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excerpt from notebook of another thesis

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excerpts from the sorrow and the fast of it by Nathalie Stephens- Nathanaël



We divide into occurrences.

A place name is an occurrence of retreat. A circle is an occurrence of light. A ground is an occurrence of destruction. A voice is an occurrence of a madness. A rail line an occurrence of parting. A boundary an oc­currence of travail. A blood line of porosity. A chasm of pain. A literature of anxiety. A massacre of disavowal. A vein of rain.

This is the literal construction of the body. The body in its built geography. This is how it is taken apart. And reassembled. The body which was to have been a body of ideas. A corporeal thought fleshed out on the rustiest of nails. We scraped away what was animal. We scraped away what was felt. We scraped away what was forgotten. We scraped away what was unexpected. We scraped and we scraped. To make the best of what could be made. We saw that it was glistening. We saw that it was smooth. We didn’t see that it was tumid. And by the twenty-first century we didn’t recognize it as rank. We gloried in superlatives. We split what was whole for the sake of it. Making from the made thing not think­ing beyond the smoothness to the rasping breath.

Everything we made was for the next thing. Everything we made was rejected.



I line the closed mouth with an indiscretion. I line the plaster walls with sobriety. I enter the wooden doorway through a skin. I tear the asphalt from the limited. I pull the water up from the river and over a hill. I mark the iron gate inhabited. I go to where the beasts mourn. I place the key under the clay pot. I break the sleep of the disinterested. I lead the revolution to the bus stop. I burn the prayer that burnt the child tongue. I snap the clavicle from the skeleton.

I liken leaving to a photograph. With a spent bone in the tired hand. I liken speaking to an epitaph. I drive the monster from the bedroom.



I wring the long neck. I carry the blue bruise. I tear the singed hair. I turn the blunt soil. I screw the turmoil. I call the city man. I turn his noise off. I follow the dog minstrel. I make the jerk off. I slam the mirrored door. I fake the sandstone. I wander the gravel dust. I snap the cello string. I swim the dry creek. I alter the sound wave. I float on the detritus. Among the shop­ping carts. In the boneless grave. I vomit on the plastic face. I humiliate the drunkard and the priest. I climb the spiked wall. I cross the poster out. I nail the infant to the fence. I line the people up. I proclaim a madness and a disgrace.

This is as the human breaks. Against the walled fortress. Against the lover’s back. Inside the child throat. Under a beaming sky. Full of a shameless sun. Full of a thin­ning air of all the wars shunted into a stifled ground.

We eat it into us like cannibals.



There is the way to formulate an absence. In among the mottled sounds. In around the cramped formations of competing fears. The bodies press all into a window. There is neither light nor barrier and we neither fall nor are suspended. This is as we discover the structure and the structure chokes us into tight squares of paralysis. What I mean to say is the significance of gravity is lost to the body in among this many constructions. This is as we divine what we are on a verge of losing. This is as the sorrow is pinched into us. We hold breath against a hopelessness. We fabricate the disjunctures. And we swim across waters that are imagined toward lands that are devastated. For the fantasy of labyrinth. For the belief in astray. For the sake of gaining what is irremediable. For the hidden arteries releasing into a poisoned lake.



I plant a garden in fall. I take the dry strands of withered plants. I pull the grasses from the edge of a lake. I make fistfuls of dirt and eat them into me. I make one garden inside and one garden outside. One for the body. One for the field. I pour water into dry earth. I take grown plants and make them small. I take old growths and divide them. I pull the sun close. I make the water fall. I press my feet bare against exposed roots. I cover the dry earth with wilted petals. I make the brittle stalks into a small enclosure. I call it an espalier an awning a canopy a stable. Even as it is none of these. Even as the hooves of beasts don’t fall. Even as wood doesn’t climb. Even as the shadow on the ground is the sky’s own alone. Even as the garden is a slab of beaten rock. And the only sound is of a wailing cat on a threshold demanding a different course of time.



I like nothing of what I see.

I close the door. I close the door for certainty. But the wall is weak. So I fall against the fallen wall on a dis­couraged ground.

