St. Francis’ Green Hands + St. Therese’s Yellow Hands -- (A Chapbook / Zine) --- Joshua Klemens Wiśniewski –
1
Yellow is the Colour of The Saints, and The Soles of my Feet Honeycomb makes a lot of sense to me. Dripping glow of it all makes a lot of sense to me. Yellow is the colour of God. Yellow is the colour of the haze. I think I can see it in everything there is. I can see it in the bluest of people’s eyes. Yellow doesn’t make sense. People tend to be on the fence about the colour yellow. I like to think that deep in my wheezing and beating chest that I have yellow striped patterned organs. Yellow is the colour of rotting. Yellow is the colour of light. Yellow is the colour of birds. Yellow is the brightest / loudest colour that you can maintain propriety in. Yellow makes you want to laugh. Yellow is the colour of the halo I purchased on the Internet last week, and that is slowly divining its way to me. Yellow. What a ridiculous fucking colour.
Violin Girl Violin Girl smiles with food in her mouth where else would her teeth and her dessert go? She asks the waiter for more foam in her coffee. She thinks about how in junior high she wanted to marry him (Cello) and have Viola babies. His hands shake the table when the cup is set down. Violin Girl’s hands ache.
An Equation Begins. Two people. When the time comes and continues to come you may like her or you may not like her. Her voice will provide the mirroring of all other voices; after all, she was made from sand as those before her. All other sounds will drain back to her, her noise makes noise from the same surfaces as other sounds do. You will know her. Fear her. You will know her. Her biggest concerns? Death, the universe, and the stomachs of birds. She will cradle you against 2
all of this. She will coo to you what it is that will eat away at you every night, constantly gnawing at your bones. She knows, too, how you will die - and us too, the flock - she knows how she herself was subtracted from the very same equation, (divide by six million, add the number of lost things there are on earth, then carry the one) and she knows this for sure: in death there is one in birth there are two, and in life this isn’t half of it even, for beings.
A Big Yellow Flying Monster There might always be a yellow scaliness growing in my chest, but I’ll never be sure it it’s after my heart this time or not. This time, when I feel it, I am outside under the pillars entering China Town, and I feel like the world suddenly makes the sky a little denser. In this life, I am a God, wandering his earth. But all idols have their foes. Mine is a bird that chirps somewhere in my body. I don’t know where she chirps or why. She beats her wings against my throat and makes me open my mouth at misfortunate times. I told Jasmine that it was the music blaring that made my stomach hurt. Which made think of those photos where I told everyone that I think I look like a bird, from graduation. But now I stop, and the little winged creature claws at me, and I must take flight. I fly through the dark to my home. I know now It wasn’t my chest making it feel smaller. Even the taxis looked golden from above. 3
I rested in among the straw coloured light. She has burrowed herself, now quiet. Yellow is my favourite colour.
One In The Morning The hour from body to brain. The hour from top to bottom. He thunders from the door in the middle of the night - nothing else matters in this moment He’s wearing sweatpants and crocs. He thinks he needs a haircut, but he also wants to grow it long’ly and unshapely and wildly. He’s lost the key to his liquor cabinet, but he’s still sobering up. A morning drink of a vodka dew drop. There’s been too much sunshine, too many arguments. But not much matters after the stroke of the second hour - it’s too late to call anyone, too early to write. What else is there to do? Jus sit and wait. Or to take your turtle shell elsewhere. To Smile. To stand under the street lamps, look at the lights that are still coming from the inside of the dead-for-the-day’s houses - are they awake, or are they afraid of the dark? He puts on his cat ring, and he is Tybalt the Prince. A bit of moonlight perched in his mouth resting between his teeth. His claws and his paws wrapped around his sword and his pistol, fangs waiting to spit and sing. It is warm, but not hot. His jacket is open, waiting for anyone to run around the corner, to bring a billion flashing lights spinning from their head and to shoot them straight in his chest, and so to expire into night light and dust, from which he was begotten. The snowy banks would light up from the small firework, their hands in a single 4
direction, pointing back to old home Strathcona. And then it’s a light hearted step back to bed back to life back to whichever pole of sanity the earth will rest on that next day. And then it’s legs over legs and he jumps into the yard creeps back into the house, as he steps on a few ants in ritual formation. Good, he thinks, for he’s saved them from the horror of four in the morning. The hour when hexes and curses begin to work, when husbands and wives get on trains again and derail of the tallest cliffs of the mind. But he laughs to himself and thinks of pulling the stars down, sticking them in his palms, and waiting until sunset of next to go out again, to the pre-witching hours, to his deathly darkly winter kingdom, to the garden with sixty frozen flowers. To the very flux of all hours.
