ESC #1

CONTENTS Markmaking 1 Contents Ladder to the Moon Film Grain Kitchen Sink Markmaking 2 Fruity Cartoons Blank in the Fills Cartoonery Markmaking Olio Contact us!

1 2 4–5 6 7 8 9 10 –11 12 13 14 15

Intricate suspension.

A square womb ridged – ceramic teeth refract my hands.

80° amniotic fluid.

The ceiling is an eye of glass, slashed by a ladder that lists, forgotten, on the roof.

A century of turning.

I seep into numbers into nameless shapes into creeping tongues that flicker into the suck of some undreamt of event horizon.

A sleight-of-hand transubstant iation.

The pupil of the eye is the moon.

The slow fade. The last of vision is starstopped alignment.

Beets like bloody fists

Beets like silk livers

Beets like still hearts

It was wrong of me to consider you a person at all. You are, if anything, a solar flare, a dissolvable planet beyond the blink of science’s eye, a tumbler full of hornets. Your movements in the kitchen repeatedly sever my bundles of nerves.

I stay away; my restraint becomes the hand that touches you. You are chopping vegetables at the kitchen sink. I want to slide in between your hand and the cutting board, so your momentum might be the force that multiplies me into numbers.

Then you promised you wouldn’t leave, I’d say, and I’d say, and me, and me.

This is the light we have lost, a particular shade of saffron like a baking cake.

The thing about darkness is the way it spills your boundaries outside the fixture of your shape, offering you new and difficult roads to navigate, but your silence has a darkness all of its own. Caved in on yourself you become negative space. If I pressed my mouth to the lip of you I would be somersaulted forward and inward and compressed into a new strange form. “I’m going out,” you say.

I say, “You’re not.”

I have seen you burn men down like good dry kindling. I have been the only one in the room with you and felt the weight of your past selves all breathing over my shoulder. Alone, I have counted your coy vices and found them manifold. To dissect the human heart is an act of surrender, and I would surrender to you, dissipate into you, red as the red juice clasped now between your hands.

“What are you doing?” I ask, you microscope, telescope, view with one eye closed. You say, “Cooking beets.”

1.1 Pear Pressure.

1.1 Stoned Fruit.

Even with the cello music, she could not bear to look at the photographs of polio victims that were stickytaped onto the walls of her recovery room. The space was dark, artificially lit, the windows boarded over. It was thought by some that sunlight would hasten her transformation.

She closed her eyes, ignoring the pump and grind of the machine that encased her, straining to divert all of her attention to the sound of the music that was drifting up from downstairs. Downstairs, where the living were, the windows would be open onto the lawn, and there would be conversation, the clack of teacups, badminton perhaps. Maybe she was imagining the badminton part. She couldn’t quite remember what the thing [shuttlecock?] looked like anyway.

She opened her eyes, turning them to the ceiling, her gaze instantly skittering away from the poster of a child with legs deformed into a bird’s.

She concentrated on a corner of the room, the crush of the machine filling her mind now, her lungs opening and closing. Like shells.

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