Soft

 

Off for long drive or a smoke, up

and out the door where you leave me

seeking, lonely for a spot

soft but not

spoiled, not fuzz

of unseemly growth, not brat

like catlike laze the lack

of work. No. Less a

push than a pull and road

-weary doesn’t count, I said

so.

 

Soft is not puffed

up tough to escort me home

after I close the store each

night alone, menacing to scare

off possible predators in the dark. (There’s

tenderness there, sure,

and I know how

hard you work, could work

for me.)

 

I don’t mean shoulder torn from

shoveling snow; I do not

mean the ways a body goes

weak with time, with age, with

-out assent, like how you cannot

carry a tune, no use in battling

the stream. Like how we wilt. We

will but in the time until, give

me lush-spots scared-and-sacred spots miss-

me-on-that-shift walked-away-but-still-

smelled-me thoughts I want will drink it up.

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She’s the blog editor at Newfound Journal. Her full publication list lives here: http://lolionthekaap.blogspot.com/p/creative-writing.html


“The Quotation in Question”: Followed by Anticlimactic Admission of Actual Topic

 

“An epigraph you wish you’d written.”

-By Someone You Are Not

 

A sweeping generalization. Some grudging refinement. And then there’s the field in which to situate the topic. Leading scholars are mentioned who said these things, several of whom you pretend to know. One or two others you’ve slept with and have to include since they might read this and you don’t want them to think you’re hurt even though they never call let alone send flowers. But other people, too. (A parenthetical compliment phrased as assessment of perspicacity regarding the intellectual merit of an article written by the cutest, regardless of category, never hurt anyone.) In an unconscious act of transference both syntactical and psychoanalytic, a slightly rocky segue ensues, some things your dissertation director told you, which after all these years you realize are actually true. Then some other things you heard were said at the conference keynote—which you would have attended if (a) departmental travel funding had not been eviscerated and you were forced to skip the conference or (b) you attended conference but not keynote, going instead to see your cousin, who lives in the conference city (with whippets! in that tiny apartment!). Brisk assessment of the situation as it currently stands. No mention of whippets. The pinpointing of a lacuna, a contradiction parading as a paradox, or flat-out mistake. An expression of mild horror that this situation could have gone so long unrecognized. Passed among us unremarked. It’s amazing, really. We’re lucky to have gotten out alive. The promise to remedy all that here and now. This is your thesis. State in no uncertain terms not just that you will prove it but how.

But not quite yet. There is work to be done. Groundwork need be laid. The fact that it is startling no one has read the book that not only makes the abovementioned clear but provides the solution—so a diagnosis and a cure are proffered simultaneously. But the latter is to be taken slowly. Don’t rush it. Slowly, slowly. Even more slowly. Christ almighty, you’d think you were being paid by the word for this thing. Or at all. Paid, that is. Well, maybe it will matter when you come up for promotion. Has the correct question been posed? Or was that question rhetorical? Do any of these things matter?

Therefore a reference to a philosopher that has a lateral relation to the topic. If French, en français; mais auf Deutsch, translate it. Lass es doch von jemand anderem uebersetzen. (Or get someone to translate it for you.) The ungrammatical use of “thinking” as a transitive verb is now advisable. A coy set of references designed to suggest you know the material better than the philosopher, and would crush them in a debate but for the fact that they are dead.

The return to the text, diagnostic and curative. Contextual application of details, many of which are relevant, some that you just can’t let go of, and one of which you’ll discover, via a letter written three months later to the editor, is completely untrue. Who knew that anyone in Palmerston North even read this thing? Who lives in Palmerston North? Where is Palmerston North? Is that a rhetorical question? Upon further consideration. No. Enough with the ambiguity already.

The continuation of a point lesser thinkers would have left alone. This (Palmerston North) may explain why they (future-letter-sender/know-it-all) are (is) reading this journal. They[1] probably have a lifetime subscription and have it delivered to their house, not satisfied with getting it online, for free, through the institutional library, like everyone else. Probably this, probably that. But one thing is certain: You are never going to be invited to give a talk at (in?) Palmerston North. The future implications regarding this particular subtopic have yet to be fully assessed. A reference to the French Revolution.

