Sr3

from Disorder -­‐ Erin Costello

To watch the virus opening: collage of syrah gore, connected flowers or steak knives.

To walk is to host now.

A1C I was never that tired, but she slept on the way to the grocery store, in the backseat, near the car seat. It was raining through her. In 1990 diabetes was rare, it had been treated with pig insulin.

Mary practiced injections, or being stared at, on a doll. Our bio-hazard bathrooms, her arms rubbed with alcohol, syringes and her first boyfriend.

A low is faster. I read somewhere that dogs can smell a high blood sugar, or a low one.

I never saw the sugar veins but I know their speed. Mary was ten years old in a hospital playing game boy. Gray game boy. The sound-an easy score. So many numbers to quantify blood, I saw that blood. Small drops from her finger on a cotton ball. Mary looked yellow in her school picture, the diabetic hospital blanket, fluorescence of the hallway. One cure is cake frosting massaged down the child’s throat.

Promise, the half and half is white replicate the flesh, in the manner of short time prayer in imminent worry.

Trust Walk What he didn’t see was the lattice walls, a trellis town of pie crusts. Uneven pavement dangers. The cars got closer, he got closer, estimating steps from memory, I was spun around, stopped when I thought there was a sign. There was no sign. Trust couldn’t stop my head from looking down.

My hands hot in my pockets, night and snow on my wrists. Sometimes I felt his arm around my waist. I see, I communicate. I see, I communicate. All words gone except see, trellis, lattice, see.

His calligraphy of brain waves the sconce, the trough, the wall diagramming burden - success amnesia like wicker.

Auto-Immune Mist, ragged and sticking to straw -through it companions came or they were voices women or grass up as buoys are up.

Organize Eat no meat, no medicine shake bacteria pills, patterns of decision wounded, wounded wood.

I sign as my name as donor I, a small pink circle that kidney.

An emergency emerges a black marker for paint.

It says lift this bar, inject.

Exit, two sticks crossing.

How Hope Works Boot heel to the ground I combine with it separate it - the empty lines - form the dullness I coil a scarf to keep off the cold mixing and straining the weather.

Boot toe to the ground spin it left right left.

-

Two boys put money in a meter, no space opens up.

from Suites for I Don’t

Need Everything -­‐ Tim Roberts

I know what the unresolved question is. It’s television. I don’t know why I sit

there at the end of the day. It’s not what I want to do. I want to be on the phone.

I don’t want to eat ice cream. I want to be reading a new novel. I’ll try these

other things. I don’t want to fall asleep. We have to think about where we are

when we watch television. We have to think about where we are not. We’re not

outside, we’re inside, in the house. You’re in the house sitting on the couch. The couch is soft and you eat your ice cream. They were not wrong when they said

that truth is contained in the everyday. We feel something going on there. It has

already been said that television makes you feel like you’re not creating anything.

It inures you to passivity. One of the reasons I like my job is that it keeps me

under its thumb. It forces my every thought into the form of the thought of an

automaton. This is crucial because it’s where the truth is. If I can feel automated then I know I’m as close to the contemporary as possible. The idea is not at all the loss of self, but the retention of self at a very low level, where life is

continuously inflected by a background struggle to live, to be more. For a very long time it has been important to think about the sensation of being

demoralized. This is the bread and butter. This is the love of cliché. This is the love of love. This is the neo-Marxist act. We tumble down. What is language

doing here? We are travelling into the why. The terror is there. The beauty is there. One cannot withstand it. Imaged there. Drawn there.

“They told me to.” You start here. You meaning you the you of you when it gets down to it it’s only you the it is you you the it it’s not much difference it’s no

difference there you are again you have only you where else will you go but to

you to speak to you to console you to be with you there’s nobody else it makes

no sense we have to stay home again can’t go out you and you no need even for the “and” just say you you you you.

Why don’t you say it again why don’t you come back to this country, the plains

going on endlessly, which will be the case until you pass away and then you can’t see anything and then you are the person who lives there, collecting fire wood, mowing, living in this manner I think it’s the station of the cross you’ve been

presented with why not trace its contours a little more thoroughly I never read the story then it was thrown at me.

The nerves you’ve accessed are barbaric, the topic of these nerves is the mother lode. It is bottomless, as they say, and leads to new worlds. Is it true that prose

will never have anything to say to us? It says all the penalties you could wish, you in your apartment wishing for penalties, lessening them in your drink but calling them back out as soon as you can. If we make these emotional paradoxes, these

emotional cruxes, our subject. If we say yes this is the thing that must remain the invisible.

Now is the point at which we say why would the self be problematic? If I make

your nervousness at the reading the issue, the drink you took to cover it, to shield yourself you from the thing that is the thing you wanted all along to give to us. I get myself to a nunnery somehow. I double over with cancer. If I dwell in there

who am I to dwell? I can ask this question at the same time. The world begins to stop. The subject line opens up again and again. I bristle and fall and make myself a funeral. The true oppositional subject.

Now is the point at which we question the questioning of self. Now we live with

our own problems. Now is the freedom time because we know humanity will not destroy itself. Now is the time to read and to be in the bath with ancients. Here is how I interpret World War II. I can do the whole thing this way.

Each day. Echo. Echo. I think. Each day. To the detriment of, I grow.

This rate. Loud the consortium. Am I ever the incumbent? Am I alone?

Now we have to imagine that we are not treated to the reigns, last, last.

I don’t need to make a judgment! That’s what it meant to be in this room.

I don’t need to be right, not everywhere. I have freed the details. Not now.

Faced with echo in the exploded canyon of Hoover Dam. Documentary.

This one fast diversion. Make it faster my man. Make it what it is.

The largest and most noticeable moments. The reason.

They have reason. When they are happening. Now and then. My father was not there yet I see him in the faces of the white men.

Sitting at a ramshackle desk in an office park. There was a metaphysical

presence counting each breath. One, two, and then it counted mine.

I knew it counted mine, as the water bubbled from heat.

The shocking thirst. The rumor is that trucks drove into the tunnels.

Echo. The rumor is that trucks drove into the tunnels. The Colorado was tamed. Los Angeles was fed. Fed! No less. Schools

went up everywhere. You could see kids running out of school.

I fell asleep but only for a few minutes. I was on the couch and it was not as comfortable as I had wanted. Wave of water in season when farmers ask if they can go back to when

they themselves hedged against destruction from the river.

Can we go back? These are smaller days of planning.

Now populations flow, such is this leaf here, caught up, making its way to the side, springing up awake, but

other than instinctually knowing an eddy not knowing or needing to know the ecosystem, the ecosystem, the star chart I think you were saying.

You must come back to the nervousness but you’re barred from it. Things will

happen, things will come and go. Now on the ocean the glimmer is twain. This is what we assent to. This is logic. This is how what we don’t like points us to

different resources, the ocean of the unexpected. You yourself could have been a city. One after another of us is enamored of one thing after another. Here is why it must be true, why you must have done what you’re inclined to link to.

The very notion of a link. Why can’t you simply say it to yourself? Why can’t

you be just this one person for once? We were watching Gone With the Wind and the aesthetic seemed to take on its own life, a life of its own. Yes we were

generative but the outcome walked around seeding itself. No Tomaz there are

many ways of unthinking. Now we have the bedroom set up and now the cold is anywhere but here. For instance, I never said anything in this space.

My group was one that had time to absorb the handful of time-honored lessons, lessons artists left for us in the rush to invent compassion. The century is full of work being produced, of people connecting to the outer world. The rush of the century is homelike and no one wanted to leave. Those who did leave were

talking about the war that was on, in service of “w” “a” “r” and the gossamer of the thinking set. Every group in the industrial largess was a sponsor of an argument.