It is like this : A sky remaindering.

In the museum of art there is a steel ring. In the river floats a silver box. Under the hood of a car there is a cattle prod. In a field there is a lead pipe. On a table top a monkey wrench. In this human hand an animal gut. These are the offerings. These are the settlements. These are the measurements of trust. These are the managings that break and break and break us into madnesses. That make the surface into rust and the weaknesses for failing.

The ground is not for any of us. Not now that we have touched it.

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in the spareroom

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Aristocracy by Sandra Simonds

I like when the form is kind of stuck-up   even though I’ve got a Southern accent and my place looks like a graduate student’s. 1. I enjoy   high art but realism swamps me.            2. The material world swamps me.                              3. I came to understand                                                the forms of realism,                                                             the aesthetic phenomenon.                                                                      4. You take a random person                                                                                                from daily life.                                                                   5. You take their dependence                                                         on their historical circumstances.                                                                   6. You make them                                                         the subject.                                      7. You see, they operate                                      the modern.      Things happen ... minutes, hours, days.       The order of life          coming from life itself.                                     Back to life /                                     Back to reality (like Soul II Soul).                                                       It is sublime                                                   and grotesque.                                                                8. They make rich forms.   Something steady.   Less manic.         Something real                                                like a bell                                                  inside the Golden Seahorse Gift Shop.                                                                Don’t take me                                                                            on that ride.                                                            I don’t want                                                         to go down.                                         9. To what degree                                  are the subjects         taken seriously?   They naturally swim                            beneath the icy sheets                                               and find breathing holes.                                         They may remember                                                         their arctic homes.                                                                            They are one of the park’s                                                          most sociable creatures. I said                                          enter the water with them.                               Graceful imitation of strange   palms and seaflowers. A seaflower     of a thousand colors, aquarium              pigmented. It is my violent  passion for seaflowers, Molly. I want the entire         underwater palace          built of roaring seaflowers!    Beluga! Beluga! Wither and mow.         The child’s song.  Emerald kayak        and the femme fatale                                 who sleeps in it, Victorian,                                                          long, frothy hair                                         and the death drive,     flesh like the statement, “I lost a friend          in the sea garden.”                          The notes, staccato, vortex,                                           paradisiacal, gold bell in a coffin     just in case I wake up. And the way                                                 darkness tunnels       inside a car on its way                        to its pinpoint destination. No one tells you                    the moon’s going                                             to end up like this.                                         No one. So you just move towards it.    That’s all the moon                               ever was. Ding. Ding.

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Text to Complete a Text by Bhanu Kapil

Sex is always monstrous. Blood appears in the air next to the body but nobody asks a question about the body. “Please touch me there. More. Oh god.” For a hitchhiker, the problem of the boudoir is transferred to a makeshift, itchy, unsafe space on the verge of a New Mexico highway. It is often the sex of another era, in which the socks and dress shirt/blouse are not necessarily removed.

I hitchhiked in the beginning because it seemed glamorous to me, ultra-American, like a Christian with an entrenched migraine who resorts to brand-name anti-inflammatories when prayer does not do the trick. At first, my encounters on the thoroughfares of your country were quotidian; after all, it is not really hitchhiking to buy a Greyhound ticket three weeks in advance then have a going-away party in a dorm with a banner and balloons. Again, this is an example of departure in another time. As a foreign student on scholarship, it was an ordinary matter to file for an extension for the completion of a thesis on Salman Rushdie’s early works. Nevertheless: “How can we keep tabs on these JI visa holders, who come over here and . . . the university, as an institution, really needs to be more accountable. We need a database and we need a system of checks and balances to make sure any change of address is verified by at least two pieces of information. They need to do their course work and then they need to go home.”