The recent use of a colon[2] for the first time in the course of the body of the piece—rather than the title, where it is numbingly obligatory—occasions a pun. (This is done as an aside. Perhaps a reference to eschatology appears at the end.) One reflects or perhaps refracts a characteristic and yet illuminating detail.  The question of exemplarity is debated; both sides of the issue are entertained. You are not an unreasonable sort. If the detail is anomalous, it is so because it is actually indicative. If the detail is indexical, it is so because the rhetorical ice would be too thin otherwise. In the case of the former, one suggests the possibility of a paradigm shift. In the case of the latter, take your medicine like a good girl. Skate along, little one.

Segue is thereby achieved. Despite the cloudy forecast, bleakness notwithstanding, and casting care to the metaphorical if not pathetically fallacious winds, hope shines through. On the horizon is “the quotation in question”! And at long last, following several especially subordinate clauses, each meant to build suspense, yet, sneaky little bastards that they are, probably doing precisely the opposite, the correct use of a colon:

This—the antecedent here is the quotation in question, obviously—you really do need to either keep up, or slow down. Fine. Start again. This is in a block quote, untethered at long last from its surrounding quotation marks and romping like a happy lamb in lush fields—themselves comprised (metonymically or is it synecdochally?) of verdant hillsides and heaps, positively heaps, of rampion—of the original text in order to give further context to the use of the quotation in question. The quotation in question is deployed freely—unleashed, to mix metaphors (lamb-wise)—in this arcadia by the unwitting (other, shepherdess-like, a guileless sort, they said) writer whose wares, epitomized by the romping quotation in question, have been touted[3] (the phraseological misapplication of ware-touting will forever remain with you [the critic, who now appears, ostensibly to provide guidance], in a self-serving [literally] inside joke which no one else is going to get; and why should they [with another bracketed critical statement, now framing the point, almost (again) literally, it is worth pointing out, in a way that would have made you famous if it were the 1980s], when you [the critic, again, duh] barely do?). But even as fragments are overused by critics, they are excusable in prose written by other people. If that’s the word for them. Maybe just people. In any case, the main thing is not to end either parenthetically (or on a point needing bracketing [if you (the critic) can help it (bracketing)]). So the block quote containing the quotation in question continues for another sentence. Or two.

Energized by the use of a voice at once your own and not your own, but there is really no substitute, i.e., none, for the buzz attendant upon the transcription of someone else’s words—try it sometime; the writing just flows—you attempt to follow up, to keep up that “lamb-romping.” The mis-employment of non-“quotation”‘s might even crop up, along with another pun. This clearly over-compensatory pun and/or “mis-employment of non-‘quotation'” could appear cavalier, or maybe even as a desperate attempt to keep up the energy level you would have if you had written “the quotation in question” in the first place, but on the other hand a level-headed but nonetheless sprightly spirit of assessment could hover over the “quotation”-laden proceedings subsequent to the block quote containing “the quotation in question.” Either way, Houston we have a problem. It clearly exceeds even as it is heralded by the (recently noticed) shift between present and conditional tenses. Way worse. You didn’t write “the quotation in question.”[4] Neither puckish nor Puck, the pastoral spirit conjured up[5] even with spatial references[6] demanding endnotes,[7] lots of them,[8] coming at you with increasing frequency[9] is shot all to hell. This “spirit of assessment”—quoting your (critical) self doesn’t even help—contains and comprises more criticism. Wolf, sheep; someone get me an axe. Whither “the quotation in question”? It’s like “the quotation in question” never even fucking happened.

Follow up immediately with another block quote from a little later in the [other] text. It’s likely too brief to merit being set qua block quote by house style standards [four lines], but you [the critic] can deal with the [schmuck] editor later.

This does the trick. Closure is within sight. Neither linger nor dither. An objective stance is resumed. A calm spirit of assessment demonstrating critical prowess is advisable. Lucidity is key. To this end a clear restatement of the thesis. Brief rendering of trajectory followed and point made. Some slight basking, just a wee bit. The modest proposal of attendant realignments in the field would not be going too far. If this is indeed the case, are further questions to be entertained? It is likely so.

[1] See above.

[2] See above.

[3] See above.

[4] See above.

[5] See above.

[6] See above.

[7] See above.

[8] See above.

[9] See above.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessica Burstein is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Washington. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education—which included her “Sex and the Conference” as one of 23 essays in its 50th Year Anniversary Anthology—and a number of scholarly journals. She is the author of Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art, and has written the chapter on visual art in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture (2014). She has also, one may gather, edited for quite some time.


Santa Claus

 

In my 3rd lifetime or incarnation

I was once a moth,

and a velvet addict,

which started the tradition

of getting stoned in the mornings.