Partisans would continue to go all or nothing. This perastroika was situated in every singleness. Even when you were a child you could sit at the dining room

table and wish for pasta with cheese. When it came was yesterday and they went ahead with inventions, they clothed themselves without any prediction. Now it’s sooth and now it’s externalized. How are you going to look right and left?

Nothing is nature but covers emerging from other covers and the “should have been” as it concretizes and forgets.

It is this place, plastic banners declare, no thing left unsophisticated. Why are we staring down at our own feet? Look at these night reverberations. Now look away. Now cease to invent, now put your bloody hand into a pillbox, a

shapelessness that looks like a parachute in the writing body. Arriving at your

destination, that’s where meaning will convert what you brought with you into

something of its own. Put down the bags, as the therapist says, and wander onto the carpet.

Poems -­‐ Jennifer Dick

Magnets and Brain Cells

Dickinson writes in the off-moments: “She is careful.”

We skirt the unpleasant: “Coffee, or diner breakfasts?” I ask, “Anything else?”

(shored up galleries on long shards of who I house, bereaved)

“It was just beautiful!”—Baudry stated—“Getting more complicated as it was not binding.”

Catches the shower.

Plants to stave life.

She seems believed.

For five years the whole story consistent.

Neurotransmitters.

Then things started from another laboratory,

she cared counters, white sofa names glued together laughing, going for sweet never-say-dried in the arroyo walking side by side.

That fact.

There were no longer advances in neurological impossible-to-see firsthand.

“After all,” a voice emanated from the darkened back room, “shows that molecules latched lightly are put in various cells.”

He approaches:

A certain calpain:

To form anew.

“A godsend, we have found the indigenous rhythm of the agonist.” (Baudry, again.)

A molecule, an antagonist, gated.

The arrival channels believed to measure binding.

Of course, the problems were all a supposed person.

“A blue with rainwater run-off to attentively round each other.”

I often head out.

Smatter,

her boney publication Lynch encountered.

The theory still came.

What they took to be a preferred not-there.

One evening she would sleep in, I brought her off, tumbled over in clipped tongues.

Broke the methodology for measuring the residue, consistent with increased receptors.

If repeatedly zapped he comes

in pond wave patterns.

Linked, suggestive—can be exciting enough.

The fact emanates from pasts I’d collaged. Scattered. Frail. Always a bit finicky striding down afternoons with a hiccup. Gazing clattered round for the objects. There.

And chains.

The mail I spent days with checking she’s here on the one afternoon in an adobe awning.

In us.

Early drinks while anything, as at Abiquiu,

became synaptic strengthening.

The first input, then frequency.

Five hertz to the so-called theta measured with a natural brain when exploring the hypothalamus.

The result is A consistency with moving towards That which is never attained.

Artificial Amnesia Maze.

Dropped into one.

Pathways that radiate flower. Normal rats move onto the bar: black coffee back room musty through a hardcover.

We’re still not talking.

Sun outside, post-corner (coroner) fingers awkwardly meet, my body hot, away from me seemed ‘normal’,

were slick or sluggish or a shape of the problem.

Knowledge:

to run the maze we had visited.

Phenomena were testing the thicket of biochemicals on the right track.

Lynch, disrupting the calpain of memories. It was high frequency elecrical synapses like the raft of Charon carrying us over the cause of amnesia.

1983: mechanical pumps infusing to solve a known ambiguity as we’d sat in class with a prof. echoing, “now you solve for the known,” again and again. The factor, X, unstable as in the show where Baudry and Ursula Starbli interfered with mechanisms for becoming more believable.

Stimulation strengthened long-sought engrams at the edge of an 8-arm radial—

In tight fists, textbooks and a ratty-cornered copy of some Romantic, I spun.

Perhaps in us this stilled touching round the aching towards again uncertain or afraid.

A green, a pulling away.

Thus reading, “From a long series of spotting a dead dog, stones through step-tostep out by a seashell and salt.”

I’m faced with the choice of 8 like petals on end-of-the-pathway chambers.

“Go in,” I say.

To those given there was no sign. They recalled (I did) the general intact (you, the very proximity of). But as they began remembering (even last night, even a minute ago that glance over-tabled surface, dart of…) the general intact

(you again). Which paths (reclining) how universal (diminishing) this (I) could learn to avoid (you) –or be avoided.

Shock was inducing not another contradiction.

Procedural after-we-know-how-to stored in the system as separate chemistries underlying an electrical no-effect. Was this observable? If not, why experiment around this seeming between? Kinds of how vs. learning what.

We cannot articulate the micromovements: central nervous suggested there were 2.

Nodding in sleep, you say:

“Listen, about Spain.”

turning away.

There on a lantern, left, my hand, your timid

Time, leupeptin had amnesiaed the one looking for a way to distinguish between a declarative and the path already taken.

That was me. As if

learning to ride a bicycle I’d gained all the facts.

Throughout this, 2 forms of memory: fern, fuchsia.

I edge closer,

finding Carson’s Plainwater, days just opposed afloat in a murky, gurgling, frothing—

say some recollection of the shape of you still reading for the simpler worlds from a central chamber (as in aortal) run quickly to the alley without returning in almost every regard.

Leupeptin was poisoning.

Already established, those remaindered had a hard time to see how well they cut through.

I wanted to demonstrate that.

With the actual storing of locations, of days in a sequential order, of heel-toe paragraphs like cover to cover in the correctly-labeled section all the time perhaps created against blinking, blocked.

If we go down to, head to the very bestsellers, I’ll thumb for a poet: Browning?

Keats?

This wordless space shadowy. Late morning cups, eyes unable to focus through temporary cataracts, fog peeling open, backing up downtunnel plodding towards this airy gesture of static.

What a Number is She giggled,

“Gonna be on the wave-rise.”

Hand steadied it. Short hallways to …a number?

She burrowed in, tilted stubbornly later last night.

Yet sleep—next to a circle-roompacing—is so determined. June under her.

Even then backed against tiny waking from another American.

She tried to steady, to systemize spiraling tautological stories that cannot ease the theory builders.

To understand the car ride?

A canopy of round-warmth, heady land, tender steps.

Years of not-man she would prop herself against.

It’s partly a function to figure out our nerves.

Into a tangle of single shot-glass lightening she rolled.

Tide of sleep, of sick.

She muttered, “Plastered.”

(Seemed a long, small white was better than

the known.)

To think about science and all philosophies’ truths.

Our

bodies get off the boat.

Nature of these filters, she believed, between mind and mathematics.

(But if we use mathematics to endanger collapsing matters like these philosophies, is one two?)

Or perhaps blue off the edge of some guffaw.

Her floor bucked,

wall to her distance down the room

Since it is webs. loops with that swoosh of green.

Calculating.

Striation.

Always

Off-The-Shelf Enzymes

Messenger: A transmitter. The confines of entire communications the body uses to send ants

and other organisms hormones which leave to receive by any antenna—more to follow.

She:

Pressed up, back to retch, entered.

I:

Let her closer. She was in the yellow of information, that neuron.

(Giggle. Back at the party…)

Messenger: Scientists network with a hierarchy. Signals from one emit pheromones

which are simply biochemical broadcasting.

I:

The proper me, hoping I held her small frame, shoulderblades to the only line betowards. A separate. Hands fondling dream asses. Surprised. Finally swear her off by breaking groups: Hence ‘seemed’ was to act.

She:

I was the one, limp, naked in the shower. Jerked her off when someone grinned, bare-boned up to me.

Messenger: AMP, various cellular-like batteries carried to the ATP breakdown structure.

Messenger: Used. For cell-equipped with precision in the synaptic gap. A secondary

I:

travel entirely within had discovered methods.

Why name? Bed. Rolling-over after the Ratt. Could be the other tucked close against her breasts. This twin us and a lover, her thin…

(Gasp)

in the—

Shhh!!!!