I didn’t want to go home. This is a boring sentence. Perhaps for you Oregon is a calming word, evoking images of blackberry pie, ocean vistas, and the capture of suspected felons. I had never heard the word Oregon before. Like the distance of Scotland from London, it seemed impossibly far. A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going. How can I put this? In England, nobody ever, ever, ever did this. I, who once drove straight to Glasgow with a thermos of instant coffee mixed with milk and sugar, in a dinged-up Datsun Cherry, was considered an anomaly. “Are you demented? Why do you want to drive in a car to bloody Scotland? It’s seven hours on the M1, man!” Though, outwardly, I was wan and somewhat reticent, I . . . no, I was. My sexual experience consisted of lying under an elm tree in Hyde Park at the age of seventeen and being told by an undergraduate student of the London School of Economics that my breasts in that position, from that angle, resembled two fried eggs. We were meeting in a park as per the era. I am sure contemporary Punjabi-British teenagers are fearless individuals, undaunted by the prospect of community censure. Back then we met by the iron-wrought gate on a park bench, on a path built for seventeenth-century promenades. It is always a century. In my century, sex was a field of restraint and intensity unsurpassed by anything except drinking coffee in a foreign country like Scotland or Wales and borrowing my father’s car forever. “Are you out of your bleeding head? Your dad’s going to skin you alive!”

In some sense, this (driving) is the opposite of hitchhiking, in which the interior of the car is always unfamiliar. The day was real in a different way back then, in the way that it sensitized me to risk, a kind of twin to permisson. Two black swans: that day and this one, history and fiction, what I went for and what I really wanted, which I didn’t know until I got there by which time it was impossible to consider the long journey home as either practical or sensible, considering the trouble I was already in and the rain, which had started to come down in a series of reddish sheets; the streetlamps were pink.

On Prince Street, in Glasgow, I saw the sign for American style pizza and went down the steps to the basement café. The tables were coated with green plastic. There was hot tea, which the waitress slung down my gullet with a funnel as I focused my eye on a laminated print of a white, blocky rose with a pink dot at its center. “Charles Rennie Mackintosh,” the waitress, pronouncing “osh” so that it rhymed with horse. “Are you from India?” “Would you like some jam with that scone? I bet they don’t have scones in India, do they?” “More tea? I heard you have a lot of tea, over there, isn’t that right?”

Plan b: The extension of my throat. The euphoria of theft. Other countries with their sayings and beliefs. The original plan, formulated by my father during his morning communte across London: marrying a British-born Hindu Brahmin dentist with brown skin, but not too brown, and rosy cheeks. Note on the mantelpiece, tucked behind the marble figurine of Shiva: what is forthcoming under the original plan? Extraction? What kind of sex is possible on the dentist’s chair late at night for that girl, your girl, who nervously asks for a blanket? She has her socks on. She’s shivering. It is sometimes sex when you touch yourself beneath the proffered blanket clearly not washed between patients, but in this scene the limbs of the dentist’s young Asian bride are rigid and smell faintly of wintergreen-scented nail polish or mouthwash. Dad, “please don’t swallow.” Rinse then spit. Spit then swallow.

I could not go home and so, after a brief visit to the Hill House—Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s art deco home on the Firth of Clyde, where he painted geometric rosebuds forever in a kind of frenzy, as it seemed from the décor—I turned left and kept driving. I drove my car into the Atlantic and kept driving, my chest very tight beneath the surface. It was difficult to feel anything or really to see, and so I can only say that I went into a damaging ocean. This is going. Damaged, washed up on the mythical shores of New Jersey a few days later, my car failed to start. This is later, when the car stopped, and, looking up from my hands, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, I realized that I was okay.

Now I am here, in the future of color. I’m sorry I do not have more to say about the period of submergence that preceded my arrival. I am not interested in it. I do not recall it. I . . . It was only when my car stopped that I realized what I had to do, on my own terms, with my own two legs: get going. Is that how you say it? Get up and go. The destiny of my body as separate from my childhood: I came here to hitchhike. I came here to complete a thing I began in another place. Removing wet pages from my rucksack, I lay them on the shore, securing them with beautiful shells and pebbles. When they dried, I folded them into squares and put them in my pocket, next to my body. Misshapen, exhilarated, I said get. I said go. Get up now and go. “Are you okay?” “Do you need a ride somewhere?” “Let me look in the trunk. I might have something in there. Here you go. You’re shivering! Do you need to go to the hospital? At least let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

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Self Portrait BY CYNTHIA CRUZ

I did not want my body Spackled in the world’s Black beads and broke Diamonds. What the world

Wanted, I did not. Of the things It wanted. The body of Sunday Morning, the warm wine and The blood. The dripping fox

Furs dragged through the black New York snow—the parked car, the pearls, To the first pew—the funders, The trustees, the bloat, the red weight of

The world. Their faces. I wanted not That. I wanted Saint Francis, the love of His animals. The wolf, broken and bleeding— That was me.