Which reminds me of

Operation Barbarossa,

when things got out of hand

on the eastern front,

but before they did,

imagine the flat steppe.

Flat land,

flat sky,

level plains with ankle length

flora,

and the occasional small peasant hut.

Perfect for the Nazi war machine.

They won decisive victory after decisive victory

early that summer,

but they soon realized,

that after advancing many miles for 3 weeks and choking on dust,

given the vastness of Russia

that things still looked exactly the same.

It was like being on the same stage

repeating the same scene

with the same props all the time.

It would end with them mortally wounded

on their backs

thrashing on the ground

like long tailed lizards.

I am back home

and homesick.

My soul is fried

on the outside of an Egg’s shell,

the Eurasian Steppe

which I’ve never seen

seems much more familiar.

The punishment shits the crime,

the history of the

vegetable kingdom,

a package of soft flesh

and drunken disorder.

Life shuddered and shook

and smoked and eventually

misfired

a rude protrusion

called hope,

that ends up on either the guillotine block

or becomes a smoking barrel,

triggering excess saliva in the mouth.

A stage between death

and resurrection.

Even the silent nighttime

leaves me estranged,

not even the darkness will embrace me.

Do not be disgusted by cockroaches,

try and get over the repulsion,

sit with them and talk

calmly and patiently.

You will discover they are not

very different from us,

and both parties will agree

to war or peace.

But who knows really what lurks in

the hearts and minds

of men and cockroaches?

Merry, bearded, red Santa Claus!

But I would rather put on

a nurse’s uniform,

and inject all with

the apocalypse

in small and equal doses.

 

 

 

 

 

Kamal Abu-Husayn is a Beirut-dwelling, Egg-worshipping Turkey. Would rather rub noses than shake hands, hates Santa, and is already weary of the next war he’ll be forced to live through, if he survives this one, of course. He sells surreal estate for a living, and managed to release a collection of poems in 2010 under the title of Bingo’s Bedtime Book, hopes to publish another volume soon: The Egg Laying Manual.


Cover Image, Issue Three

Eric Yahnker Selfie Preservation

 

“Selfie Preservation,” 2015, pastel on paper (39.5” x 39.5”). Eric Yahnker. Courtesy of the artist.


Entopicon 3

 

Jean-Pierre Roy Entopicon 3

2016, oil on linen, (22″ x 16″)

 

All of my recent works have dealt with human sense and perception. As George Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to the external world. Only through the window of our senses do we acquire data through which to build an internal model that we use to mediate our position in “the real out there.” This holds true not only to the immediate external world, but to the world presented to us through the artifacts of Art History.

By choosing to use a representational language, I am constantly presenting my ideas through an anachronistic visual language, a language which at one point was the epitome of visual high technology. Now, however, oil paint is merely one of a number of aesthetic “traditional” modes of picture making that are fundamentally removed from the cultural, philosophical and political context that gave birth to them. As a researcher, I can study the life of the historical painting, I can know the wars, the patrons, and the lovers that surrounded them, but I can never really have any more of a “direct access” to what drove their practice than they could to the underlying motivations of the neolithic artists.

The prone figure in the painting “Entopicon 3” is a quotation from Jusepe de Ribera’s “Martyrdom of Saint Andrew.”  A charged Tenebrist image to be sure, but one that directly connects to Berkeley’s idea of “The Relativity of Perceptions,” the idea that the “same” object may appear to be the source of different incompatible sensations.  A loaded Christian image to some, a tragic humanistic narrative to others, and an outdated modality of art to yet more. Cradling an invisible form, the standing figure contemplates the gulf between Ribera’s intentions and the act of viewing the painting in the 21st century. What would it be like to experience a historical art work without the filters of 500 years of red-shifting context? The Entopicon paintings engage that very space where the Relativity of Perceptions collide to construct a new model of reality.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1974, Jean-Pierre Roy is a Brooklyn-based painter and teacher. Roy received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2002 and was awarded the school’s 3rd year fellowship upon graduation. Since 2003, Roy has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and Europe and has had solo museum exhibitions at the Torrence Art Museum in Los Angeles and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach. Roy is currently represented by Gallery Poulsen, DK. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, ArtNews, Art in America, New American Painters, The Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, The Seattle Stranger, Hi- Fructose, and Juxtapoz amongst others. He is the co-creator of Single Fare, an annual NYC art event that had been covered by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. His work is in collections of Anita Zabludowicz, Jereann Cheney, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Jean Pigozzi, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bjorn Borg amongst others. He currently teaches painting at the New York Academy of Art.