And to find her there, home, red-haired, close

(Exclaim)

Messenger: Released to power, bonds are energy emerging to be needed.

Messenger: One, a ring-shaped purpose which she had come to call Rebecca.

She:

The bottles of… I tipped her chin, I forgot her me in my morning. She talked of ADP with two phosphates.

She:

Pulled women she desired, mine, pulling my unabashed nudity, sense of pressing lips and small….Come out of the invasive so I’d…

Messenger: ATP down to one energy is reactions that stone, store sites, where its

products include the name cyclic. As what biologists culled.

Neuromodulators, hormone-like chemicals that bathe whole areas of the

brain activating special receptors to dispatch secondary messengers inside the cells.

I:

She:

Seemed a set of, as in losing count on fingers.

439. It was. Or some past tense. Not quite distressing, I’d flop down on the mattress and wait.

Messenger: A biochemical cascade somehow coupled to the receptor phosphorylates a protein.

I:

Can be thought of as a means of turning it on.

The Tower in the Jungle

called memory. Some scientists form insights in the way of interlopers. Historically, they sought friendship, looked at colleagues jealously, unexplained. Coming to actually confer upon their theories, he was the one felt in Greece. Cold, we’d bundle eating dolmas or a summer hot spot.

When the holidays on Rhodos on a rooftop, mountains his hand tossed mid-afternoon. The mould would stare hours.

Discolored, amazed, watching Turkey. A small hip in turn came migrating southwards. Took another at the places by the sense of change. Organization called F.E.L.T. It was a difficult tribe.

“Are people in your customs? Beads and trinkets upon tiers of seats?” He had a lot in common with fungus.

“Where from island wander the fish?” The only locals asked. “Even we are 1,000 miles.”

Woke at 8 next to a recently-formed society. “Are they really all there asking how many your totems?” What then to exchange?

Before him were tiers. He would seem to have Cognitive Science. Big plains out sending representatives clans. What I half expected instead of conversation filled with people who all shared a body and sunrise over the slip of land. The boat where out on deck each day ‘toe’ fascinated, were now interested in this thing.

We haven’t felt much upon one another. As guarding with their ancestrals, the brain undermined to be called Cognitive.

Philosophers seeking psychologists. I picked the first on his island in the deserted shores. Customers in a “why are you departing?� It was Credo to his Longing.

Poems -­‐ Lindsay Bell

All the Rage in the Mall That Love Built Contradiction, contrapuntal composition, lines outside of time and times, well good times, anyway. Were you inspired by the mannequins, did you find the sizes you need? You’d be a headcase not to stare, displays are designed to engage gape-mouthed fascination.

Cold storage, neutrals do not suit the black-billed magpie, whose tail-feathers flash like unexcited knives across the atrium. This tanktop is the perfect azure, as enchanting as the wilderness.

Give me therefore a pure, unpained heart and I will go forth to the checkout alone.

Interstellar Battle for Remote Control We depart our embrace and prepare to lose our jobs, you to the soda mines, I to rank and file. When you ship out in the morning, you practice masking your cough. It’s good, I lie. Volcano dust, excruciating inhalation. I wonder how you have not already died with all this geologic certainty afoot. I let go, I was let go, I am pondering the cornices on the building from which I have been exiled and to which I have returned, reincarnated, to shuffle the same six pages and take the same six messages and shift offices three times in one day.

Pie Day There’s nothing funny about five kinds of pie when you’re really hungry for pie.

There’s nothing funny about pie when it’s in your face.

There’s nothing funny about that pie in the window, there’s no touching it.

Sounds the piper shed on his way into the city tiny sounds of hammer claps and gold, clinks of beer bottles in a halfway closed biker bar.

His name comes from inquisitors, from a treacherous place.

He only plays behind my back.

His name is a glo-stick.

His name is a surname, is as its own origin.

He wants to be indigenous,

the last of his species.

In his head he’d busk without a license, several times shooed away from storefronts and subway entries.

All the vermin followed him in a death trance.

Please Excuse Me Prefaces spider out from my tread.

My shoes apologize for these little cracks I open want water I cannot spare.

Today the cotton is high, air damp.

We’ve been bukkaked by seed from every tree within five miles.

We walk through the big bang and nothing gets done but good getting.

Oversight July Sweet, still sending you honey, not sweet but the business of bees. Text message arrival.

All this ephemera has got you as blue as bed sheets.

You come home, tired and droll, piss vinegar, eat and go to sleep.

The wanker on the loading dock, drop-trou’d on lower Wacker was a dandy last straw.

But this is the best month to be born in, I say.

This July’s not too salty, no sweltering catalyst sleep, but no boon for wakeful twisting hearts.

All this pirouetting around just to picture you standing in Indiana still skimming oil from the wreck, excavating

tankards of dross.

You didn’t see the three tanks get pulled up, leak their caustic juices into the soil, get crushed and tossed aside. No, you didn’t.

Ode to Fingers The tips should be blue, neon cold as they are opalescent, long tender hooks.

Meant to wind and coil with utmost efficiency. Stun bass lines into submission, amaze the rest of you.

Still, they are often caught in awkwardness, which I like.

Take this morning, you were seen sporting a blue bandage, reporting that an errant machine jumped up and bit you.

Machines, I say, are not meant to be pets, though content to follow you home, bend to your command.

So anyone should bend to those

sentinel digits, those commandeering digits, those unfailing phalanges.

When interlinked, we lose sight of the individual fingers, have only a crushed-together, fluttering mass, each flexing mistakenly for another.

Biblically, this is A-OK, as we should always do for our neighbor. (Do you.)

Do yes, but do not turn back.

That is, no one likes a looky-loo.

And I would hazard a guess that no one likes me, except maybe you.

Receiver Oh you’re only ever one metaphor away from dying: hamming and courting, sewing frilled ovations for her ladyship. Meantime, damage hangs out in the attic - she’s mad, mad. Wait till she whispers roses, then you’ll know her demons are gone.

You’ll laugh at the insistence of tapping, stock footage of winter, donning your cap again at her somnambulant swivel like that of a medium’s head. You’ll mock, but every heart is invited to inhabit such mimesis. Circuitousness, life-cycle diagrams, set dances, the horror movie shower scene cut to drain. A sudden calmness will descend like a languid zipper pull. This is the one ritual which you are expected to approach with an air of incredulity.

Hindsight I want the maps at the backs of my legs to take me somewhere beyond the genealogy to which they owe themselves. They appear to be natural, these calvish crosshairs of vein and blood crush.

Many of the old maps have died or are dying. I don’t know them from Adam, or their switchblade caverns full as they are of detrimental sentiment detritus and stalactites.

If only I could introduce myself with my back facing you.

You could better see where I am going. I’ve taught the world to make appearances over my shoulder, a precipitous light with no point of origin.

An Apology for Breath (Creation Myths) -­‐ Derrick Mund

#32

Around all the bodies’ dew grass bending

with the muddled cross street.

She’s still a half moon ago with her rattle and search for more from the nice clouds.

I thought about how my roots might split despite deliberate steps around the yard quirkyinresponse

#89

There are still

the soft girls on car hoods

from photographs of what flowers look like.

#472 we began as

dander shed between

anemone pedal

atoms of circumference

began between us.

#126 Non‐prophetic time

comes in dashboard glances

across a purple sun bruised U‐haul lot.

A tambourine traces

a burnt dress across an Alaskan lingered afternoon.

We acquiesce small talk with leaning shoulders black and white tattoos, and humid T‐shirts.

Or something about Portland or Chicago or good cigarettes or here, humid with bike locks

# 46 I took the earth apart last night

Ara and all

that look on your sordid face left off glances

like movie images of rain swipe

what whispers off of us.

