thee istsfor manity reader

Burn the Witch

(from 30 Stories in 30 Songs)

He sat eating what he thought was the best chicken noodle soup he’d ever had.  It was chock full of carrots, translucent slivers of onions, noodles, and hearty chunks of chicken. 

“This is exquisite,” he told the waitress when she came to refill his water glass.  “And this is a small bowl?!  Unbelievable, this is a meal.”  It really was the best soup he’d ever had, he wrote in his journal.

What he couldn’t work out is just what kind of regional spin on this dish he was having. He was accustomed to having some lime with his chicken soup in tropical climes, but it was the chicken that was unusual.  It was darker than usual, even for dark meat, and a bit tougher, but quite tasty because it had been marinated so well and it had become one with the other ingredients; it seemed as if the chicken had spent the perfect amount of time stewing in the soup.  It was fantastic, this “sopa de pollo grimalkina.”

“¿Señorita, por favor,” he intoned in his best studied Spanish, “que tipo de pollo es este?”

The young waitress stood mute, staring at him as if he’d said something offensive.

“Señorita…”

She ran into the kitchen.  After a some time there were some raised voices, and a pleasant looking man came out to speak with him.  He repositioned his pants, pulling them up by his belt over his rounded stomach.  He wiped the sweat from his bald pate and ran the hands through the hair on the sides of his head.

“Señor, is everything all right with your lunch?”

“Yes, yes.  The soup is outstanding, but I think the young lady misunderstood.  I merely want to know what type of chicken this is.  Is it a rooster?  Is it a feral island species?  What is it?”

“Well, señor, thank you.  But this is a family recipe, a secret recipe that we just can’t share.  The cook, my wife, would not allow me back into the conjugal bed if she knew I told you.  It is her special recipe.”

“I see, so her family’s name must have been Grimalkina, yes?”

“Ah… um… yes, of course.  I will tell her you enjoy it very much.  I will have my daughter bring you a mojito, on the house, as you say.”

“Well, thank you.”

The man returned to the kitchen, and within a minute the young woman returned with the drink.  Quite strong, he thought.  Having the strongest mojito ever, he wrote in his journal.  This will get me shit-faced in this heat.

Upon finishing his lunch he asked to speak to the man again, and thanked him for the drink anew, and added, “compliments to the chef, tell your wife she made the best soup I have ever tasted.”

As he left, he stopped a few steps away from the restaurant in the street.  This was a “paladar” after all, he reviewed to himself; this is their home.  I bet if I looked around out back I can find the coop and see the chickens, maybe a picture with my phone…

He crept up the side of the house, walking gingerly around the boxes and buckets.  The thick pink and red hibiscus shrubs provided cover from a direct sight-line from the kitchen.  At the back of the yard he found no coop or chicken cages.  There was an odd corrugated metal garbage can that seemed ancient below a mango tree.  Some odd tufts spread around the base of the tree.  As he came nearer he shuddered, his stomach seemed to need to float out of his body through his chest.

He felt dizzy as he stood among these tufts and realized it was fur.  Fur in different colors.  He felt repulsed as he took the sticky garbage lid from the can.  He began to retch and eventually began to vomit into the can.  He vomited on what was clearly half a dozen carcasses.  Dogs?  No, Cats.

Am I swooning? he thought.  As he fell he saw the three of them coming out of the back of the house.  The man had a cleaver, his daughter had a carving knife, and the other woman, an imposing block of a human being, had a tenderizing mallet and a large pot in hands.  The last thing he heard was the tinny strains of Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch” coming from some distance.  He could not reconcile this, not here, not now.

They’re witches, he thought.  He reached for his phone, but swatted at the air instead.  He stared at the solitary stratocumulus tacked to the sky.  He felt a searing sensation reticulating sharply out from his chest, as the three heads blotted out the sky.

“I just don’t think of writing as a career.  If I had chosen that as a career, I would have failed at it, obviously.  It’s just: get the degree, get an agent, get the book, get the job, get the tenure.  And coast.  But me, I’ve always been a dab hand at introducing hardship and difficulty into my life.”

— Gary Lutz

wish you were here, the insects are legion

The dust, the arid heat, the vexillologists.  None of that made any sense there.  It was a tropical rainforest last year when we booked, and the defoliation and climate change left the place a barrens.  What gives?  

And why were there 120 vexillologists installed at dozens of tables festooned with swatches of fabrics, encyclopedic books, drawing pads and markers out there in that wasteland?  There were also the carcasses of the old denizens — piles of bones of howler monkeys, tamarins, marmosets, every imaginable bird of paradise, jaguars, tapirs, and so many more.  Everything that once lived there was now a discrete pile of bones, generally undisturbed, each life reduced to its own monticule of what once was, but the insects were legion.