Cover Image, Issue Two

 

Eric Amling - Vex'd Discretion

 

from Vex’d Discretion, 2016, collage on paper (15″ x 18″). Eric Amling. Courtesy of the artist.


Thought Point

 

(for Berta Cáceres)

 

Lisa Samuels has not shared anything on this page with you

In her book a personal devotion to feminist theory

Is an erotic situation because words drape electrically through her mind

Which insists on reciprocity where we live

Whose meeting point’s a commission between external and in-

Sight: at the point where anything is made is the center of its making

You can go there, over to the new center

Down to the new center, up to the new center

You integrate divergence without fail muscles

As a courtesy to this idea, which meets where you become one too

Where the literal becomes physical as a consequence of your attention

You become yourself a concept meeting that one, free

From self-possession’s warrantless erasure of relation.

 

Go to work and take up the material of nature’s swift ability

To self-heal, if you count a heal as change mark

To the dense struggle to make external possibles

Ready for those shots that come where she is not alone

The very visceral vanishing of point perspective

As the concept ceases to be holding

Provided by its other. The concept realizes self-perception’s lonely cry

Because the filled-in area is vanishing.

 

Every center gets its day replete inside and out

Not long enough for anyone to know it

Which is why the exhalation leads to terminals where the

Battery charge of culture wants to rest. Please let us rest

Says Cloaky to the bastion of divergence. No, Cloaky, no:

She’ll not. One’s claim in faith to ill sunder finds

There’s battle in the breath, certain scattered objects

Such as water, life, stars, eyes, voices calling out

A topic’s reason for assent to start itself righteously

In the center of what’s powerless. That center pulse

Gives out a new authentic, one’s own object turns

A scaling trans-surrender in the zone that never mocks.

This is what gets called authentic tribute. The idea of her

Eyes and stars and water is a center one can breathe

In as example. The social location of our ideas has changed

Which is exhausting to the slow move against which

Measure’s latent knowledge’s wont to hover.

 

So we put a body there: its signs of force

Trigger the necessity of knowing from that center

Pulls us towards an other we accept, attention’s moment

Emphasis mine. To cause her to be idea’s open score

The words fill up our heady eyes and flesh out

To the multiples of center. We cannot abnegate

In thinking for her of her near to her

Breath’s contention cancels out the slow

Determination how we value musters in “the world”

A known dispute. There’s no way to speak ugly but to say

Plural’s a wretch, so close in to the skin such

Convention’s blasted its own wise.

 

Which is related, tell me, to the topic of our

Mass centrality everywhere you can think

Think allow it. This is predicated on belief

Your structures listen to announcements very far away

Her body brings it close and proves the rule.

The satisfied relief’s no thought at all

Since publication’s superadded form

The circumstance of central’s system fix, means we’re

Undergone, a fragmentation loss as having given up

In gaze. It almost makes you wish for porn’s effects,

Distributed submission to the site where desire’s activate

Hits hard a moving purview. The gaze returns itself

Without a recognition of its mirror apps

The schedule of our freedom’s hidden from the beast

We give ourselves, a private reliquary stipend

When we save our chance to misrecognize

For the wrong occasion. We might instead cross-cut

The labor of our thought as yielding when

We meet in real quiescence to the far-off zone

Where thought displaces both itself and us.

 

The product of a woman failed itself far-reached

But only in a hid-sight dead to actual failure’s

Crucial work. You have to give up in advance to understand

The work the water did over her flesh

Without analysis, our context becomes a moment’s

Harvest kept with hers: that’s thinking parlance

Self-formed in a wrap with far-clung instance

More authentic than what you’re swamped with feeling’s

Vacant register smashed on you when it’s “close to home.”

Further’s no escape beyond control if it’s choisir

We’re dead not knowing so reciprocal to how

We might then land. I can’t interpret her whom I’ve not seen

But having seen in scene withstand

Trajectory of thought beyond the heart.

Misrecognition’s grace is there interpreted

Resisting on the eye, the living space a dark intended

Document we’ll never see, so knowing’s then a subject

Near to me so far as I have no such face nor never will.

Authentic listening’s bonds broke mutual.

When you express it starts to feel as well, a mutual

Cancellation of captivity breached in the ramp

Where blood’s a thought armed on the floor’s example

Intemperate wish to make us heal as hole.

So nothing’s thought the echo of this one-time stolen role.