#97 I’ve been so many

places of what

ghosts might say they look

like a day in the life and a brain across the window

and a film today

Oh, Boy! Cheery paper bag sutra; charred and

turned on by its own flowers.

#7 Liz Pale between ribs and hips, nostalgic, and full of paraphilia.

earth flower bustier.

Like

too moist kisses (light splotches

of saliva cool when her lips lift)

#2 The world is a Chloe

with dirty blonde hair.

Blood caked hair like

the dirty blonde earth.

Like the space between horizon

the dirty blonde

air in the woods

left with bodies.

# 37 (Glaciers) We talk over afternoon beers, bioluminescent limbs on the floor we listen to Liz

lily pick on the water below speakers

she says

“what kind of idea are you, your iridescence

like meadows?�

# 56 felt all uneven I felt dumb coffee mug dumb.

I allowed myself to get fucked off by someone on an outreach day But I know you’re spreading the weird world through the legs in my eyes I wrote a scribbled cheap world where I was I had space I was a tree I never know which of two things I’m talking about I failed to tell you ‘the mud between your fingers helps me know what a thin plaid shirt feels like;’ airy and almost blue see through with paratactic red on your freckled shoulders. I don’t believe in god I thought you should know how I feel about your nipples rigid contiguous dirt clumps unlike the tree leaves where your legs used to be.

The Monster Opera -­‐ Nancy Stohlman

Prelude

If I tell you, you can’t keep it.

I know.

I’m not sure that you do, I know how you are, always trolling for someone else’s gold.

I said I won’t.

You could be lying.

I probably am.

So we’re at an impasse.

Perhaps.

How badly do you want it?

Jesus, I’m here, aren’t I? What do you want?

Your loyalty.

But you’ll never believe me.

What I want doesn’t come with words, little one. It comes at a price.

Doesn’t everything?

Yes, you’re right.

And if I agree?

Then we are forever linked. Everything I have, including my story, will be yours.

And if I don’t?

Then you should leave this place, leave my bed, leave this house and find yourself another.

I’m sure there have been dozens of those already, offering their stories for only a fluttery look. But those were the stories of boys, my dear. You can write their childish tales forever or you can pay the price. I think you’ll find it worth the cost.

The poet, in love with this idea of herself as a poet, agreed.

This is the moment the story changes hands, the moment you realize your ego has done you in. When she walks away you realize your mistake but it’s too late—you gave it willingly, wanted to feel that your story was worth taking. She even warned you: “I’m going to steal that story,” she said while you chuckled, while ribbons of narrative freed themselves from you. She might even make you into a character—this is the fate for most family members and ex-­‐lovers (lovers before they are ex-­‐ lovers usually find this prospect romantic and appealing). But you forget that the story is no longer yours and she will twist and torment it until you don’t even like it anymore. But she is absolved from her sins. It’s just for the plot she claims. It’s fiction, I swear.

Act I Scene I The Forbidden Story

The whole family suffered from sad sickness. Even the maid slipped on the somberness with her uniform, and the paper still came day in and day out, though no one had read it in nineteen years. Charms guarded every corner and every archway, candles on the baby grand piano, spirit catchers in the bathrooms, African pox masks and reflective mirrors and beaded curtains from the Yucatan to filter out the bad spirits. The walls were plastered with photographs and smiling family portraits, so beautiful that you wonder what ever made them so happy, and where it went.

In the distance were the two volcanoes, the Iztachataltan in eternal sleep, the Popotechatlan in eternal watch, but most days the pollution in Mexico City was so thick and dense that they were hidden from view. Yet they were there all the time, hiding behind the smog, rumbling with activity.

Nineteen thousand feet right in front of your eyes, and you didn’t even know it.

When Ursula first arrived at the large, lonely mansion of Libretto and Magdelena Santiago, the sad sickness had spanned more than two decades. Ursula suspected she was the first guest in

many years. There were no grandbabies, no husbands, wives, no boyfriends, girlfriends. Magdelena, the aging matriarch, must have been stunning once. Smoking had obliterated her soprano voice; her skin was a thin parchment map that had been surgically altered, lifted, tucked, then refolded. The daughter of wealthy Spanish doctors, she had married down, an Armenian refugee who took her name.

Magdelena was short, not even five feet tall but busty, but the rest of the family including Libretto was lanky and hunched, reaching for the sky but interrupted, some unnamable weight that settled between their shoulder blades. At first it seemed to add to their appeal, give gravity and importance to their words. The irony, of course, is that they were not of this world, and yet chained to it.

Ursula woke the first morning in the Santiago mansion with the sickness suspended inside of her like colloidal silver flakes. She dragged herself down the cold marble staircase to the large kitchen where Magdelena and her six grown children, all the exact same age, dined in silence on a suckling pig soaked in Spanish brandy. Above the table were the required affluent paintings of watermelons, paintings of indigenous girls in front of lilies and hand-­‐carved painted animals from Guatemala.

A spider crawled across the table as Ursula poured herself espresso and warmed milk.

There is a saying in Spain, Magdelena said, breaking the silence in an accent deepened by cigarette smoke. A spider in the morning brings the sadness; a spider at night brings hope. Kill it in the morning and you kill the sadness; kill it in the evening and you kill the hope.

Ursula set down her cup. So are you saying we should kill it?

Magdelena shrugged. That is your choice, I suppose. I leave them.

When Libretto first came to Ursula he appeared young, vibrant, with a full head of brown hair and the same twinkling brown eyes she saw mirrored in all the children. He came to her first as a flutter, then as sensations in her body which started out innocently enough.

In the afternoons Ursula and Libretto lay tangled in the bed, her curls twirled around his fingers. He told her sunny tales of six golden children lined up the staircase. Everything he told her confirmed what she’d seen in their photographs but not in their faces.

My queen, he said, for this is now what he called her, Reina, I’m so happy you have come to us. It is like a gift even in death.

You promised you would tell me your story.

It is not pretty.

I have no use for pretty things, my love. Tell me.

The bite was swift and deep in the fleshy part of her shoulder, followed by a warm, painkiller

feeling that made her arm heavy, like a tetanus shot.

Okay, little one. This is the story:

Armenia. Land of fables and superstitions, land of Van, the flying winged dragon of myth,

land of enchanted forests and mythical creatures…neighbor to Romania, Transylvania. Armenia. The first country ever to convert to Christianity. And why? Why was the emperor of Armenia so eager to convert? Perhaps he already knew something that others did not.

On that horrible night the main church in the town of Van was full—250 of the town’s

intellectuals rounded up and crammed inside. This would be the beginning of the genocide, that genocide that defined the word genocide, that Holocaust before the Holocaust, the one not reported in the history books, the one that even Hitler referred to as justification for his final solution: who remembers the Armenian genocide?

But the 250 gathered in the church had something else in common.

Libretto was only five years old the day he watched his father burn in the church with the

others. Before his father had been taken away he had called the boy to him: What do you want to be more than anything in the world, son?

The world’s greatest tenor, sir.

I can give you the gift of being the greatest, most famous tenor in the world. But it will come

at a price. I know you’re too young to understand this now, but I’m afraid my time has run out. My son, I was waiting to pass this gift onto you until you were old enough to choose it, but I pass it to you now. I do hope you don’t hate me for it. There will be a price, but I think you’ll find it worth it.

The boy Libretto only remembers the bite, the strength he felt as his father gripped him, the

way he cried and resisted but couldn’t break free. He’d never known his father to be anything but gentle.

It was that same night that the boy Libretto stood watching the church burn, heard the

screams, saw the windows broken out from the inside and arms, legs, torsos trying to escape.

The fever began in the orphanage, nine months after his father was incinerated in Van. Alone

among the other orphans, he first felt the monster stir.

And how did you die?