Nothing escaped, and yet there we were as death tourists — gawkers of our future.  

But why the flag people?  I couldn’t figure it out.

“Why are they here, dear?”  I said to my husband.  He was embroiled in the flag drama, and as usual he ignored me.

Then an eminence at the central table rose and screamed, “I’ve got it.  I’ve got it,” then correcting himself said, “No, we have it,” he said making a sweeping gesture to the rest of the table full of white haired men.  

“We’ll undertake the usual scholarly investigations and we’ll produce a paper with the title: ‘A Review of the Changing Proportions of Rectangular Flags since Medieval Times, and Some Suggestions for the Future.’”

There was one full minute of confusion and discussion at all the assembled tables.  And then the men at the head of each table said, “Harrumph.  Yes!” in a precise counterclockwise uncoiling of their support outward until arriving at the outermost, and largest table, where a younger contingent of vexillologists were gathered.

Their representative said: “Fuck you.  Nay!  You got us into this bind, and we’ll be damned if we let you finally drive us over the cliff as we teeter at the precipice.  All you’ve been useful at up to this juncture is winning at the war of attrition.  Look around.  This was a verdant jungle last year and now it’s a clear cut wasteland.  You were part of the leadership that got us here, and we don’t trust your tired ideas, your platitudes and your do as we say, not do as we do approach.  You’re fraudulent, and you’re  mostly tired old people having lived out your life in profligacy and now bequeath us this sinking ship.  

We say fuck you, and fuck the horses you rode in on.  We’re starting our own thing in diametrical opposition to this dead horse flog of yours.  In fact, we’ve added a codicil to our manifesto, we insist that you die already because resources are scant and once we’ve banded together in a larger group — for there are more of us than there are of you, and as life would have it, there are pleasingly less of your lot everyday — we’re going to see to it that you do die before your appointed time.  You’ve fucked this up so much already.  We don’t need the extra dead weight!”

And with that spittle-filled pronouncement the newly minted “red vexillologists” marched off into the dunes that were once verdant foothills to form a cadre of revolutionary guerillas. 

“Oh, well that’s interesting,” I said to my husband.  “You know since this ecotourism thing didn’t pan out like we thought, why don’t we just fly to Mallorca tomorrow — it’s already dry there — and there remain a few puddles of fetid water where the beach once was, and you know how much I enjoy a nude beach, dear.  And voila, here we are.  Isn’t it just gorgeous here?”

“A writer never has a vacation.  For a writer, life consists of writing or thinking about writing.”

— Eugene Ionesco

Exiles In the Land of Kakistocracy

I.  A Conversation in the Time of Galamatias:

Our salad days are filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots —

Not so much a salad, but a melange

Of weeds and thistles —

Indelicate things in our mouths.

Every bite a mouthful of rot and offal —

Awful offal.

The kakistocracy is installed in the cupboards 

The cups are off on a two week vacation in Mosul.

We are mystified and malnourished.

Now I’ve had my wine…

And you look better than you did twenty minutes ago.

And you say:

The sky is a massive hole tonight —

My precious lucida is eating the universe:

Inside-out.

I can lay down and go to sleep.

The lights are receding

And the darkness is strangely pleasing.

II.  The Death of Tane:

Then there was the sickness —

So hot.

The vault of heaven darker —

Then darker — 

A black sun —

At end.

It was succeeded by the shadow 

Of the shadow —

Spreading —

Nearer and nearer to the pin prick 

Of light —

Destroyed.

To the west—

distant—

A white effluent

Soft and yielding

Bounds off.

III.  Passage:

Crossing guards cane a woman.

She stopped traffic —

She wore a mask stocking

She needed a cuddle —

She shook —

She hollered:

“You there, take this…”

Her eyes closed.

The wind appeared pink.

“Your mother buggered 

little boys and girls!”

“She’s a ghost,”

My mother said —

“Alone —“

As she squeezed my neck.

“Goodbye,” I cried.

IV.  Coulrophobia In The Land Kakistocracy:

Clowns are spotted in the Carolina gloaming —

Clowns with knives at the edges

Of dark woods.

I met an old man who loved

A woman who —

In whispers — 

Had recently died.

He recounted his harrowing nights

Raising his hands at

An unfamiliar country.

Without spotting an actual person — 

He spent lonely days

Encircled by clowns — 

And a stranger…

We can not discuss.

Painful moments in our pockets.

