ALGAE AND BONE

please don't follow me if you're like 14. please stop.

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He moves like any / other fracture, revealing the briefest doors.

Ocean Vuong, “Trojan,” in Night Sky with Exit Wounds

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Let me show you how                          to make your lungs                          a home for minnows, how                          to let them flicker            like silver            in and out of your mouth like last words...

Saeed Jones, “Mississippi Drowning,” in Prelude to Bruise

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Go back: my throat still        crowded with dirt                                  and loose teeth but I speak              (tongue slick with iron) but I speak in the language of sharp turns.

Saeed Jones, “Jasper, 1998″, in Prelude to Bruise

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By nature our nervous system errs, is subject to defect. We are born in discomfort then want what we cannot do for ourselves. Not even for each other.

Wendy S. Walters, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal

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One day the soldier will write a book that explains how to survive as a man, which means how to forget all the places in which he claimed to become one.

Wendy S. Walters, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal

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I remember myself in locations that no longer exist, and this is how I am able to believe that, at some point, I was free.

Wendy S. Walters, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal

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She had been conscious for some days of an increasing sense of disembodiment, as if her limbs and musculature merely established the residential context of her body.

J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

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All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but he familiar, we recolonize past and future.

J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

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These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you're lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.

Annie Dillard, “On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley,” in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your smoky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels,” in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

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When I as a small lizard gasped for oxygen, he touched me with his burn-damaged hands, gave me the name "Amphibian." So thin that nerves glowed through my fetus-blue skin.

Aase Berg, “We were born from the same mammalian egg,” in Dark Matter

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I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

Susan Sontag, “Unguided Tour”

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Travers's problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life—not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies, the awkward geometry of the postures we assume.

J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

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The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, even God. The mind's sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.

Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse,” in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

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Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Any thing erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function.

J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

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I have damaged— caused damage in the clock orbit Glass breaks into the day comes out of its notch and pains in a maybe knee, skeleton

Aase Berg, “Strong Bodyfault’s Orbit,” in Dark Matter

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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole,” in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New