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IN CASE OF DEATH by DAVID NASH

1. Cessation of Breath: Is He Breathing?

He’s not breathing, and he cannot go on like this. He needs air. Mouth-to-mouth is a fool’s game: you must not believe that you have enough air for the both of you. The body should supply itself, but in this it can be encouraged. Breath begets breath, and life life. One O says yes to another O and that equals oxygen. One god nods to the next god, who nods to the next and so on. Therefore plant plants, as follows: (i) The chest is just a gathering of shapes as it is, and it knows full well what it means to be a shrubbery. There is depth and breadth enough for soil, and it lends itself naturally to inhabitance. From there to conurbation. Drop seeds and sow. It grows in spite of itself. (ii) The extremities are a framework already in place: honeysuckles, for example, thrive on the order inherent in limbs; fingers are the beginnings of mathematics, and you will find the sweetpea loops nicely to a ring; ivies are many and incessant. (iii) The holes of the head are a blessing. Eye sockets, in particular, are favourable to succulents.

2. Cardiac Arrest: Is There Any Rhythm to Him?

They say: cut the wood yourself and it will warm you twice. It is the same for the heart – if you beat it, it will beat. And it is the same with blood – it won’t move unless you move it. This is the kind of work that must be done by hand. This is monks and manuscripts. This is sculpture. This is the work your father did, is where you came from. (i)        Locate the heart by feeling (ii)       Trace out the gridlocked veins (iii)      Prepare the bell for pealing (iv)       Make fists and take your aim (v)        Pound it till it feels like kissing (vi)       Push the blood between your hands (vii)      Force the heart to miss what’s missing (viii)     Forbid it to neglect its plan (ix-xii)  Of all the laws that you could leave him Leave him only one: Hurt could your heart every man Hurt can his heart none.

3. Pallor Mortis: What Colour is He?

Isn’t it tempting to leave him? Now that you know he’s as white as you? Is there no way he could live like snow lives, which is to say: unanimously, without discrimination, everywhere, carelessly/carefully, in paralysis, absent, and dumb? No: that is the opposite of science, and you should proceed like so: (i)    Hit him. The pocket-bursts of red as you rain down your blows remind the skin of its duty. (a)    This is not advisable for the lips, which, if blue, should be bitten, as before. (b)    This is also, NB, only a temporary reversal of the state. (ii)    If saffron seems like an investment, remember that its employment requires the body to steep (and steep and steep) and be bathed. Did your hands memorise the weight of his? Well then, now’s your chance: knead the yellowing water into him, notice the steady dawning of your skins. Saffron is pittance. (iii)    Cow’s piss also does the trick. (iv)    There is always war paint. Humans have been making themselves up for years. They are canny and, often, uncannily like themselves. It’s a neat trick, but you, of course, would always know.

4. Hypostasis: Has His Blood Settled?

Bloodset / Blooddown: when the body designs its own horizon in telling the erthrocytes: “Rest now”, or “Settle”. And they do, in good faith, like children called to come down now from the trees: with a pause, then dripping one by one from the canopy. With relief. With the sound, even, of relief, the deflation of that last f. The way a bus is grateful to be waved down, the way a coal chimney savours its condemnation. In such a way does the blood settle, and its acceptance is crepuscular. To cause a bloodrise you must: (i)     Reverse gravity. (ii)    Reverse time.