You are so curious, little one, he says. I was killed in Barcelona by a man I hope never to see

again. The Traitor knew of the bargain I had made. He wanted to make the bargain, too. Because see, you may look down on us, you may think yourself ruined, but there are even some who would give anything to have this fire, to make this bargain, so you should consider yourself lucky, after all. He came to me, asked me for my secrets, and I took pity on him and…well.. Libretto looked at Ursula with a crease in his forehead. He has a power like no one else I’ve ever met has.

Not only did he want to make the bargain, but he was sentimental for the monster itself and

bore no fear of going through the transmutations—he welcomed them. I, on the other hand, had

never bestowed myself onto another in that way. He cornered and begged me. Seduced me.

Convinced me that if I loved him I would share my gift. Eventually, I agreed.

We waited for it to happen. I had never actually witnessed this transmutation, so I was very

curious. We waited and waited and waited. Until one day when we knew, beyond all doubt. We knew.

The Traitor was angry. He insisted that I had done it on purpose, but that was untrue. He said

I did it on purpose to be with Magdelena. I told him I loved him but he did not believe me. He was convinced that I had done this on purpose to destroy him, and so, angry at me in particular and the world in general, he resigned to punish us both.

Libretto opened his mouth to finish the story and then stopped. He suddenly didn’t want to

tell Ursula that those who have been bitten but do not turn become something else altogether….

After Libretto plummeted to the concrete in front of Sagrada Familia the family fled, knowing it was only a matter of time before he came for the rest of them, the children one by one and then Magdelena. Magdelena knew of the jealousy though not its full cause, as men in those days were required to keep such things quiet. However, when her husband was found dead on the pavement in front of Sagrada Familia, she knew instantly what had happened and took the children far from Spain.

Libretto had played the details of that horrible night over and over in his mind a hundred

times. No, he didn’t want to tell Ursula about the bounty hunters.

And how does the story end, darling?

There is no ending, it continues.

But there must be an ending. All stories have endings.

No. Besides it doesn’t matter.

Of course it matters! A story without an ending is not worth writing.

You promised not to write it.

Yes, of course.

Act I Scene II

Letter to the Editor, La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 1924 For anyone who has ventured down to see the work in progress of Antoni Gaudi, Sagrada Familia, you may be in for quite a scare. If you are expecting the grandeur of other cathedrals, a Chatre or a Notre Dame, do not come to Sagrada Familia. La Sagrada Familia is a nightmarish masterpiece of a building. One has to wonder what Gaudi was thinking? This reviewer can’t imagine that anything holy could take place inside those four twisted walls.

For those of us from Barcelona, we have enjoyed Gaudi’s creations the way we enjoy the work of children, as a happy accident that we patronize because it’s good for us. We are used to the surrealist movement, and we appreciate that Mr. Gaudi is attempting to keep Barcelona at the forefront. The result of this effort, however, is a cathedral so monstrous that I dare not wish it upon any city.

I do hope that the people of Barcelona come to their senses soon and stop Gaudi, pull his building permits and his funding. This building cannot continue. I do not think we can be good Christians and live in the same city as Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia.

* The casseroles stopped coming after three weeks. Codfish, paella, layers of noodles or layers of rice—Magdelena ate them all, and when the last one was eaten she packed her few belongings

and left Barcelona. She was pregnant with seven children and seven hastily packed bags on the deck of the ship as she quickly sailed to Mexico City.

Now Spain was a long way away. Many years had passed since Libretto had plummeted to the concrete below Sagrada Familia. Magdelena had tried very hard to forget Spain, forget the cathedral and the smell of thick, Mediterranean air that blew through the Spanish city and swirled at the base of the mountains.

Magdelena hadn’t entered a church since. She certainly didn’t believe any benevolent spirits resided within.

He always said we should write an opera together, Magdelena said as she approached Ursula at the piano, the weak sun painting the music room floor.

What about?

Love. All couples in love want to write about love.

Ursula blushed. An opera about love. You could still write it.

It’s too late for me to write about love. Besides, I haven’t played in years. Magdelena sighed,

ran a weak arpeggio. He used to love to listen to me play. He would sit in that chair and listen to me for hours. Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Khachaturian from Armenia. He liked the drama of Rachmaninoff. I liked Mozart. Mozart was a genius, he would say, but he’s too refined.

This is a beautiful piano, Ursula says, slowly replacing the lid.

It was here on our 30th wedding anniversary with a big purple bow.

And the love opera?

Too late. When you’re in love you think you will always be in love…

The way she stared off at the garden made it clear that she still lived in the land of the Lotus

Eaters, waiting for the unwritten opera to their love.

The Santiago children in descending order: Sol, Alma, Jesus, Fatima, Rafael and Raoul. All of them the exact same age, the exact same height, with the same dark hair and thick eyebrows and exaggeratedly long lashes. Like a pack of identical wolves.

When Ursula went to Mexico City looking for a story, she didn’t know that they were waiting

for her.

“My sister says she’s having visits from our father,” Sol told Ursula as they sat on the rooftop patio. “She says he wants someone to write for him.”

“Write what?”

“We have a lot of secrets, you know. Most of them aren’t pretty.”

Act I Scene III

My Dearest Ursula, October 24, 1926—

I can’t tell you how happy I was to receive your letter—not hearing from you these long

months has of course planted the most horrific images in my head. What I wouldn’t give to see you right now, to quiet my nightmares by beholding you healthy and well. Suffice to say, your letter’s arrival has helped immensely, if only temporarily.

I was thrilled to hear of your encounter with such a big, important family—how fortunate to

be passing your time in someone’s home, rather than alone in some dirty hotel as I feared. And so coincidental—or not—that this should be the home of opera singers! How exotic your stories seemed to me as I read them, smelling your scent on the pages. I must say that I felt slight twinges of jealousy when picturing you attended on by the men of a Spanish patriarchy, but this is where my

deep love for you will remain strong and true—although certainly those fears had run a bit wild before receiving your letter.

I am grateful that you have found us another story. The mood you set when you describe the sadness of the house might be perfect for our next creation. I’ve begun composing Act One already. I call it the Sad Sickness. I hope you like it.

Your adoring husband, Hugo Leonard

Hugo and Ursula Leonard: Hugo wrote music so achingly beautiful that it made you want to

cry; Ursula’s fingers drizzled poetry arabesques across the lines of the staff where his notes landed like bold footprints through fresh snow. When the music and the words entangled themselves on the pages, operas were born.

But after they had written many operas to their love already, they found themselves without

something to write about.

Leonard, my dear, Ursula had said, I believe it is time for me to find us another story.…

Yes, my love, he said. I trust you. *

Ursula woke in the Santiago mansion to long scratch marks across red Egyptian cotton sheets. Saw the hole with the tiny bit of foam oozing out of her pillow. Saw the long maroon streaks along her arms and legs where the forbidden story grew inside of her, stretching her skin into pink rubbery spider webs. Oil glossed her hair, left a marmalade sheen across her cheeks. The story was swelling, transforming, shining behind her eyes the way secrets do. She ate cottage cheese, spinach, eggs. She ate raw liver with bare fingers.

Once the seed of a story has been planted, it cannot be removed. Every story will be tinged

with the unwritten story, it will call to you in sleep, mock you in waking. Once a story has planted itself into the belly of an artist, it will stay there poisoning her.

Her belly continued to swell until one day her creative juices exploded in a gush of warmth.

The muse urged her to push, feeling for the head of the story. She fed the poet grapes and yogurt and sang to her through each wave, screamed with her as the pain crested and then subsided. The poet writhed and expelled the story she was not allowed to write—the church in Armenia and the genocide and the orphanage and the opera called The Lotus Eaters and Sagrada Familia and the misty form of a monster disguised as an angel and the house in Mexico City and the baby grand piano with no varnish—all these images slid from inside of her and attempted to arrange themselves on the page.