The Woodpile I don’t know why people like to make art about smoking. But I sit on a wooden desk the drawers have been pulled out and I am feeling a little empty in the chest and in other hollow parts of my body. around me, wind is blowing like it’s still winter - snow everywhere, the sound of nothing, and nothingness. No grassy hairs to comb through anymore, nothing to pretend that I am the vein in a tree branch or a pound of energy running through a cord of wood, cut from it’s stalk from the fork it takes when it reaches for the sky. I’m smoking my last two cigarettes and I want to drop them and let them set the whole woodpile into flame, and I think the best art comes from the thought of death. 5
Every Shadow They sat, both of them, across from each other, at her kitchen table. The moon was too bright, so they hung a long length of cheese cloth across the window. They avoided each other’s golden eyes. Hollow, money eyes. He was scrunched up into himself, knees burrowed deep into his throat, marbling his chin, the loose pants with bright stars sewn into them yellowed his cheeks, and he stared somewhere, his hands were nowhere, his lips stuck together by a cigarette, “maybe” he thinks, then looks at her. Her skin is puzzled together like pieces of stars, huddled across the night sky, if she spoke, they would spit off of her tongue. They would lay on the floor, the counter, the rug, faintly colouring the tile, the fishbowl, a thousand colours of the shifting moon in their small room. he says, “Colours.” she says, “I’m hungry.” he says, “Me too.” she says, “Does God exist?” Outside, behind the drapes the whole world is turning. The earth uproots its trees and blades of grass, it’s too much for us, clutching our kitchen knives in our bedroom gowns. Inside his and her heads, patterns and melodies cling on the folds of their brain. Vines spit their tongues out of their ears, the course of history tries to burst its way out. Its too much, they confess. She is panicked, he is frightened. She puts out her cigarette, walks to the window, leaving footprints in the white and pink tile, and she undrapes the cloth from the window, and they both dissolve into the walls. The moon invades the kitchen. It sits at the kitchen table. Samhain (Sav-ayn) I cannot speak for my year, for I'm not yet sure I understand it's language. 6
Children tell me that I could find my way back home if I had bought a compass. I tell them, but I don’t, so we must continue on just the same. I asked for a new brain at the brain store this morning, and all they had was a pumpkin. I walked until I reached a bridge and then I grew the wings that I had always wanted and flew off of the bridge into the nighttime. Yule Banishment is hard ghosts like to linger and they find ways to knot their rags around many things, like bedposts and elbows. I may be solid meat but every thought I've ever had about myself has never even taken form. And it's cold and blue outside once blue was my favourite colour. and in the burning of the log even in smoke - there are a billion beautiful colours, and blue is even one of them, even long after I don’t think of it anymore.
you can write to make it dissipate i dont write like that anymore / i don't evangelise anymore not to make / blood spill out through the page / to shroud peoples eyes / and tell them which way to step / rather than see which way to step / no room for love on my page / to pray that love comes to me / no more spells / i do not write like that anymore / i write to wonder / I write to myself / the dumbfounded boy / lost and confused / and im worried your art is better than mine // 7
PAIN IS A HUMAN COPING MECHANISM The doctor came stuck his knife inside my brain spoke to him in song and rhyme he cut a hole right through my head I laughed so loud but still yet not dead and then he said take time to feel take time to heal hope to address the murderous stress the doctor pushed me to the side he grabbed my lobes and let them slide right down onto the kitchen floor medulla long and thalamus sore. He spoke once more “you’re sick” I stabbed him, that fucking dick. How dare he lie. Fuck that doctor. We’re all gonna die. Moonettes If I were French, I think, I would probably ponder the moon more often. I would probably think that calling the freckles 8
on your cheeks glow-bugs, and comparing them to the stars that cradle in the sky boring (since we’ve heard it all before). Sometimes, I wish, I could run my fingers in your hair and shake out the stardust, just to see you beam.
Tchaikovsky Ten flower petals on a rose flower tell me a joke, and, I’m so rude and I did not even laugh, because I always forget that my flowers can talk! It’s really weird to me, because aren’t flowers supposed to photosynthesise or some shit? I cut them up, and blend them in my blender and pour them into my garden. They talked to much, and I needed more sleep.
Witch English is the witchiest language. No other spits as she, or flicks their gums and cackles as she, with all the indigence of thousands of years and ears and tongues before her. English makes those words sound like a roll of plush velveteen has been lit on fire those hundreds of them, rising limply from the lakes, and the oceans after making shallow of their graves they cursed the Emerald Isle with this - the last of the horrors leaving their lips and their tattered teeth in bubbles. They hexed her wholly, from Cardiff to Orkney, with a dark mass of macabre and marrow. Those words 9
they spit, the would land on their black gowns and dark leather boots to make a starry night from the wet droplets. Standing on the grey shores of New England, thinking of the colour of blue to greet them in their after-breaths, with all the pride of being cleansed by fire, by the chance to be branded at the stake as a heretic - that dark and golden word, the way it doesn’t even touch your lips, and their ashes turned silver by night over the lull and pull of the ocean, wafting them over to the cloudy skies of London. No other formation of letters ever will quite sound the same as when you can look at a woman a girl - with her hair wild with contempt, broken bits of a crucifix under her nails, and a smile that could swallow the whole world, and with a spark of fear and delight, slyly, slitheringly, just say witch.
Święty Mięty The saints smoke menthols but I don’t like the taste of mint. It’s too sharp, the peppery taste on my tongue, it bores me. I prefer the softness of light and the clearness of the taste of water, than that of the sharpness of mint. I lay a leaf in my mouth, and I chew and chew. 10
Taste becomes you, and you are brought to your knees and you wish that you had never laid a finger on anything you have ever laid eyes on before.
11