[2]
[3]
Thank you
[4]
unidentified feeling: 1. an organic yet unnamed emotional response or reflex to a stimulus, inexplicable and sometimes aggravating, often characterized by copious hand gestures, a humdrum sign language with parched syllabaries 2. the word-of-the-month cobbled together with block letters on your elementary school’s bulletin board 3. a financial conundrum 4. a forgotten conversation with your hand-sized inner self 5. topical, sinkin’ in, then flyin’ out
[5]
“I think meaning does involve the mind. The brain is a receptor. It’s like a dream machine. It receives impulses and it receives image upon image upon image upon image, but the mind craves meaning. The mind is assembling stuff all the time. It’s what makes the human species pretty interesting.” —Ralph Angel
[6]
Prologue
Another entrance. Too many instructions in life, subtracting into a channel of sloppy doorways, hands to memorize. Another threshold. That word like a metal in your mouth. A metal or a medal. A medal for “jumping too high.” And the work ahead is too dark to see. Another walk with fog for feet, your mother in every doorway behind you, advancing from skins of what has been left behind. Your belly has brought rocks. You’re aware of how your own body abducts you. But don’t worry about how much longer you’ve got. You were always here.
[7]
This feeling is written on the firstborn leaf of a cautious spring and smudged to the roof, is automatic, like cannibalism: animals eating animals simply because they’ve never done it before. A rock on a mountain’s hunchback. A lion called procreation. A cat in a cage, gently obscured but heavy with want, licking itself clean and calm.
[8]
This feeling is cell phone light through a handbag or the pillow between your lips, severed fingernails, carnivoristic burlap, a mystery that tells you don’t come in, don’t bother— catch bounce hang.
[9]
This feeling is the tuning of harps condemned to a prison cell, each hardening note like a rickety kick at the bars, each possible lyric hushed, left to throb in the throat.
[10]
This feeling is pressing the book in two, the end of towns within a town, simultaneously, the birds of prey we hoped would die smeared together as they clamor upward for escape, for fish flying higher than even they imagined— a race of tied feet.
[11]
This feeling is elapsed, quartered, and spiced, hidden in the competitive dishes of a speed-cooking show, beneath the eye-glaze, in the rawness that roosts inside.
[12]
This feeling is as rigged as a dunking booth, a perfectly shot-through hole that plummets to the core, to that mouth-basin of thawed ice deep enough to kick in your head like a beehive, or hornet's nest— something that buzzes to be heard.
[13]
This feeling is honeymoon in our station wagon in an amusement park wave pool, sex shop lingerie balled up in a tinsel-wrapped cell phone box, a classroom’s world map dry-erased with coordinates to our favorite places, curled into itself and spotting with mold, our fingers mimicking pentagrams as we reach for the pull string.
[14]
This feeling is a drop-down box: [pick an ethnicity] [pick an authenticity] [pick a home city] [pick a duplicity—] [who you are and] [who you will be] [pick up a beehive found resting near the sea] [fallen from the branch of a hollowed-out tree] [the thrum of emptiness, of vacation, of free] [tear it open like fire, like humming—the dead queen bee.]
[15]
This feeling is head spun into cotton candy conspiracies, five years’ thick neck hanging limp on an old-fashioned noose, shoes plummeting from a tree grown thousands of days old.
[16]
This feeling is A spell of eyes Breaking into Cigarette withdrawals, The pocket of your grandmother’s blue jean button-down shirt Smiling with pinstriped coffee stirrers, Promised replacements for Rotting the next high, For soothing the old work between her fingers.
[17]
This feeling is freakshow heatstroke parallel laurel wilted indents unfalling from the golden string of a necklace you wear every day in reminder— of what? —of something I’ll never know.
[18]
This feeling is throat cleared sharp, dissected by the fingertips of ghost teeth, dewdrops parting from formaldehyde and bone, rising in perfect spheres, how we've torn ourselves apart too much this time, how we reject the atmosphere and earth.
[19]
This feeling is Wolf in tuxedo tight tongue-over-teeth libido asylum-white mutter right words turning in, the taking off beasting
[20]
This feeling is rain up from desks pitched outside an abandoned schoolyard, sharpening, crystallizing, a reverse flipbook of jewels ejected from a humid glass, the way we unfurl to one another, everything in slow motion— eventually reaching itself.
[21]
This feeling is cheeks full of acid rain, your voice being carried by pigeons extinct from the weight, the recipient, hand over hand in a glass panic room, dead from the wait.
[22]
This feeling is feather-bound, perched on a smudged telephone wire with a rolled-up note portraying the last tattler on a playground, throat slit, buried beneath the pebbles, and you, taking a hint, pulling out limbs like leaf stems.
[23]
This feeling is all of your missing teeth aching to sing.
[24]
This feeling is Magical Girl complex, sketching costume ideas into a notebook buried in your underwear drawer like a time capsule waiting to be opened, when you finally have the time to thrift shop for worn Cosplay pieces so your bedroom mirror can applaud how good you would have looked at a convention rather than staying at home, muttering the perfect cosmic names for attack strategies as you cook dinner for your children.