Accept and don’t accept the rigorous loss of view

Lisa Samuels has shared anything on this page with you

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa Samuels has published thirteen books of poetry and prose, with recent experiments in memoir (Anti M, 2013) and the novel (Tender Girl, 2015). Her poetry has inspired musical scores and scholarly essays internationally, and her recent critical essays include Over Hear: six types of poetry experiment in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2015). Her edited book A TransPacific Poetics, with Sawako Nakayasu, is coming out this year, and current projects include Symphony for Human Transport (poems) and The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (prose). A U.S.-born transnational poet, Lisa has also lived in Sweden, Israel/Palestine, Yemen, Malaysia, Spain, and since 2006 in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she teaches at the University of Auckland. In 2016 she is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington Simpson Humanities Center in Seattle.


Sign Paintings

 

Nicole Reber - Sign Paintings 1

 

Nicole Reber - Sign Paintings 2

 

2016

 

 

 

 

Nicole Reber (b.1989) is a New York based artist working within sculpture, painting, collage, and language. Recent exhibitions of her work have taken place at Black and White Project Space, Knockdown Center, and Kimberly-Klark. She has spoken at MoMA PS1, NADA, and Printed Matter, and is a co-editor of Packet, a biweekly arts publication that has published over 75 issues in the past 3 years. The complete Packet archive was recently acquired by the MoMA Library. She is working toward an upcoming solo exhibition entitled “Allure” opening July 2016 at Outside Gallery in North Adams, MA.


Itchy Occupations: Toward a Parasitic Mode of Writing

 

1. It’s eating them from the inside! In horror the parasite arrives as foreigner, alien, vampire, worm, threatening to infiltrate the social body and destroy it from within.

2. The following social groups have been culturally constructed as parasites: Jewish people, poor people, people of color, queer people, disabled people, migrants and immigrants, women. The artist is also a parasite, feeding off of shared resources without producing anything useful in return. But, as Donna Haraway has observed: We have never been human. And, as Michel Serres has declared: There is no system without parasites. Tom Ray’s artificial evolution simulation system Tierra, built in the 1990s, managed to generate its own parasites.

3. Appropriative or citational writing is categorically parasitic, and has often been denigrated as derivative, vampiric, feeding on the life/blood/brains of other texts and persons. But there is no shame in being a parasite, Carl Zimmer concludes in his popular science book Parasite Rex. Indeed, there is political strategy. The parasite can provide a useful model for thinking about oppositional appropriative writing and its relational politics.

4. Parasitic writing is posthuman, beyond-human, in-human, though it may not be humanless. It writes the body from a trans-species perspective indebted to indigenous critiques of human exceptionalism. Gloria Anzaldúa: You’re all the different organisms and parasites that live on your body and also the ones who live in a symbiotic relationship to you…So who are you? You’re not one single entity. You’re a multiple entity.

5. A parasitic mode of writing is organized around imposition, infection, and itch. It sucks, it burrows, it produces chronic irritation. In contrast to the pure machine of conceptual writing, parasitic writing insists on impurity, transcorporeality, bad boundaries. It is a minoritarian mode, exploiting power asymmetries and enacting imposition: the self-body-text—understood in a post-Enlightenment western context to be bounded, sovereign, impermeable—recognized as permeable; violable.

6. An agent of imposition and occupation, the parasite may also be an agent of intersubjectivity, allyship, symbiosis: potentially. More often, the relationship is nonmutual, one-directional, nonconsensual, nonethical. The parasite takes more than it gives. The parasite is a dangerous subject, Anna Watkins Fisher writes in her analysis of artist Roisin Byrne’s performative parasitism. It does not necessarily work toward something…it just works….

7. In this way, the parasite rejects the logic of avant-gardism. There is no progress forward or backward; parasites force their host to change without going anywhere (Zimmer).

8. A parasite transforms through infection. It makes a system change its condition in small steps. It introduces a tilt (Serres).

9. The predominant metaphor for the parasite is the vampire. Let us put aside the vampire and think about the tick, which needs no invitation. To write like a tick: find a sweet spot and suck until swollen. Extract the host’s contents. Gorge yourself and give only an infectious bite. Detach and find another host.

10. Or the scabies mite: enter the skin and travel subcutaneous, eating tissue and depositing eggs. Leave jagged burrows and itchy bubbles in your wake. Chronically irritate a text or idea with your presence. Reproduce inside it.

11. The fluke begins life in fecal matter, then gets eaten by a mollusk, which may be eaten by a bird; the fluke changes form for each stage. To write like a fluke: attempt transfiguration. Be consumed by multiple host bodies. Create relationality through inter-species escapade.

