Panty Connoisseur

elegantly

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Charlie Panty

Suffering from alopecia, incontinence, and poor digestion, our new Charlie Panty does not reassure or inspire confidence, at all. It is hungry, but it cannot eat. Tag ends hang off its shrimp ass. Its eyes, badgerlike, measure only its own uncertainty regarding the world and its place in it. Yet its neediness will come to seem endearing, especially when you are sitting at dinner and its head suddenly appears in your crotch and with its little claws it tries to pull itself onto your lap — claws like a zombie’s thoughts. You do not need Charlie Panty, but Charlie Panty desperately needs you. Fitted with codependence, Charlie Panty will convince you to go on even when you know — it smells so bad — that it would be better not to. Its appearance is a reminder that everything is made of dust, which is filthy and dead.

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Soft cheese and sand paper in plastic bag, Dieter Roth / Dieter Rot

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Untitled 2007, relief print from rubber band matrix, Tara Donovan

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Le grand corbeau pendu, Henri-Charles Guérard

(It’s called “hanging bird”, though when I first found this etching it was oriented horizontally, as above. The “DR” in the upper corner makes me think it is intended to be turned 90 degrees to the left. But I like it better the way it is above.)

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Sept chats noir, Henri-Charles Guérard

[miotropolis]

Secret poem delivery mission is ongoing.

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Imaginary Personal Statement #2

How often do you like to eat corn, in any quantity? In fact, rarely; I’m sorry to say (and I hope this sorrow does not disqualify me) that I can’t remember the last time I ate corn in any quantity. I can only imagine (although I won’t) what this says about me. Beneath my elbows extends a rectangular segment of fabric, a placemat, on which the crumbs of my last meal reside. I can consult these, in the manner of an arithmantic or a seer of destinies, and make reasonable statements about what the future will likely foist on me: something red, something brown, and something green. From this you might conclude that I am a synesthete, and an aficionado of games, not to mention a slob. How regularly, and with what energy I undertake challenging endeavors, such as the confabulation of my own interests, I am now going to try to explain. I go outside nearly every day. Sometimes there are places on the earth where people await me, and I do my best to appear there at the exact moment when I am most expected. You might have begun to notice that at this point I seem to be “losing steam”. That is because I have not made the attempt recently to gain steam—to recoup my losses, maybe. However, without your assistance, I am certain I will continue on this untoward trajectory, approaching or perhaps declining from magnificence until I reach a truly shocking state, one in which I will not care at all for the very conventions I am here trying my best to adore.

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Imaginary Personal Statement #1

Without proclaiming my own superiority too loudly, I want to suggest my proclivity for exercising good judgment in matters requiring such, and poor judgment when that seems to be what is called for. In the absence of any clear indication, sign, or decree, I am adroit at determining how badly to perform, or how poorly. Nobody, I want to say, gets the better of me; everything has been placed in such a way as to allow me to glide by it, and in some cases, through it, as if I were phantasmagoric, or nothing at all. This is a credit to those whose lives consist in arranging things so that others may pass by without making great sacrifices in comfort or prestige. For isn’t the sky, with all its various manifestations, quite a grand example of what we mean when we say inhuman? This question bears little on my own capacities for amusement and daring, all of which are within the realm of the human and, what’s more, the sane and well-connected, even (maybe) the arrogant. I added this last bit of information to counteract any picture of me you might have been forming of a creature willing to humble herself before big concepts like destiny and god—a creature in a state of perpetual supplication I am not. But: I do, from time to time, like to bow down to nobody, or to a nice patch of daisies, or to a rumbling in my belly, which is often my wisest counsel and confidant and, furthermore, my least appealing feature, vis a vis my own concept of myself. To be a creature that desires nothing, makes no demands of herself: that, I suppose, I will never be, except in my dreams, which I enjoy nightly in moderate amounts depending on what I have recently eaten.

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Essay

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I got really sad. I didn’t know a person could get so sad. I walked to a pile of garbage called a shopping mall. I realized that there are no limits to how sad a person can get. I looked at my sadness. There were two dead curly fries sticking out of it. It was a hole. The sky above it was a parking lot. There was rain fumbling around it like old stars. The sadness hole didn’t know how to spell hallelujah. The sadness hole wanted to touch someone's cheek with the peel of an orange and whisper, "It's done. It's all done." But the hole only held onto the dead curly fries. I decided I would move to Mars. First, I would start a blog about moving to Mars. Later, after I had blogged about moving to Mars, I would move to Mars.

“The journey has just begun,” I told myself while I stood next to the pile of garbage and cars drove around the pile of garbage and parked next to the pile of garbage in rows of cars which were also like a pile of garbage. I went home and started a blog about moving to Mars. I messaged my friend, “I’m going to get married on Mars.” “You don’t like marriage,” my friend said. “Things will be different on Mars,” I said. 

