MC HYLAND RESIDENTIAL AS In
BLUE HOUR PRESS 1709 8TH ST TUSCALOOSA AL 35401 http://bluehourpress.blogspot.com/ bluehourpress@gmail.com Copyright Š 2009 MC Hyland. All rights reserved.
(absent plural)
cipher. cipher. let time slip through this isolation, as nation so self. as self, so submarine & therefore undering. therefore reticent & glow.
RESIDENTIAL AS IN
incremental. as in built. as in tires & clay, windshield, straw. as in gunmetal sky, tornado, heat. as in dogtrot. inverted roof, wings & gripped down in soil. as in here is the church made of two hands. opened. crowd.
a house is a house only in isolation. an interior space. if skin is other than skin. if bones form a frame. repeat this motion, homing. repeat this sound. buildings made of breath. vibration. a refrigerator coos inside your stomach. you are particle. molding.
house of severed heads house of lunar aureole house of diffidence house of underwater luminosity house of detractors house of distraction house of hollow chambers
living funny in rented rooms. television all night & abandoned text of the front door. says enter. syntactic & wooden. says let all the bats out into nightliness. let all the raccoons of the neighborhood stand on hind feet sniffing for you on the air.
refrigerator which sounds like a bird trapped in the house haunted by bees. this is not the movie we thought we’d be making.
residential as in residue, as in provident. as in body at red dawn. gasflame massed. crouched below the iron pot.
how the body responds to this homing & light. as though solemnity. as though a hand. as sunrise deferred, a lateness of season.
a house is a house only as past expands to fill its rooms. the new architecture like the old architecture. about loss. no sooner built than declining, rain in the eaves. abandoned architecture of intention. abandoned architecture of failure to speak.
wanting to smell your hair, a thing which has come from you & is already dead. report what the television says to the windows. report their reply to potted basil on the sill. leave a map in every room exactly the size & shape of that room.
dialectic: cleanliness & godliness, scrubbed linoleum & silence between walls. if hopefulness is next to waywardness. if the popular front of the house opens to reveal jeweled miniatures, thumping floorboards of upstairs strangeness. brass chandeliers grown black with tarnish.
house of arterial blockage house of forgotten siblings house of impatience house of undeniability house of sleeping dogs house of the improbable
as in excrescence. for every body a body again. food shelter water & a window through which breezes might pass. look at this skin. how it ages. how it wears. my room has got two windows / but the sunlight never comes through
if reticent, then provident if repentant, then ascend if exhaustion, then lightning if therefore, then breathe if hostage, then Texas if pharmaceutical, then substitute if human, then undering if abject, then bells
what pipes & warmth moving from floor to floor. what winter. a bevy of forgotten beneath snow obscured. teeth vulnerable, slow disintegration under coats of candy.
this is not the movie we thought would make us, low comedy salving the winter. write me when you get to Texas, open my body into something new. write me when you get to Texas to say that the house is growing larger. countryside shifting in reference.
living room to kitchen, kitchen to living room. living demands room, rooms, & breath to fill them. noun, noun. shoes on the floor.
the body’s turning in on itself. body left without food. ragged left, ragged remnant. these stanzas. little rooms.
in this house of my dead & the dead they carry with them. they are burying the letters by the live oak. they are calling indecipherable words into all the dusks of summer. murderous summer in the split small towns. murderous soil turned suddenly walls.
Scale 1:1; the bookcase is a precipice best scaled by night; the front door groans and opens in the upstairs closet of your childhood home.The closet with the circular window. Read right for up; so climb the narrow stairs. Light bulb swings & shadows lurch, leer.
house of malingering house of discontinued correspondence house of wanderlust house of foxed leaves
& then you. how northward you are. how glowing. how snowed.
so gripped by unnameable on hands & knees dusting baseboards with paper towels. so neglect the body. remove the house from itself. your hand here framed in the doorway at dusk. the milk of memory sours.
& so the house creaks & settles. a thing which comes from you & is already dead. all your dead laid end-to-end in the hallway. eyes to ceiling. sing.
This book was designed by Justin Runge for Blue Hour Press, printed digitally and distributed online. The titles were set in Helvetica Neue, a 1983 reworking of the renowned Swiss typeface designed by Max Miedinger in 1957, and the textblocks were set in Perpetua, designed by British sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill in 1929.