12. The tongue-eating louse slides into a host’s body through the gills, then attaches to the host’s tongue with its front claws. To write in this fashion: Hang out in the mouth, siphoning away the tongue’s blood supply until the tongue falls out and you have replaced it with your own body. Occupy the mouth with new hungers.

13. The tapeworm has no mouth or gut: its whole body is a mouth-gut system: its skin absorbs food. To write like a tapeworm is to behave as a consumption machine.

14. This is just one possibility. There are more than six thousand species of tapeworms.

15. There are more parasites than there are any other organism in the world.

 

 

Works Paracited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.

Fisher, Anna Watkins. “We Are Parasites: On the Politics of Imposition.” Art and Education. N.d. <http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/we-are-parasites-on-the-politics-of-imposition/> Accessed 17 September 2015.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Tr. Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Zimmer, Carl. Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures. New York: Touchstone, 2000.

 

 

 

 

 

Megan Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, winner of the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award finalist; as well as three chapbooks, including The Feels, published in Black Warrior Review. 


Where All the Elephants Lie Down: Chapter 1

 

The sun. Well. What can he say about the sun that hasn’t been said already. He resists description and thinks instead of a relentless open mouth kiss. The humidity of it. The voluptuous pressure bowing him closer to the petunias he’s pruning. Hybrid. Black velvet. That sounds like a song, he thinks. A rolled newspaper smacks into the screen door. He hears a cat-call whistle, looks up to see golden tresses streaming off the bicycling paper girl who’s noticed he isn’t wearing any pants. It’s a dressing gown tied in front, hanging to mid-thigh when standing. He hadn’t considered its length when knelt over with a trowel. It isn’t made of anything impressive—cashmere or silk. It’s terrycloth and second-hand, the color of well-chewed bubble gum. And the tie is slipping.

He pushes his sunglasses further up the aqueduct of his nose, lets the robe open uncertainly. He likes the draft it allows. A sudden gasping thirst brings the watering can to his mouth. He gulps down half the sulfurous blend and the swelling tide of it in his stomach makes him heave over a patch of empty soil next to the petunias. Ill plant some tulips here, bright coral ones.

A bright choral arrangement balladeers from a passing convertible enchanting his hands to flirt with dirt, trowel tossed aside. Burbling air, his fingers hear the arrangement again, convertible long past. He grunts. I play the piano. He observes with humor the obedience of his hands. I may even play well.

He pulls out a pack of cigarettes from his robe pocket, lights one, leans back in the grass with the slumped elegance of a fashion model, skeletal legs and sunken belly stretched out narrow as the shadow of a sundial. His dial should be hitting forty-five years old any month now, but he’ll have to be told this. Several times. And it won’t matter to him anyway. But falling asleep will. If he dozes now, he’ll roast into lobster red, he knows this. He can see uneven burn lines fractured across his body from some time before. Like that Nudist Distending a Stairwell, and takes another drag. Someday, he thinks, I could have a yard like this, live in a neighborhood like this one. Where news is wielded, and sprinklers tick and hiss away the afternoon, a chorus of occasional laughter in the distance. First, he’d have to figure out which neighborhood this is, then, years from now return, buy a small corner house—more ground for planting. He’d find a piano and throw dinner parties that carry on into scandalous hours. He sleeves his forehead and notices the terrycloth frosted in scarlet, looks over to his car parked in the shade of a nearby tree. The tree is pressing into the radiator, which is smoking. In fact, the tree is making its way into the central engine, an area he knows nothing about. There are one or two things left to do today. Maybe three. He’s just beginning to realize he won’t remember what they are.

There’s the matter of a flywheel buzzing in his chest, a tiny turbine standing valiant in a motionless field of sallow lung tissue exhausting his desire for anything but sleep. And it makes him wonder—if there isn’t a way to open up his chest like window shutters and reach in, hold it still. Jerk it out. He looks down into the opening robe at the bruises and claw marks haloing his lower ribs. Maybe he’s already tried.

There are one or two things left to do today. Maybe three. He’s just beginning to realize he won’t remember what they are. And stands, robe opening completely, cigarette limping from his mouth; decides to leave the trowel in the garden and not return it to the shed where he had chanced it. Walks past the rose bushes and chrysanthemums, the deep puncture of earth where he had found the petunias, dug them up. Opens the car door, collapses to the seat, pulls the lever to drop it back. The sun cant kiss me here, and sucks on his lips, remembering the watering can. A slumber hovers over him sounding like Beethoven’s Moonscape Serenada. In silhouette of flowers crumbling across the ruptured dashboard, his hands rise above the steering wheel to play heavy uncluttered chords with astonishing ease.