Weak and hungry, Ursula heard a hushed argument in the living room as she came down the

stairs to get water: “Is it not bad enough?” Magdelena asked, chain smoking. “He’s dead, and there is nothing we can do.”

“Do you really think you can blame this away, Mama? We all know what is going on here.”

“And so what do you propose to do about it?”

“If she succeeds you know what it could mean for us. All our years here completed erased.”

“Here is where we need to be.”

“She can’t be allowed to leave with our story, Mama. She doesn’t know how dangerous it

could be for all of us—even her.”

“I never thought I would meet one in my lifetime, let alone two.”

“What are we going to tell her when she starts asking questions? What happens when she

wants to leave, are we just going to chain her here like we’ve done to ourselves? Do you really think we’ll just keep doing this, generation after generation?”

“I’m going to be dead soon and then you can do whatever you like,” Magdelena answered,

storming off in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

My Dearest Leo, November 2, 1924—

My darling, darling Leo, how happy I was to get your letter, how far away you feel from me,

now. My darling, tragedy has struck here, tragedy so overwhelming that I dare not write it down.

Only know that I am trying to return to you at my soonest opportunity.

I have gotten what I came for but it has come at a price, my dear, a price much dearer than

any I could have anticipated. I fear what it may mean to us both, and now my days are filled with hopes of leaving this place, returning to you.

But my doors are locked at night now, my windows sealed. I have an escort wherever I go, to

the market, to the garden, even to the rooftop patio. The only time I can be alone is when I am at the piano, and even then the ghosts of the dead watch me. Oh Leo, how infantile of me to go looking for danger, as if there were no other way to awaken my muse. How ashamed I am of what I have put you through, and what I may still be putting us both through.

I now must be very strategic in order to flee this place. The only time the gate is unlocked is

for the mailman. I wonder, perhaps, if you were to send me a letter if it would give me reason to go to the gate myself. Your sweet words might actually save me from this place. Oh Leonard, my darling, how I come to you now on my knees, begging your forgiveness, the depths of which I cannot tell you here, but hope with all my heart that your love waits for me intact and that I may again lay my eyes on you.

Your most humble and shameful wife,

Ursula

I said you could never write about it.

But I’m a poet.

But you made a bargain.

But I’m a poet.

You cannot live.

But I’m a poet.

You made a bargain.

I tried to keep it.

You cannot write it. You’ll die before I’ll allow it.

Then kill me because I cannot stop it…

Exodus

They were eating breakfast when the mailman arrived. The conversation was loud and

animated in the other room. Ursula took the mail. Gracias, senior. Buen dia para ti, tambien.

Leaving Mexico City

The busdriver crosses himself: Head, heart, shoulder, shoulder lips, which starts a chain reaction through the bus: Head, heart, shoulder head, heart head, heart, shoulder heart, shoulder heart, shoulder, shoulder shoulder shoulder shoulder lips shoulder shoulder lips lips

lips lips shoulder lips Heart shoulder shoulder lips kiss the rosary beads

The Letter that Arrived for Ursula After She Left

My darling Ursula, November 25, 1926—

Oh my darling, what possibly could have happened?

I am both angry and fearful to hear that you are being held against your will in that

household. I am ready to come there and set fire to the doors. Each day is a test of restraint that I do not follow you, and I’m not sure how many more days might occur before I succumb and arrive at the door of these monsters, for that is all they can be called to do this to you.

Curses on them and strength to you, my darling. If you don’t arrive soon you may see me on

your doorstep.

Your faithful husband,

Hugo Leonard

Act I Scene IV

When Ursula returned to Denver from Mexico City she fell on her knees: Hugo, I fucked up. I

fucked up…

I see you found something in Mexico. Is it a story for us?

Oh Hugo, it’s the most amazing story. But I’ve been forbidden to write it.

By who?

By those who the story belongs to. I’m scared for myself and I’m scared for you.

For me? …who are they?

It’s not them, it’s what I might do. Oh Hugo, it’s bad.

How bad?

It’s terrible, the worst you can imagine. I know they’re going to find me. We should pack our

things and get out of here as quickly as possible.

Run away? That doesn’t sound like my Ursula.

You don’t understand…maybe you should run away from me…any day the Ursula you know

will be gone…and you’ll be in danger.

Ursula, we’re together, remember?

I don’t deserve this from you. If only you knew how awful—

Stop, darling. I don’t want to know.

Ursula is sobbing. Now all the false charm, all the superficial seduction of that stupid family

feels so contrived…how could she have risked everything like that? No, she deserved to be a monster, she really did. She was a monster and she deserved it. Let her die, let her out into the woods to live with the rats for the rest of her life, she deserved it.

But Hugo Leonard was innocent. She flushed with love and shame—she would do absolutely

anything to save Hugo. Absolutely anything.

So she went out and bought the biggest kennel she could find. She bought a padlock.

I can’t write it anymore she said to Hugo’s sleeping figure. The story has brought us such bad

luck. And yet I can’t stop writing it, either. Darling, I can’t tell you the urgency with which this story is demanding to be borne. It’s like no other need I’ve ever had. And I know that it will probably be the death of both of us. How ironic-­‐-­‐my muse has awoken and she spends every day writing this opera of tragedy. The poison is breaking down inside of me. My poetry is becoming erratic, words spinning upside down and backwards. The words won’t b

ehave for me, anymore.

December 21, 1926

I am hot, so hot, the blood is boiling in me. Leonard puts cool washcloths on me but it does

nothing to cool this fire. The monster lives in me, wants to escape, wants to take over my body and mind. Each time I slip into sleep I dream nightmares of fire and lava, of boiling alive. When I awake I fear that I will find myself changed, but…oh, this heat. I would do anything to quench this heat!

As Leonard washes my face I toss his hand away and snarl—get away from me! I cannot be trusted—I push him away and race to the bathroom where I can be alone with my own humiliation and despair. In the mirror my face is red, distorted, splotchy and ugly, my teeth yellowed, my hair smashed, my nose swollen. I am ugly, a hideous monster. I hardly recognize myself.

I am beginning to get a sense of other monsters walking the earth. We look away when we pass them on the street. We know instinctively, somehow. And they know, too.

The Traitor runs, jumps hills, hears the music, the story, hears the call of the opera as it

rushes towards its finale. Could it be the same Libretto? The same family?

He travels from Barcelona to Mexico City, following the acts of the opera, following the music

forward. He smells them, he’s approaching them. He arrives at the deserted house in Mexico City, he smells the scent of the family, knows he is close.

He is following the script and pure instinct. He crosses the city, sniffs at the bus station, easily

picks out the ways of travel for both the girl and the family. He hasn’t considered what might happen when he meets the girl. In his life he has never met another, and he can’t imagine that she is as powerful. He’s been this way for so much longer…

He is approaching Denver.

It began with the phone calls. Ursula would answer the phone and hear nothing but the

presence. When Libretto finally revealed himself in all his terrible forms, it was almost a relief.

What do you want from me!!

You knew what you were getting into.

I didn’t know.

You’ll stop writing this story or I’ll kill your new lover within the hour.

He’s not my new lover, he’s my husband. The whole time.

How romantic. And when you turn, the first thing you will do is roll over and take a chunk

out of Hugo and he’ll die. I’d be doing him a favor to kill him this way, rather than letting him sleep safely in your arms only to die cruelly in your bed. Trust me, I’ve done it before. Beautiful women that I loved bled to death in my arms. And if he is lucky enough to not die from your bite—then he will be doomed to this life. Is that what you want?

Libretto, let me go.

The family doesn’t need you running around with our story.

I have nothing against you or your family—

You selfish, stupid girl! You have no idea what you have unlocked…he’s coming for us! All

these years and he’s coming for us.

Who?

Him. The one in Barcelona.

The one you loved?