[25]
This feeling is weeds crowning beneath a streetlamp, seeping in metal, fed umbilically, raised on artificiality, growing arms at night.
[26]
This feeling is us sitting in the treehouse of that haunted house's backyard, carving annotations in the floorboards softly like the bark of the trees we've scraped our names into, each one pressing two branches to their lips and crossing two behind their backs.
[27]
This feeling is body stewed, a cooked disentanglement— insides unwrapped from their clear elastic, eyes rolling under welldone carrot slices, tongue crawling over celery flavorfully, meat falling apart to the pinch, cannibalistically orgasmic, mouth calling back for heart from the cauldron heat.
[28]
This feeling is a dark wood howling religion, the hallelujah in a heartbreak, shaven palm stamped to foreheads and creeping to the knees, a single raindrop like a hymn caught in the loose hem of your throat, hair braided down to perfect circles turned into four-way stops— intersections to avoid.
[29]
This feeling is using pages of the Bible to roll blunts behind a gas station where Icees are periodically 99 cents and the cashier removes her wedding ring for purposes I wonder about before I'm passed a Psalm and told to kiss an apostle’s writing hand.
[30]
This feeling is the skeletal remains of the only mansion in our town's slums, a single fractal of sunlight from the toothless ceiling bleeding awake the dust on a pastel couch sunken into the center of the grand den. you, watching as a bullet that took blood into its trajectory frees itself from the fireplace hearth, and I, silly enough to wait with you until night so we could play shadow puppets like it was our sole talent, strange enough to say “we'll be all right, alright?�
[31]
This feeling is an aimless compliment, vocal chords trembling into a gift-wrapped box, a corner of yourself reverted to fire— how the act of living sometimes takes a break, rests between your vertebrae.
[32]
End of Part 1
[33]
Intermission Had enough? You’re on a road. There’s a light. Take a breather. Break your neck. No, turn around. Usually, in this damp glitter, we learn to cut the spoiled limbs from our bodies. Instead, you’ve learned how to win charades with the lights off. The sky-glow from under the next doorway tells you shadows have a secret handshake, but yours is too pedantic for slang, yours is already chewing on a cold, metal slab. A voice says, “I am everything you want and can’t have,” and then, another light. Brush your hair to the side with something else’s forearm. Come with me vague ambition, come with me into a cloud of stone.
[34]
“We can come to understanding n a cognitive, rational, linear way, and we can come to an understanding in an ineffable, permanently mysterious way. We understand things in our minds—we understand thing in our hearts. There are times when I understand things in my knees. And I trust all those layers and kinds of understanding, it seems to me.” —Ralph Angel
[35]
This feeling is every word that means one thing but then rhymes with another—apothecary, epistolary—swiping hotel key cards into rooms without flooring, flower bulbs malignant beneath makeshift soil. You try & try to dig but your hands are spoon-side mirrors carving you back in and the mask seeping into the skin of your throat is happy about it, knows that the plaster replica of your head is the only way to pry yourself from it, that your name is still somehow Carly-Beth, Carly-Beth. It keeps its jealousy pursed between its new, flesh-like lips, thinking of a name it has always wanted.
[36]
This feeling is ivy engorged with birds’ nests, the plant that breaks its neck to reach for light, the only panel in the sky that stutters static, something to let you know you’ve been sneaking around in your own skin.
[37]
This feeling is a league of boats before they hit the league— sailing or sailing as they prefer— a crew in a captain caught in an eyeglass held some distance away, some longitude and/or latitude where a man sends the flaming-arrow vulture from his crooked arm, a beacon, a becoming, a search warrant and a seizure, honing while homing. It will find a lodge in the queen’s forehead, spreading her fire. One day you’ll find out why it’s called a body of water.
[38]
This feeling is the witch at the end of the bottomless well, stomach full of coins, every quarter a promise ring, every wish a new punch line.
[39]
This feeling is see-through, flame disguising flame, snaking in a stream frozen with hairline fractures, the stillness and pulse beneath— chilled— silence and cold like the depth of a sky’s miscarriage, trees stitching scarves with their thin and arthritic branch tips.
[40]
This feeling is a picket-fence field of vision, summer shin splint into the afterlife, wheels upon wheeling on weeds quick-burst despite the lawn poison, ravenous for more midnight television-cobalt glow and game show boomerangs—the kind you wake up to and let crawl back into bed when they leave for the bathroom.
[41]
This feeling is water veins swelling electric, splashed against the concrete ceiling of a bridge where we oscillate our bodies, maybe to catch our lifelines’ shadows in a hand puppet reenactment of our future lives, or maybe to swallow the holier-than-thou exaggeration of light.
[42]
This feeling is daylight lightning like a wink of fool's silver along the clouds, responding to want ads on our billboard-foreheads in prank calls and bags of shit.