He awakes in a coma of cerulean blue. Sheets, pillow, the kicked-off comforter. Listens to the hushed even scream of a shower insisting itself in another room. On the floor are two pairs of men’s trousers—khaki and black tuxedo. He recognizes neither. The window curtains are new, wedding-white, badly hemmed, bursting sunlight. He stands woozy and wobbles to the front door wrapped in a blue fitted sheet.

The heat outside is a torrid affair. Like breathing flesh, he thinks. I stand in anothers mouth; the pebbled porch step is a calcified tongue. He raises his arms to dive down what could be a flight of throat, bed sheet blooming behind like a cancerous tumor. “PARISTALTICATE ME MOTHER FUCKER” he cries across the morning serenity to the sun—a fearless uvula over the cul-de-sac. He spits a fist of solar-aimed saliva and hits a perfect bullseye.

Inside again he looks around the room. The boudoir—a wall closet standing guard to a double-twin mattress low on a box spring—is the left wing of the main room centering a butcher-block table and chairs and a wall of empty shelves behind which lurks a kitchen. There are no music books propped on the mudstone colored upright piano camouflaged in shadow facing the front door. And beside the front door is a Greek column of wood, a ledge hip-height, perfect to pageant a set of car keys. But no keys are there and he doesn’t think to reach for any. Above the stand is a chalkboard slashed with bone-white letters: NOON—BATHROOM CABINET. Once closing the cabinet and swallowing a second glass of water, he peeks behind the shower curtain.

Back in the living room he wants to put on an apron and clean. And he wants the apron to have ruffles, with that friendly pattern of two red cherries conjoined at the stems, one snug above the other like testicles. He looks in the pantry closet: ironing board, broom, dust pan, lightbulbs, orange hazmat suit. By now he’s realized the apartment doesn’t need cleaning. Though not without dust, it is unlived in. Politely desolate.

At the chalkboard he wonders at the handwriting and decides to rescript the words but hesitates which hand to reach. He writes with each, taking several minutes, every line and hump a dare upon dare. “How about me?” asks the first O, “Am I familiar?” “And how about me?” asks the fourth. Neither mimic matches the original. He wants to draw more. The floorboards’ varnish has long ago vanished and slats rise up like a drafting table as he kneels down with chalk, still cloaked in the sheet. Arcs and swirls curiously soothe until he’s tracing his hands, then his whole body. He stands to examine the outline, tilting his head, pouting his mouth. The lines are light, questioning, quivering. Having traced only the pressure of his flesh, the figure is smaller than his. He has drawn somebody else. He lies down beside it, retracing with firm attention. Now the contours are over-pronounced, blubbery, dumb-looking. Maybe he is somebody else. And he remembers the bandaids.

Days ago—was it only days—he had arrived back to this apartment—yes, it was this apartment—on the table top a pyramid of boxed bandaids, different sizes and shapes. That night he had used every bandage to tape on the floor a life-size likeness of his body, arms out prostrate, face embedded. He had fallen asleep to wake up hours later, his skin stuck to the gummy veneer, shoulders sore, hands numb. Peeled from the portrait, he was pocked with rectangular stamps, like burns. Like sunburns.

Now he traces his feet—prints not quite webbed, not quite articulated either. He crawls beneath the table where he means to trace himself again—himself—and settles on his back. On the underside of the table top the word TEN is written in marker. Probably warehouse-speak, but for a moment it looks like TED, and he thinks of his Uncle.

He had met him only once when he was eight at the funeral of his grandfather, the patriarch of both his father and Ted. Uncle Ted was a pilot, flew safaris in Africa. The brothers had had a rift, though over what he hadn’t known then and can’t remember now. Uncle Ted was a tall man who loomed like a bell tower resonating above everyone, his voice baritone and abrupt, deft at dismissing “the dialectic dysentery” of others, as he called it. None were spared.

As a boy, he had been agitated by the whole funeral affair. The weight of the rituals, the coldness between adults that seemed less like grief and more like boredom, loneliness. As if they were all loitering in the lobby at the end of a sold-out show, having missed it. The chapel was emptying, family one by one abducted through light beyond the foyer doors. He was still whining about whatever, loafing as the very last to leave when Uncle Ted turned on him gruffly, clutched his small face in his broad suntanned hand and leaning down, kissed him full on the mouth. Several heartbeats later Uncle Ted pulled away, glaring. “Now shut up.” Then turned and boarded the blinding light.