I saw groups staring up —

Untethered —

Lost —

Exiles.

They looked small in comparison with 

This Curious Refraction.

V.  A Violent Force:

Corybantic priests run —

Amuck through prickly weeds —

Bloody hands full of entrails

Chased by their sacrificial lambs and

Headless corpses — 

With empty chest cavities — 

Whose names were not happily chosen.

Among the monticules of ashes —

Lie dismembered heads

Mouths stuffed with testicles.

And the stranger —

Bright and Barren — 

Grows stronger —

Triumphant.

bitchsplosion

“Diluent,” he said at the wall. 

Then: “Offing.  Fealty.  Procrustean.”  The wall said nothing.  It remained stolid in its sentry like “Reflection Gray” satin finish.

Finish.  Finnish.

Finnish:  The wall itself was not, but some fraction of a compound, some iota of primordial matter remained in its provenance, and one might surmise that it had some atavistic connection to something Finnish, maybe even to Finland.

But now, it just stared back at him.  

He stared back, and after a paint break and having shouted the vocabulary words from a dictionary app at the wall he tried a couple of his own words:

“Cunctation,” he said to the wall.

“Belligerence, you fuck!” he said two minutes later.

The day grew bright and hot outside the open window.  The cicadas roared.

“Bitchsplosion,” he said to the wall.

On that instance the wall snapped, and allowed an overburdened stud to crack in two;  from which a piece of stucco dislodged from the cracked ceiling and fell on his head blinding him for an instant.

The freshly laden paint brush slipped from his hand and he teetered —  a smaller but no less weighty piece of stucco fell on him next and sent him reeling.

He fell onto the paintbrush handle which speared and twisted through his groin.   He was emasculated.  There in his living room.

He felt a brief moment of elation.  Free at last.

The sensation of wetting his pants flooded his synapses, a picosecond before the pain hit.

The cicadas were quiet. 

found in the sunday globe magazine (isabell bonapace)

hanoi bell

(a black-out poem)

when i was 8 they came from hanoi,

in the sweltering heat, women delivering babies into the night.

my mom smiled and said, “the narrow hanoi streets can’t

pronounce ‘hello’ and neon lights laugh at the tiny girl

alone

in front of a small concrete building with the warmth

of a cold night.”

children pointed at me

at the clinic i heard one ask, “why?

disappear.”

i hid my face

replaced my “otherness” with the night.

girls taunted me for relinquishing language

but i hadn’t been able to bond

and i left my mother

in this room.

notebooks

She hated blank pages like she hated the blankness of her life.

So she began by making marks – large, loose, gestural sweeps on the page. She then shifted from elongated serpentines to dense clusters of hash marks on the peripheries of the page – this reminded her of where the people who once cared about her were now in her life. She came to the middle of the page and drew one thick hyphen – this was she.  She went on this way year after year, filling thick notebooks with serpentines, hash mark clusters, and hyphens. Winters came and went with the usual snow and white brutality. Summers flourished in oppressive greens. Yet she went on. Fifty summers passed as she assiduously made her marks and filled notebooks. 

Notebooks. 

There was nothing else of use she could do. 

It seemed as it was when she was a child and jumped from the bridge into that cold river. She watched people above her moving to and from their lives. The mornings filled with a flurry of black bowlers and slate fedoras – the afternoons a long procession of pursed lips and heavy eyes. Occasionally, a flash of brilliant blue or a fleeting smile, but it was mostly gray refracted above. 

At the end she had stacked up thousands of notebooks from floor to ceiling. The notebooks filled her small apartment wall to wall. Then with this notebook she filled the last remaining slot of open space. As an opaque scrim spread itself across the sky she whispered, this is enough.

Two Views: A Cut-Up Bedtime Story

(a found and a cut-up poem)

I.

X.’s home was a shambles:

piles of amber eyes,

clouds of fleas and other debris,

the ritual heads against our legs;

red bodies were discovered –

strong and sharp –

in the refrigerator’s freezer

relying on a stethoscope,

crowbar and chisel to make a hole

beyond salvation

II.

Has anyone seen

I could eat your heart 

    for dinner

with such conviction…

you?

probably be scared

photo courtesy 100 word story.

Sangfroid I-IV

i.  The Ashen Landscape

“He’s got what?  Days left?  I don’t want to be there when he dies.”

“Sangfroid.”

“I’m cold-blooded?”

“You didn’t wish to come back to the village — to the sea?”

“I see… a Rothko — canted, a lost apocryphal work — an ashen landscape in three gradations.  My father tore out its center and revealed there’s no heart to the universe, only a corrugated armature — frozen, encased — as if the sky were stapled to the sea with liminal ice.”  