5. Algor Mortis / Decline in Temperature: Look Up: Could You Pick Him Out From a Crowd? Is He Redder, More Gigantic Than Before? Is He Whiter? Tinier? Is He Closer To / Further From Land? Is He Different, Depending on Your Location, or Constant? Is He Causing Havoc to Radio Signals? Would It Mean Sudden Death to Approach Him? Blindness to Look? Or Do Those Advances Neither Put In Nor Put Out On Him? Does He Remain Unmoved? Are You in the Sweet Spot? Is It Down to Him What Gets Eaten and What Fed? Does He Cultivate Your Farthest Points? Is He Beautiful at Your Edges? Does He Still, Albeit Rarely, Tilt Your Tired Face Towards His? Must He Always Remain This Way, Never to Swell or Contract, For You to Be Happy? Listen. Are You Satisfied or Not?

It is considered a strength to find yourself in any given room and still know where North is. In the same way, you should be able to read a dwelling, know if he is adding to it or taking away or if there would be no difference without him. Assuming the latter: (i)    You could melt him, but he would not flow. (ii)   You could torch him, but he’d burn too slow. (iii)  You could fuck him, but he wouldn’t know.

6. Rigor Mortis: Can He Yet Be Turned?

By now it should be clear. You are on a boat-deck, both of you, and a white sun fizzes on the water as though dropped like an aspirin. Then it dissolves completely. Darkness. Two unseeable faces, etched uselessly into smiles. You cast out a word or two and they frost over with brine: each stroke of the pen is breakable. Things snap or creak and you credit these sounds to him, but these are equally plausible: the sucking of a mussel; the canvass canvassing; the scissorwork of seagull wings; one sea creature tearing the flesh from another sea creature; a jellyfish pulse; sounds of your own invention. You line up his armpit hair to the marram grass on the shore, and the parallax is kind: they are near enough to a perfect fit. You recount the boat parts: Forestay. Gunwhale. Thwart. Tiller. Transom. Jib. Clew. Keel… Even if he was moving, he might as well be doing it behind the ocean, somewhere utterly else. (i)    Wait. (ii)   From the bilges of hopelessness, skim the oldest foam and the darkest pitch, and from the oldest foam and the darkest pitch, procure the lowliest gnat, the sickliest, and (iii)  Name it thus: His Finger Twitched.

7. Decomposition: Has He Broken Down?

Once, you decided to catalogue life. It was a losing game, but even then you knew what was and wasn’t reversible and therefore you persisted. You constructed his every last hair – the one that flags age; the ancient; the wisps; the cowslicked. You thought of digestion, the blanket alchemy of browning, that shiest of Chinese whispers. You thought of nerves. There were: 1.  assemblies of cells; 2. paliaments of bone, bipartisan clicks and bickering, motions, stalemates, and all of them were legislating, legislating movement and stasis; 3. two sides, the right of which dictated; When you dreamt hard, you could make a nail erupt. Dreamt lighter – the skin of a lip, a scar, the stirrup. Bigger, bolder things too, like a.    breath. The stuffy grammar of it. How it guffaws at the smallest misstep; b.    the subject/object of the heart; c.    the check and balance of breath; d.    two feet, two pliant, compliant feet, two suffering feet, two poor feet God love them; e.    all kinds of erections; f.     the idea, in his mind, of an I. Distinct from you, who to him is: Him; g.    the glacier game, the earthquake, the seaswell, the henpeck we call “breath”. You wrote blood, and then you wrote it in Greek, and then the whole thing fell into translation, into action. Reaction: he turned. He turned on you. He withered in your hand, flopped out. It was a time after Babel, when everything you had named was suddenly anonymous. Falsehood is not in words: it is in things. He feeds himself to the world, a dandelion, its damage done. You cover your mouth and nose. (i)    compose again.