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I was going to write, "The origins of the panty..." But who cares about origins? Do dreams come from dreams? Everything comes from air. The medium we breathe. Thinking must begin there too. I see it in the trees' leaves. How they move. How they just begin to move. Then, how they don't move at all. When everything else seems to be in chaos, they stay inside their shapes. Only later, when everything else is calm, they fall.  

Why am I talking about trees? Because I want to begin something. I want to begin reaching something that, on Saturday, February 18, 2017, still feels very far away.

It's something I think Mark was trying to reach. Can I speak about a dead person this way? But when I speak of him I mean a living person. He lived inside the horizon. It's difficult to move beyond a place that is at the edge of everyone else's eyes.

I guess it seems like the time to care about origins has receded. Maybe it will return. But right now, what I care about is the part in the middle. The living body. The body that has extended into my vision and occupies a face there.

Yesterday a physical therapist told me to stop stretching. Instead, strengthen the shape I already am. Don't create new distances. I'd like, too, to collect the scraps things are always leaving behind. Assemble colors, shapes, lines. ... “the old, the fragmentary, and the enigmatic” (quoted in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder).

So, maybe a revision: not air, but time. Not origins of things but things that are already in shambles.

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The dead have no message. The birch trees have the look of having just arrived inside their lines. They might still smear. Eventually everything that is said becomes indistinguishable from objects. I feel responsible for the broken, rejected, and abject ones. That is what this blog is named for. Hobbies: licking moonlight off glass dolphin figurines. How else does one person vanish?

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I’ll be traveling, in disguise, for a strange new job I’ve taken. The job involves speaking in rooms, hopping across puddles, pressing the brake pedal when it’s time. I’m waking up early. I’m staying up late. Two specialized dictionaries were recently sent to me. The definition of “foregrounding” turns out to be more intricate than I had thought. I haven’t come up with a reason why there’s so much trash on the ground around the mall. There is no reason. People just get tired of the ground when they’re by a mall. It’s a festival, a fair. What it’s not is a jubilee.

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Standing at the edge of the mall’s parking lot, I feel I am standing on an ocean beach. My feet are on a meridian of grass littered with objects people have discarded, or that the wind has snatched from their hands, or children flung from windows. This is where vanished things persist. I pick one up—it is the plastic wrapper of what was once a seasoned stick of meat. I want to drop it but keep carrying it, and the longer I do, the more it feels like a treasure—a little calcareous shell life once inhabited and might, it seems, inhabit again. I carry it with me into the mall, where I have come as a kind of pirate. We don’t pay for internet at our apartment so I pilfer the mall’s. Carrying my Jack’s Strip wrapper I make my way to the Food Court, where, at a counter by a wall painted with the words “Recharging Station,” I set up my office.

Channeling a connection through the piece of plastic where I type these words, occasionally touching an edge of my Jack’s Strip wrapper as if to see if it has a pulse, I feel there is magic all around in the garbage world I inhabit. Maybe I am what’s preparing to fill the wrapper with life again.

{from an essay in progress I found at the mall}

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from Uncountry, a mythology by Yanara Friedland, published by Noemi Press

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But already I can tell I won't wait. I'll build a fire as early as tomorrow. I'll burn my papers alone.

Can you be more specific?

Waterslides, a maze, an undercurrent & an elaboration on a silence.

An elaboration on a silence is a tree.

Yes.

With unimaginable branches.

Yes.

Terminating in ordinary leaves. Leaves that are always leaves.

And then one day all the cats are missing.

The shadows seem off too. But it's just because there's no cats hiding in them.

Being nobody is a political act. Being an abandoned building is, too. You’re home alone. You’re walking around the city. Nobody knows what you do.

If this logic continues, everything will be everything. But this logic need not continue. We can put an end to this logic right now.

A small shape surrounded by a bright window (you).

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I live at the mall.

If you take the ugliness of the world seriously, it will kill you, the mall is teaching me. You have to carry your sweet potatoes through the obese parking lot even as you’re crying because your tears will water the gravel and there something might grow.

A tree of grief in the lot of Total Wine. With leaves that cast shade on the entrance of Forever 21.

I wonder if future people will find the ruins of Forever 21 and laugh.

From the bedroom the light of Total Wine shines on the inner walls.

I tried to close my eyes but what I was couldn’t.

The walls are hues of those signs. Above the lots. They cast their light for known and unknown reasons.

They place within their luminations their own reasons for being.

In fact the lights, shining all night for no reason, seem the most like poets. I’ll read them Alice Notley, I’ll adjunct in the lots after academic hours.