“You see wasteland?”  

“I see ghosts.  I was eleven.  My father placed the gun to his temple — then mine.  He abandoned me here.”

ii.  A Song for the Plague Year

I find my father supine on the bathroom floor, limned by a bloody halo — a pinpoint hole in his left temple.  Gorgeous.

The floor seethes and the ceiling lowers its claim upon me.  I’m extruded out of the bathtub spigot.  Suffering.  Wait.  Wait.  Suffering.  I’m in the heart of darkness.  I’m in the heart of the work now.  Shiver.  Fertile.  Gorgeous.

iii.  Molecular Organic Nano-machines

I’m at the morphine station.

I’m a soft machine inside a hard silicone husk.  I’m a warped machine rattling out flickering images: images of a gun.

I’m a soft machine in a hard exoskeleton — silicone dark inside — silicone smooth and white outside.  My memories play back on the cryoscreen. Here memories are particulate existences transformed into nano-globules (n-g.’s) that are secreted from the ferrules at the end of your iPuffer: smoky, hormonal, and projected inside and beyond your eyes.

“Please cue n-g. 173-A: the day I met my father at CBGB’s; and frame n-g. 173-B: the moment that punk rock saved my life.  Please add the blue 17 gelatin filter.”

A puff from the ferrule and the images resolve, but this memory is faulty.  The memory warps and echoes: a radiator squeals, brass electrodes buzz, my father is blood-crusted, ignored in a dusty corner, covered with mites escaping the evil heat.  Batista’s henchmen torture another… no, stop, this is not my memory but the anecdote he told me that night… 

“This is not the n.g. I requested. STOP.  STOP.  Press the eject…” 

Blood, on the tip of my tongue.  Where is it coming from?  Then a bestial din: the sound of a million cicadas’ lament before the seventeen year death — a rupture tectonically within me.  The smell of hissing green plantains dropped into overheated oil — the splattering: tinny, spastic —  and then the loss of control.

iv.  missing  STOP

im not who i was once was   STOP   aposiopesis   STOP   STOP   im a perfectionist   im obedient    get away from here    get away from that gun   STOP   STOP   STOP   dr x said im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   dont relive it    dont rehash it   and if it finds you   then embrace it    embrace the thoughts    embrace the feelings    be one with it and then release it     youre not your memories    youre not your feelings   be one with the thoughts   be one with the feelings   and then release them   STOP   

punk rock changed my life    no punk rock saved my life    the songs of the minutemen   no not that memory   STOP  STOP   dont touch him there   dont touch me stop it   put down that gun   38 snubnose    it weighs a ton    STOP   STOP   STOP    embrace this memory   embrace this emotion   im not my memories   not my emotions   STOP   aposiopesis   apoplexies   apophatic   and aphasic   STOP   STOP    dr x said    whatever happens   its ok    whatever happens is ok   im ok    whatever happens    im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   youre doing the best that you can   im doing the best that i can   STOP   STOP   STOP

windblown

it’s not today anymore

a bruised child 

in yellow terry cloth

flew past my window

windblown          barn bits 

and green cornfield detritus

speckled the turbid sky

it opened up and spat out brittle

lightning and cow

sized hail

roiled in that dark funnel

were the bodies i planted

with the corn seed 

last spring

alight

The oscitant oscillator was stuck at the 4 o’clock position, and the fan head was feeling unruly.  But it was the constant breeze on his bald pate that got his attention.

“What the…“

The fan head was stationary but the base shook, then it wobbled violently and shattered in to five pieces.  The fan ring rolled off in a drunken arc down the hallway, the blade rotor shot out at great speed embedded itself in the wall.  The back cage remained on the base, but the front half of the cage hit him squarely on the bridge of his nose, and a rich trickle of blood was made its way down his chin, and dripped onto his new polo shirt.

“My God, what the hell?”

The electrical chord crackled at the outlet, sparked, and set the curtain ablaze.  The television was next to go.  Before he could take a step toward the extinguisher in the kitchen, the building fire alarm went off sounding like a thousand amplified cicadas.

Then sprinklers shot off in all the common areas of the building: in the hallways, the laundry room, the gym, the lobby, the nursery.  But inside his apartment the blaze went on, blocking his access to the kitchen, and eating its way through the east wing of the 22nd floor.  His only way out was the balcony.

He stepped into the now pleasant sunshine.  The fire teethed at his heels.

He climbed over the railing and alighted into that rarified air that so few inhabit.