Yes, don’t you see? The story. You’ve given us away and now he is coming. You have to stop

writing it.

But I can’t stop.

If you finish it, we are all destroyed.

But it’s too late-­‐-­‐I can’t stop writing it. Don’t you understand?

Yes, I do…you’ll have to kill yourself.

I’m not going to kill myself, Libretto.

The Traitor will be here, soon. I’m surprised he hasn’t arrived already. Have you begun to

write about him yet?

I’ve only just begun to write about him.

Then we should expect him any time.

A knock on the door.

It’s too late.

Poems -­‐ Wythe Marschall

In My Hour Of Rampage

I dig my ruined flesh to find my squirreled-­‐away hearts, whose secret meat engines me on through the without-­‐you night.

•

There's Something Funny About Xmas

My elephant Moriarti agrees. He selects for me a gift of a giant sock.

I think about hiring a recursive giraffe to tool him up a giant shoe.

We could go out looking like A Pair, as they say.

•

Horse & Cattle Cultures

Burning brightly, ringing tightly, our universe is the line drawn to decline our universe and make of us a useful grammar, in reverse, that speaks not into meaning but from it, obverse,

so that the Originator, looking in, decays and purses Its looking lips in doubt at us; we can sing no verse, form from bricks no stable tower marbled, only hearse, a vastness-­‐flying night-­‐cutting Wodinaz' steed, cursed,

Sleipnir of the eight-­‐legged icy hooves and terse snorts of breath like the shaking ice-­‐cliffs hoarsely falling into the sea. The rightest course, of course,

is to go left always, heart-­‐to-­‐center go, unworried, winding out the sounds and tiny hairs of the yarn that threads you back to the primal—da!—the echo-­‐yearn—

•

Doubleheart

The B train pierces the side of Manhattan at China Town, bleeding passengers into the morning.

In my bag are the handcuffs I bought for us.

They are a warm secret, but my id wants to tell the social worker and her kid sitting next to me—tell them everything.

Dear madame, I have sinned delicious.

Dear child, my lover is a magnesium flare, too hot to look at. We are partners in crime, secret assassins of others’ hearts. They fall in droves to see us. We wilt them all, returning their nutrients to the tracks’ clay.

•

What Had Happened Was

I didn’t want to share you. But, in keeping you, you slipped out between my fingers, ash-­‐blonde eel.

• Withinit

Within the heart, a smaller heart shines forth, trooping blood from The Blood into the veins,

creating man as a cell within The Vein—but all is not like you think:

Give everyone chances, even if you never liked them, and you'll hear

the first lick of Wah in the funkless void—

•

The Feet Beneath My Ground

I'm standing in a graveyard over my prefigurers, a funny word, a tripper-­‐upper.

My atlas is off, neck broken, pendu, fate crossed (or lacrossed) (right in the dome).

Semierect man at the cinema sits on the dead gray chairs, hot feet turning into buttered heads.

A heroin addict bitten by a snake calls 311— no, it's not an emergency. Give the snake a salve.

•

Protected Midnight

It’s not right that you should be angry at me even if you are angry at everybody else. If not immunity, then what is the talisman I get from your boar-­‐tusk torque around my neck, the one I wear

when I walk down to Hel. At this time, I must register a complaint on a black wax log stuck in the riparian piss-­‐hot bog of the night without end, consolation in mourning's plenty,

which comes in all the shades of melancholy a Rilke could ever paint. Thorn-­‐apples grow from your discarded sentiments and plaster the earth, ripening into axe-­‐grass, their juice a run of blood

delineating with surprising economy just how far down there is to go. So much poisoned stored up, to be splashed in as it runs down, down, aeon by aeon.

•

Argument B Is That I’m Missing Out On Everything

I’m told men are supposed to think about sex every thirty seconds, but sometimes I get too absorbed in what I’m doing to think about sex that frequently. Take the book on the First Crusade that I’m reading; it’s very absorbing. Or the Blood Pressure Excellence brochure I’m writing at work. The His-­‐Purkinje System is absorbing and organic, so I feel it competes with my libido for mental resources. I’m worried because I might be missing out on something by not thinking about sex more often. Call this Argument A: I’m missing out on something.

Literalists will say I’m not missing out on much, because the sex I’m not thinking about isn’t happening outside of my head. Fantasists will say the pleasure of sex is in the imagining, that I’m missing out on the act of generating new and potentially subversive thought. The avant-­‐garde will say I’m missing out on nothing: Down with thought! Down with sex! Down with moonlight!

Psychologists, religious leaders, your mother, and my employer will say I am crazy, but will not be able to agree on how. Like a fox? A snow leopard? A sexy wolf? How often do wolves think about sex?

I think of wolves as virile, loin-­‐y animals, but wouldn’t it just be like them—wily villains that they are or are often cast as in folktales and morning cartoons—if they only thought about sex, say, once every hour, or only on nights and weekends, and then only if basking in purple, fir-­‐shaded mountain chasms, at a goodly remove from both human and lupine civilization?

How many times was I supposed to think about sex while writing this?

•

Love Poem With Limbs And Baseball

At the Mets bar on 4th, I ask a beautiful woman with one arm if she likes the Mets, and she says no, she likes the Yankees, and the Mets are faggots, and men who like the Mets are faggots. I say, Well, I don't know about that... but she's already off, pointing with her one beautiful caramel arm, first at me, There's a faggot, then at my friend Paul, There's a faggot, then at our friend Ashley, And she's probably a faggot too, or else she's your manager, yeah, sells the queer VHS tapes. And I think, I'm in love—queer? VHS tapes?—this woman's a poet. She's better than I am. And so I say, My God, lady, you're a poet! You're better than I am! VHS tapes? I'm in love...

But then I notice this woman, black with dyed-­‐copper hair, blue dress, a Yankees fan at a Mets bar, isn't one-­‐armed at all! She's got two arms! Her one arm is wildly pointing at all of us Mets fans, complementing her mouth's j'accuse, and her supposedly beautifully missing arm is in fact right there, behind her, digging through her huge black purse for something, probably mace, disappeared to the elbow and so invisible to me from this angle. And I'm flabbergasted, purely amazed. I have to say something.

I say, My God, lady—you have two arms! And she looks at me like she's going to slap me, like of course I have two arms, you Nancy, you blind Nancy. Of course I have two arms. But then she doesn't slap me. She just pulls out the mace—as Denorfia fouls out and the inning closes—and ends our brief affair like she was always going to.

from Blind Roller -­‐ Jen Tynes & Michael Sikkema

On the sky or sky

feeling like bluest fur

the cat needs double

checking, to ensure no mock

children climb in

bed. Either electric

air or electronic

activity keeps weight

off feet we haven’t

washed in anger

in a while. When light

changes the animal

is chewing down a strap

to fine argument and I

am a sleepy arrangement

of plants made with something

else in mind and no way

to winnow extras.

You go stand in

the corner and be

what it’s like to uncover

something at

the beginning of

the call and it

keeps humming like

a mammal fable.

Or the taxidermist's

broad backed black bear.

Her mammal table. Put

your left feet right

up on it. Put your share

of code switching

into fair play and give

us all a stay against

the gifted corn whiskey.

When light changes

it's not winter, not snow

through lamp's bell

or cold chest snap.

Workers spread out

through trees

hammering bulb-­‐-­‐-­‐nails in

for celebration.

And smell of all

material is either tobacco

or roses, other

option being

immaterial flash

of light in woods you

key by. I am of the habit

falling around like bear

skin or a bear

describing things very

close up. Do you call

white frittering

around us lichen or

cotton mouth?

When light

changes

close a snake

it’d

bit you.

Adding to hoof print

hieroglyphics scouts

repeat their city names

to shame us. Of the two

suns, old and new,

they know they prefer

more expensive

and less understood.