He had nearly swooned as a child then in the vestibule, and nearly swoons now in remembrance. Below the table, pulling up the meager sheet, surrendering to sleep, he recalls the smell of him. Bourbon, cigar smoke, the pages of a rare used book—tannic with intelligence, sour with secrets. And a hint of talcum baby powder.

“Dude, let’s chase those kids!” Someone snickers. “Let’s scare them shitless!” These must be buddies from college. It feels like college. In their old Buick, the upholstery smells like so many other Saturday nights wagered in bets and blasphemy and black-tipped cigarettes. It’s one of their parents’ homes, the folks on holiday. The house, retired and mono-mahogany, sits like a brick of mud measuring itself against the night with a rope of daffodils snaking its perimeter, their hopeful yellow ashed in sleep.

At the neighborhood intersection is a half-dozen children playing catch-football under a tall streetlamp casting over them an arachnid web of light. The wrong song is playing on the car radio, making him impatient. The Buick swings into the driveway and halts, engine exhaling. And for an instant the whole night hesitates. He sees their academic faces indistinct, a plot of headstones in a photograph. His mind clicks the flash. All doors clack open and they buckshot into the street with the relish of a well-paid mafia. The best at pool fronts as cue, the rest as follow-through, breaking apart the billiards of kids. He veers behind the smallest, a girl in loose boy clothes and matted hair. She sprints him up the block, her strides five times his to stay ahead, both blindfolded by darkness. And it’s now that he realizes how unprepared he is for joy, how painful that can be—the face flexing as one muscle, the catapulted heart, the gibberish brain, the mayhem. The terror in her squeals staccato as she turns to glimpse him, gasping euphoric when she turns back. The sound of her pulls a ripcord of bubbles through his spine, shimmering his bones with pleasure and an urgent guilt to wonder, What if I catch her. She hitches a sharp left through an armoire of honeysuckle as he stands huffing and puffing with an idiot grin.

He awakens to the ultimatum of drums.

Snapping upright with mouse trap intent, he clunks his head on the table top, falls back in surprise. The drums lead from his forehead and get lost somewhere in his chest. The word TEN stares at him in countdown. He drags himself from dreaming, dresses with anticipation.

Outside, humidity is still as pressing and perverse as body heat, but a river of breeze moves the fever enough to breathe. It is already night. His cramped, hard sole shoes make the drumroll, popping pavement as he remembers the extract: Van Gogh was a formidable walker. He could walk with this borrowed confidence all night, and perhaps has—his heart pulsing in fresh blisters on his feet. Past bodegas and caged shops, past butcher shop windows with pendulous legs of peeling meat, past a neon night club with rows of boys posing in cut-offs and lipgloss and aerodynamic desire calling to him. He swerves to the street. From the club’s open door a woman’s voice heavy and sweet smogs the avenue. Vowelson this he meditatestheir ambrosial delay of consonants, opening wide the mouth for what it can only hope at.

He thumps deeper into the domestic, past colossus homes asleep in their opulence, the corridor of tremendous elm trees out-doing them. A contusion of night colors spring off car windows, through leaves and swim like Northern Lights up his pale khakis and white t-shirt, rippling his arms aquatic. His hands slither up his body and he wonders if he has ever touched himself like this before.

Before

He’s unaware there is an indifference in him so deep it will be mistaken as understanding, for it needs no conversion, seeks no argument. It will be mistaken as strength and swagger. It will be conspiracy, he will be dreaded. He volunteers his solemn face to the sky. Tonight he is an offering, come what may. Tonight he is a deep lagoon of a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y; he is purple and dark turquoise and aquamarine. And for now there is nothing to wish, nothing to correct, nothing to account for. He needs no witness, believes nothing needs him as witness either. He dances like a phantom, like a fool.

The propeller thwacks in his chest, skewering what must be his ribs. He crumples to the ground, face scraping concrete. The abrasion feels good, so he drags his face further down the residential road, tearing open more skin.

“NO ONE WAS SUPPOSED TO GET HURT” he shrieks, forgetting the words as soon as they hit air.

 

 

 

 

 

Kat Mandeville graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and is finishing her PhD in Philosophy & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. She has published two books of poetry, with various poems published in various journals. She lives in New York City.