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The vacant seat by Hirata Toshiko

He left his seat

to take a seat in another chair

In another room

With another someone

He forgot the seat on purpose 

He should have taken care 

Of his seat through to the end

I persuade the abandoned chair

To go chase after him

But it pretends not to hear 

It cannot leave the table

A vacant seat is an eyesore

So I carry it to to the trash 

But each time I do 

It rushes briskly back

(Its four legs make it fast)

If I put it in water, it won’t dissolve 

If I step upon it, it won’t break

If I hang it out in the sun, maybe 

It’ll turn into a four legged beast

So I hang it out on the balcony 

But the chair stays a chair

The two words vacant seat blead

And wait for someone’s behind

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At some point things get rough by Hirata Toshiko

Emotions are either straight or curved lines Sometimes digressions or dashes The three- dot ellipsis...shows Lingering sensation, silence, and summarization Just these three infants Carrying such heavy weight........... .......................................... Sorry to have ever been born... I never want to see you again... A line of dots hinting along those lines I am always tracing a line parallel to yours After nine instances of the ellipsis Is Urashima Taro, stabbed in the back....... Throw either a fastball or a curve and still the ball flies high and falls back to the ground

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Pelicans by Ali Eckerman

My friend was at the A & E, he wasn’t feeling good I was at the barbecue, just like he said I should. The phone call from the hospital shocks me with fear and fright – ‘You better come to ICU, he might not make it through the night.’

I stand silent at his bedside, he looks so dead already, I try comforting his children as their lives become unsteady. ‘Please don’t go away,’ I whisper. ‘Don’t leave us behind.’ I pray then to my Ancestors, I ask them for a sign.

We sit all night like statues, on each side of his bed, The thought of losing him is really fucking with my head! The nursing staff fuss round with looks of deep regret. But I was waiting for a sign that he won’t leave us yet.

The morning light creeps slowly across red desert sand His eyelids flicker open and he fumbles for my hand. ‘Hello,’ he whispers, ‘how are you?’ and then falls back to sleep My eyes stare at the monitors, the bips, the dots, the beeps.

‘He’s out of danger,’ the doctor says, ‘you should get some rest.’ And as I walked along Gap Road I look out to the west 2 pelicans fly overhead, floating on the breeze, ‘It’s the sign,’ I cry and thank the Spirits watching over me.

I return to the hospital, he is much stronger now And the nursing staff all smiling as they too wonder how? I share the story of the sign, the pelicans in the sky We hold each others hands and smiles are in our eyes.

I drive out to Amoonguna to tell family he is right I sit down with his Aunty, round the campfire, in the night I ask her to explain the pelicans and the meaning of the sign She laughs and whispers, ‘Arrangkwe just 2 pelicans in the sky!’

Poet’s note: Arrangkwe (arrente-word) means no, nothing, no one

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Thunder raining poison by Ali Cobby Eckermann

a whisper arrives. two thousand. two thousand or more. did you hear it? that bomb. the torture of red sand turning green the anguish of earth turned to glass did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more yams cremated inside the earth. poison trapped in glass like a museum. did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more tears we cried for our Land for the fear you gave us, for the sickness and the dying two thousand years of memory here two thousand. two thousand or more peaceful place this place. happy place till you come with your bombs you stole our happiness with your poison ways you stole our stories two thousand. two thousand or more our people gone missing. did you hear it? where’s my grandfather? you seen him? where’s my daughter? you seen her? Mummy! you seen my mum? Dad! two thousand. two thousand or more times I asked for truth. do you know where they are? two thousand. two thousand or more trees dead with arms to the sky. all the birds missing. no birdsong here just stillness. like a funeral. two thousand or more a whisper arrives. did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more it sounds like glass. our hearts breaking. but we are stronger than that we always rise us mob. two thousand. two thousand or more you can’t break us. we not glass. we are people! two thousand. two thousand or more our Spirit comes together. we make a heart did you see it? in the fragments. it’s there in the glass two thousand. two thousand or more our hearts grow as we mourn for our Land it’s part of us. we love it. poisoned and all

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Minority by Imtiaz Dharker

I was born a foreigner. I carried on from there to become a foreigner everywhere I went, even in the place planted with my relatives, six-foot tubers sprouting roots, their fingers and faces pushing up new shoots of maize and sugar cane.

All kinds of places and groups of people who have an admirable history would, almost certainly, distance themselves from me.

I don’t fit, like a clumsily-translated poem;

like food cooked in milk of coconut where you expected ghee or cream, the unexpected aftertaste of cardamom or neem.

