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Berlin zoo after Allies bombing 1943

Elle mord Dieu au poignet. [She bites God in the wrist]

Antonin Artaud, Jet de Sang (via viperslang)

8

“What do you like to do?” I ask her. “I mean—draw? Do you sing? You look like an actress, maybe. Gardening? Whatever it is, I wager we can find a way for you to get back into it. Unless you like water polo. We don’t have any aquatic horses.”

“What?”

“The last one died.” She stares blankly at me. I’m panicking a little—she hasn’t smiled, there’s not cracking her; the actress thing gets nearly everybody. Hardly a girl on Earth who doesn’t, deep down, feel they belong in front of the camera. Why not? “We fed the water horse too many crabs, and it died.” I went on. Jennifer is making a face. She thinks I’m a fucking idiot; I can practically see the words scroll by under her eyes—what a fucking idiot—and that’s fine, that’s good. If I’m an idiot, she’ll ask me for things. Better that the see me as another cop, another social worker with a long list of other names to hurry off to.

“I do like acting,” she says. “Same as everybody.”

#caught up today

7

My favorite thing about the town of Alberton is its proximity to various lanes of escape. By this I don’t mean a helipad on my roof, or even a terribly significant airport. Rather, in addition to my own highway-facing office, any place where I might find myself is fairly near an onramp. In turn, the highways tend to intersect with other highways and interstates, main arteries that run across the country, funneling its lifeblood: trucks of plastic accessories and live chickens neatly stacked in crates; thick motorcyclists with determined forward stares; families secreted away in boxy RVs. Although I very rarely leave Alberta, I appreciate the message that this sends me on a near-daily basis: I am not trapped here. At any particular moment, if the mood struck me, I could take off—for a weekend, for forever. I could go and camp at one of the national parks, several of which are within a day’s drive. Just seeing the signs on the side of the road, their green shine and white block letters, the names of towns with their distances stamped alongside, gives me a little thrill. Seeing the name of a city like Las Vegas regularly tells me that I am, if not important, at least tangential to importance. How many movies are there about Las Vegas? How many celebrity’s deaths have been portrayed there? All this, within my reach if I chose.

6

I lived in a glass box in the desert. The sun stretched to the horizon and stripped the color out of everything—the road; the tall, blank-faced buildings along the road; the solitary men who walked occasionally down the shoulder in heavy, measured steps against the heat. Sand ticked all day at the windows. Dust storms blew up overnight and swallowed the sky in a yellow haze. Hotels became blurry smears of hotel; the cars were erased before my eyes, even as they moved. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of my room I had a view of the construction projects that dragged on and on for months; in the lot next to my building they were putting up another hotel. Next to that lot they were, simultaneously, putting up a block of condominiums. Cranes turned their stiff necks, arced steel beams in slow, pendulous circles over the dry caked ground. Men in yellow helmets, their arms and necks covered in white fabric for protection from the sun, hammered rebar, yelled at the operators. I was eighteen stories up, and the glass was tempered, so I could only hear the construction if it was very, very loud—moments when the crane dropped a beam, when a truck lifted its beetly back and emptied obscure contents onto the dusty ground. The haze hung everywhere in the late afternoon and the more distant trucks, the palm trees stretching down the median, turned into smudged, dark shadows, which at any moment could perhaps shift, uncurl some hidden limbs, reveal themselves to be another object entirely: just my eyes playing tricks.

5

The woman in the blue suit smiled. Her face from across the street was like a doll’s, but up close you could see how thick the makeup was caked on her, and how she was a strange, deep orangey color because the bright camera lights would wash her out. The skin of her cheeks was like the surface of some weird, soft planet where nothing grew. “That’s lovely, Tabitha. Media is one of the most crucial fields in the world. And we need more smart women like you.” She reached out and touched Jenny’s cheek and she flinched. The woman didn’t notice. “Would you like to be on our crew for a moment? You could hold the reflector.”

4

A jinn appeared, his face dark in the dark room. He crept onto the foot of my bed, his every limb bent to a sharp and terrible angle. He raised his long, thin arm, pale as rice, toward me. Then the jinn pulled his body forward on the bed—his body slim and wrinkled, yet soft and formless underneath like a dried fig. The jinn raised his other arm; he pulled himself closer. I could feel his warm breath moving toward my face in hot, bitter clouds. The jinn’s breath smelled like piss and old fruit, like the dark spaces under bridges through which I hurried home. He turned his face up from the covers toward me. The jinn had teeth, long and wet. He had no eyes. He grinned terribly, and he moved both his arms forward, grabbing fistfuls of coverlet, moved toward me once again. A sharp and fleshy tongue darted out and ran over his teeth. I lay frozen, my throat full of glass. The jinn shivered. Then he spoke to me without moving his mouth; the voice of the jinn was deep and hissing, carefully spoken, and creamy, and delicious.