[43]
This feeling is eating and eating. Sorghum-enamel and kite-like reflexes, torn in the wind’s teeth. Bite down, & restore, chewing soft in gums spacious like empty comets. I’m sitting in a belvedere, watching my house on fire.
[44]
This feeling is one-hit wonder, a prosthetic fist rotating on a stripped screw jamming through your cheeks and leaving you toothless, the way silence sits in your replacement gums.
[45]
This feeling is always in the morning, trying to delicately fingerpaint my future in a cave of bears— and then the sneeze.
[46]
This feeling is a cancan with bloody stockings, a chorus singing ghost stories in a cheery, tidal multitude of voices, the glissando wavering as they reach the reveal of the poltergeist, of the man with a hook.
[47]
This feeling is another missionary trip to the center of the earth, Baby on Board! hedonistic awareness, clicking tongues giving way to a backwards butterfly effect: I felt the tornado in my palms.
[48]
This feeling is inebriated fan mail, a portrait in which I’m flipping off the painter, four score and seven beers ago when I buried the stillborn of my humility and discovered the chopstick secret to living two seconds longer than everyone else.
[49]
This feeling is another picture of the fucking sky, one that stagnates repressed in your phone’s memory until discovered during that accidental yearly sync, where it’s lost its aurora-burst inspiration, clouds shape-shifted into something unrecognizable, the blind luster of a “could-be” creed suckled and stricken with amnesia, cradled in the lost and found shoe closet in your head.
[50]
This feeling is fumbled apology unzipped from the lips, standing on a bridge and watching as screams of light plow through crying waves of a somnambulate Jesus who walked underwater and didn’t come back up, tridents lowered in congress, in respect for the drowned, God telling me it’s OK to smile.
[51]
This feeling is mortar and pestle to a mountaintop looming from the back of your poached skull— grinding intuition.
[52]
This feeling is lampshade entertainment and the stain together in
worry showers
sedated just beneath the shallow
of lips
nosebleeds crippled
five-foot-five and found
end of the pool
in a cruel dusk.
Here, you reflect the surface choose from a mirrored wall of masks lined
according to number and origin,
orthography,
to skates and spikes,
somersaulting, to the heart of your mouth.
to lexicology and
to mountains
[53]
This feeling is a rickety bridge to that imaginary island you dreamed of pooling in your hands, that wide shot of erupted ocean, an unglued pearl of nonfiction and a cinematic journey, life or death in provisional cans stitched to your hip, eager, interested in an oasis of things: the onetwothree snap of a rose stem, the number of commas in an arpeggio, how to fight against Hell’s axes beneath your pillow, biting a spark for this canal of paradise.
[54]
This feeling is a highway comprised of plane parts, wings like the thin marrow of a mammoth's tusk constrained to bare-backed semis, a small and disjointed parade of our modernity diving into asphalt tarred and black as a new-ish hell, returning to prehistoricism.
[55]
This feeling is bloated days stretched across fingers counting a heatstroke circuit, Time as another mouth to feed, & Love like a restaurant punch card: the thrill of free with conditions.
[56]
This feeling is a bird talking to himself about humanity and rubber bands before he crashes into a building made of pure glass, drops like a baseball into a boy's open hands, glittering into the perfect broken gift, father’s front lawn dreamscape & promised ultimatums.
[57]
This feeling is gag reflex initiation in the dormitory showers, a fist stranded by surprise, contact lenses buoyant on fingertips like water orbs on a spider web— how suspension sometimes comes in the night like a changeling, waits for you to wake up.
[58]
This feeling is weightless— and then —even more weightless a body plugged up with screeching amplitudes of pressure, aluminum foil crushed into a tiny fist, hard but light as air.
[59]
This feeling is a supernova spreading its wings overhead, watery eyes rubbed thin with splintered forefingers, the day a gentle pinch as sharp as an arrowhead, just enough to draw blood from your sweet hip delicatessen, exhaustion and fatigue scrambled like eggs on the sidewalk outside of the elementary school that spirals into a storm where we fold paper cranes as third graders, raising our hands absently to make ourselves known.
[60]
Epilogue Sweet earth. Sweet nothing. Sweet everything. Sweet heart in a hull in a nutshell falling from a tree. Sweet we should hit the ground soon. Sweet mercy, if you believe in that. Sweet abduction, even if you don’t believe in that. You’re driving on the road again, does it matter that you’re waiting for that hole in your brain to preach to you, to confess its everything? I don’t think it matters. Does it matter that it’s not over yet? No. In a world that we’re still finding names for, how are we not the aliens? to be continued…
[61]
Logan Ellis is a claymation phenomenon, a helter-skelter of something or other. His work has been published on winningwriters.com and in The Brasilia Review, Eleven Eleven, A Literation and a few other small literary magazines. He is currently attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, working on his BFA while working as co-poetry editor on his campus's literary magazine. He loves kittens, but not enough to marry them.