There’s always that point where the language flips into an unfamiliar taste; where words tumble over a cunning tripwire on the tongue; where the frame slips, the reception of an image not quite tuned, ghost-outlined, that signals, in their midst, an alien.

And so I scratch, scratch through the night, at this growing scab on black on white. Everyone has the right to infiltrate a piece of paper. A page doesn’t fight back. And, who knows, these lines may scratch their way into your head – through all the chatter of community, family, clattering spoons, children being fed – immigrate into your bed, squat in your home, and in a corner, eat your bread,

until, one day, you meet the stranger sidling down your street, realise you know the face simplified to bone, look into its outcast eyes and recognise it as your own.

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Enough music by dorianne laux

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive, and we've talked enough and listened to enough music and stopped twice, once to eat, once to see the view, we fall into this rhythm of silence. It swings back and forth between us like a rope over a lake. Maybe it's what we don't say that saves us.

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fair spiderwoman

fair spiderwoman mirror, mirror on the wall, whose the fairest of them all? her that weaves the most transparent net catch cunningly perhaps my ovaries are hesitant elves and set free guilt free no such thing

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Eileen Myles from Chealsea Girls

We were watching teeve some old movie we didn't see but kept flickering while we talked. How everything's equal since I've been fucked over worse by women than men almost more because it hurts more. A woman uses you because you let her in so naturally never expected it's just chess. I've learned so much. Women per se. Men per se. Everything feels equal. Trust per se. You walk away thinking what a great man what a great woman. How really nice they are. In or by itself; intrinsically. No such thing.You make a hole in the weave if you expect anything to be something through and through. There. I've gotten to explain it. You look at people. They look at you. It's like have you been a catholic. Someone wants you to be a machine or else they think it's just a passing phase. Lesbian per se... ------ I am looking at her standing there, looking at her in her orange construction boots and everything else is dark. I'm really adoring her as she's leaving and by the second she's getting more and more beautiful look at her eyes all green and golden brown and gigantic and these unreal lashes. Two are caught between her nose and her eyes are just sitting there and you know how people who you really love or who you irritate are always coming over and picking something off you. Well I can't even tell her I like those two lashes just where they are. Her entirety goes out the door. Eileen's entirety is lying on the couch watching teevee, waiting for them to turn us off.

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First Elegy by michael palmer

Singing is prohibited in this café. Torture is permitted in this café.

I'll have a double, thank you, in ¾ time, Sister,

may I call you Sister, you almond-eyed, unsmiling,

in this ever-changing light that cloaks the feral world?

These dancers, do you know them? Do they think

as they glide and spin of what is to be

and what has been? Do you know their names

and if so do their names change

from earliest hours to late and day to day?

Do their wounds show as they mimic the music's path?

(Sister, I apologize, but I must ask.) Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Abu Ghraib,

Oradour, Terezín, Deir Yassin, Vel d'Hive, Vorkuta, Magadan—

that waltz, that dance— among the café candles

and beyond the fogged windows the endless allée

of lightning-scarred trees whispering fractured words

for none to understand. All the beautiful names,

Sister, the infinite names, roll off the tongue

innumerable as the stars that frolic in the sea.

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Sticks by Thomas Sayers Ellis

My father was an enormous man Who believed kindness and lack of size Were nothing more than sissified Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded,

His eyes were the worst kind Of jury—deliberate, distant, hard. No one could outshout him Or make bigger fists. The few

Who tried got taken for bad, Beat down, their bodies slammed. I wanted to be just like him: Big man, man of the house, king.

A plagiarist, hitting the things he hit, I learned to use my hands watching him Use his, pretending to slap mother When he slapped mother.

He was sick. A diabetic slept Like a silent vowel inside his well-built, Muscular, dark body. Hard as all that With similar weaknesses

—I discovered writing, How words are parts of speech With beats and breaths of their own. Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam!

An heir to the rhythm And tension beneath the beatings, My first attempts were filled with noise, Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows.

The page tightened like a drum Resisting the clockwise twisting Of a handheld chrome key, The noisy banging and tuning of growth.