3

Just before my death—the real one, the one that stuck— I spent several hours staring into a mirror, contorting my body, bending over and backwards and turning my head like an owl to see myself from every possible ugly angle. Folds of skin doubled over, muscles bulged, my body thickened in areas that television had promised would exhibit no thickening. Where were the woman like me? Certainly my heroes were not among them. If I hadn’t seen my body myself I would’ve guessed it didn’t exist—or rather, if I’d seen my body as an object removed; if I’d knocked my head and woken up with amnesia just beneath a mirror, and looked up and seen my reflection, and hadn’t recognized it as my self, I would’ve taken it for the body of a villain—a villain, or someone to be pitied. Squeezing my arms close to my torso, so they grew thick and fleshy, I tried to remember where I’d seen arms like those—arms not long and brown and slim, but a bit pale, marred here and there with a patch of rough skin, growing a bit thicker as it reached the shoulder. The image did indeed recall others from the movies: I’d seen this arm in the homes of the poor—I’d seen this arm in parking lots of discount stores, or in the doorways of rough, tumble-down shacks on the side of some low-country road, attached to a woman who didn’t trust the police. I’d seen the arm only ever from a distance, never my own but belonging to an ugly obstacle; an arm that blocked my way; the arm was barring the door, was the recipient of some hideous, terrible grief—her daughter, perhaps, had been murdered; but her daughter would have had arms that were long and slim and brown. Only beautiful women got murdered. This offered me no comfort. My body was strange and unkillable.

2

An ox at the door, a kettle of blood. Tell me

about the nail that cleaved your tongue. Tell

me about the creamy world past the glass,

how long you’ve been trapped in the body—

while outside, a street, two dogs,

a funny little song her friend knows.

Greece Day 1

i mean it isn’t actually day 1. i’ve been here a minute. doing ~okay~ on writing consistency but not as well as i want. no one is here any more, the room is mine alone, ha! you goobers and turncoats and fools. some catch up posting of what I’m happy-ish with:

“I lived in my uncle’s house. The showerhead dripped white chalk stains. The lotion smelled like cigarette hands. In the yard, the rusted skeletons of beach chairs, their canvas long since rotted away, rocked from wind.

“Why don’t you like me?” I said into the microphone. “

found poem

close the windows and tape over the glad very well. This way should the break or shatter, god forbid @JamilaHanan

@alasaadim *glass. Then they won't shatter and fly in. This way you may close the windows. Allah ma3kon w ye7mekon inshallah @JamilaHanan

@alasaadim @JamilaHanan this may help a little. But it's what we use to do in Lebanon as well as closing all windows pic.twitter.com/3XDxIdnzTb

@alasaadim @JamilaHanan and doors with plastic because if the chemical bombs Israel would use.

“@alasaadim: #SandStorm & #Decisive_Storm r making our night in #Sanaa terrible. Windows open in fear of explosions & dust fills our lungs.”

This Morning

As I drive into town the driver in front of me runs a stop sign. A pedestrian pulls down his cap. A man comes out of his house to sweep the steps. Ordinariness bright as raspberries.

I turn on the radio. Somebody tells me the day is sunny and warm. A woman laughs

and my daughter steps out of the radio. Grief spreads in my throat like strep. I had forgotten, I was happy, I maybe was humming “You Are My Lucky Star,” a song I may have invented. Sometimes a red geranium, a dog, a stone will carry me away. But not for long. Some memory or another of her catches up with me and stands like an old nun behind a desk, ruler in hand.

by Jo McDougall

Abide

Forgive me if I forget

with the birdsong and the day’s

last glow folding into the hands

of the trees, forgive me the few

syllables of the autumn crickets,

the year’s last firefly winking

like a penny in the shoulder’s weeds,

if I forget the hour, if I forget

the day as the evening star

pours out its whiskey over the gravel

and asphalt I’ve walked

for years alone, if I startle

when you put your hand in mine,

if I wonder how long your light

has taken to reach me here.

--Jake Adam York

2

At Pioneer everyone usually gathered in the little sheltered area on the square poured concrete. The girls sat on logs and stumps dragged someone had dragged over, crossing and uncrossing their knees. The boys smoked cigarettes and sat on the picnic tables, asserting casual dominance with their booted feet on the bench. When the girls arrived, Victoria was still buzzing. She was made higher, too, by the secret they’d found in the divot in the grass, the naked foot cold under the moon and wrecked clouds, the body folded by the great empty road. It made her warm and exhilarated and she wanted to hold onto it for as long as she could. She wanted to kiss every smirking boy on the picnic table—she looked around at their pale cratered faces thinking, you, and you, and you.

fragmentarie

There is salt on my lips, I am thirsty and burnt, but not unhappy. I lie there and watch a whistler high up, riding the hot air, and I imagine it is a seagull and I am in the bottom of a boat, jumping with sea lice. Karen is with me, we’re drinking Cokes and she’s got her fingers laced through mine. I will stay here, I think, I will pull up the anchor and lie in the hull of the boat and let it take me to wherever the centre is. I walk down the corridor of my brain and don’t even look at the doors either side.

Evie Wyld, All The Birds, Singing (via oldtimefriend)

Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space-- that is a rough visual description of childhood.

Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past" from Moments of Being

#virginia woolf #sketch of the past #moments of being #childhood

2

And she liked this, too, the cleaning. When the chemical breath she took started to speed everything up, she loved to take the white cloth, wring it in the clean water, and go about the tables, shining them: like puzzle pieces, she thought. Putting everything in its place. She worked with energy, scrubbing at a gummed-on syrup puddle, and as she pushed the cloth, she admired her lithe, strong arms, her young skin like a caramel chew, her nail beds square and pink. She bent her arm at a right angle as she cleaned so that she could admire the tone of her skinny bicep. She moved from table to table, ticking them off of an invisible but critical list, feeling little gold coins rolling into place. She pictured an enormous glass beaker, like those in the high school science lab, notched with little black marks, and as she cleaned each table, the beaker was filled to the next notch with perfect, sweet, clean water. When she finished the dining area, the beaker would be full. xU

#back up to 1000 words per day #biiiiiiiitch

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