They know tattoos are

for children and all

yellow action is over-­‐-­‐-­‐

blown. We looked

at cracks in

telescope with

microscope and we

danced without moving

ourselves. It turns out

devil drives a jalopy

poorly, so poorly, and

it turns in every ear worm

is an animal to itself.

Mess of barbed

wire must be technical

language. Anyway

they kept themselves

at the center of it.

I know that IF

FACE and IF

I control my

position there will

be water

plumping satellite

branch, when light

changes there is water

in my mouth

and in juvenile bat

feathers ignited

whole gesture

toward shebangery, I

know where my errors

lie here. First nix

feathers. Second perishable

see its leather. Third

whatever

my mouth has accomplished

in passing is nothing

to do with capture.

My friend is asking

for foods that cure

dizziness as sky

spins. September summer

days are jokes

we play on ourselves,

in buildings and over-­‐-­‐-­‐

sized vehicles.

We don't know

rules but noticed

ones with biggest bags

of buttons are given

more big bags

of buttons. It's only

right, we say,

it's only rite. My friends

are shaking larvae

from their books

off their hands.

My friends are headed

towards the holler

and your arc is all

rapids and so little

grand. I can't sing

you any closer than

when light

in leaf and not

leaf come-­‐-­‐-­‐along

comes along.

Hang bottles

and wooden spoons

in willow

I'll sound my way

out to you. When

light changes

and changes back

we'll "hello" sexy

underthings of the year.

Panel is made out

of lacy fungus and

interrogative humming

birds like bulls muffled

in a cotton

shop; be

responsible mid-­‐-­‐-­‐

westerner take away

their food. Be the body

of water large enough

to be ocean without

tricking anything out. Eye

wants to stay

home this

evening working out

secret of other

panel, the one that when

light changes you

touch it or when

you touch it light

tells you it

has plenty more

where that came from.

Region of red

letter days and orange

you glad

there is

a mirror.

Mirror's only

where light changes

window into

something you can't see

through. It's all liquid

as a lake. Step over

big one with no

sharks and little

one full of released

pet crocodiles

in my delusion

of your grandeur.

Relief panel is lichen

and moss and likened

to most angry lickings.

Rear panel is meant

to see you through

thugged out as a 50's

hero. Rev your engine

all up Denver and flat

country part of country.

I'll drain the Mississippi

and blow up key bridges

to get you here faster.

Light bulbs remove

me from arms you

from states and

grace of right-­‐-­‐-­‐

handedness, grains

are a subsection of light

changes I will

muster with tail end

of my double

barreled device knocked

up with feathers. (I know

my errors, another

mammal maybe.) I stand in

for rosin and head

of sanctuary. Bring camels

and angels. Help me

water down

jigsaw and oil

slack the beauty

queen and make up

a wolfy tween or

twang to be

our golden

child our purple escape

mechanism with a serpentine

rust belt problem.

Sleeping with French Philosophy -­‐ Chris Tysh

In a few minutes I’m meeting Jacques at the Café des Parisiens. No doubt, we’ll both cringe at the absurd tautology of the name, though neither of us could possibly claim anything even remotely close to a titi parisien — what with his Sephardic beginnings in Algiers, what with my mother’s dark green passport haunted by its double black lines which spell APATRIDE, (e.g. stateless) an event that drags with it the blue archive, the one stored in the chest, both grave and everlasting ark.

Stay with me, Jahveh had said to Moses Send them to their tent (Archive Fever 23).

As in any expulsion, exile, and incarceration, between Christmas and New Year, he remains suspended before the barred door. We are no longer at the Rużyne prison.

The heart— have you found the heart? (Glas 111) Instead, we are walking along the narrow streets of Prague’s ghetto, paved in the immemorial knowledge of the way. Il camino. Le chemin du calvaire. No high heels here. That is to say a walk of walls, stones and fosses. This clacking on the ground we understand as if in a dream, comes from afar. The memory of the Jewish tombs piled high, one on top of the other, laid upright in this mad vertical rush hour, for ever (en)graved in time, this stone, ineffaceable mark which never ceases to blacken.

It is 3:00 in the afternoon. Dr. Franz K. returns from his office by way of the Charles Bridge. Will there be enough day to belong to him?

Like the clapper of a truth that rings awry (Glas 227).

Time is near.

Will I know the password (wish I was still smoking), drawing the tongue

exactly so I could mouth his initials in smoke rings, up in the air, toward a point where light goes, reshaping itself, letting go of the pattern, the trace, the inscription, the very writing which leaves a mark right here on this wooden bistro table. I’m definitely thinking of throwing the cl, the gr, the gl— these tormented garlands of his — under the bus.

Feu la Cendre Ashes, one more time, verify there was something in that passage.

Let that fall in ruins (Glas 201).

Never mind. He’s here now. That white shock of hair, the wide boulevard of a forehead, the smiling mouth. Irresistible, the very thing that distinguishes him from B, F, L, D & G, the others I sleep with alternately, though truth be told, I haven’t gone near L nor F in ages. Does this change anything in the book of ghosts? Jacques empties his sugar stick.

I try hard not to stare — step aside, miser — I admonish myself while simultaneously hoarding a clip in that rather inept doc made by one of his former students: Jacques in his kitchen eating aubergines. The intimacy of that scene fells me. Crushing sign, if one was still needed, of the hopeless philogroupie that I am.

Right off the bat, trail of shame, I confess that in Glas, I only read the Genet column.

What is proper, clean in French, he says, or appears to be, must be depropriated itself.

The question here is not to install an originary founding matrix, a proper mother, “the global mother” (Glas 168), he adds but to recognize that in the event and practice of writing, there is always already— here’s that deconstructive tag that has become a second skin — a part, a morsel, bread and wine, of mother in father; of writing in speech; of fictions in truths.

The text is what makes a hole in the pocket, harpoons it beforehand, regards it but also sees it escape the text (Glas 170).

I show him my pink highlighted sentences on page 170. He backtracks my citation by heart in a voice both tender and tutorial: Even if we could reconstitute, morsel by morsel, a proper noun’s emblem or signature, that would only be to disengage, as from a tomb someone buried alive, just what neither Genet nor I would ever have succeeded in signing, in reattaching to the lines of a paraph, and what talks (because) of this. (Glas 170) Having left the café, step by step we now mount the steep Rue Compans at the bottom of the 19ème. I’ll spare you the insane chain of puns, semantic shifts and phonic backbends we indulge in this chance meting that cries out to be seized by its impossibly rich letters, we grab like hair everywhere or fibers in a dress we stroke before pulling by the handful.

“That street is lucky,” Jackie says. “It has the power economically to condense, while unwinding their web, the question of semantic difference and seminal drift” (“Avoir l’oreille de la philosophie” 309). That “panse” as in fat gut and “pense” as in think, share a pair of wings has us in stitches. Glou glou … we laugh like madmen, thinking of yet another way of tearing poor Compans’ hymen, folded, reversed and restitched everywhichway, it is now a glove turned inside out, more of a sieve really, a kind of basin or pot without borders.

“This game is dangerous. I’m sure we left traces” (Glas 56), Jacques says after a while, nearly inaudible under the general traffic where Rue Compans merges with the

noisy Rue Mouzaïa. But we already knew that deconstruction, that supreme game of infinite regression is best practiced in the crossing rather than at the arrival gate.

As we‘re coming in view of Villa Paul Verlaine, my place, I tell him, with a sad smile that he is not alone, that the others will be joining us for dinner later on at Les Folies on Rue de Belleville. “Sometimes I wish,” he responds, “that all remain illegible to them— and to you too” (La Carte Postale 221; my transl.) Not to worry, I laugh to myself.

Threading his arm through mine, he continues: I am like the one who, coming back from a long trip, out of everything: the world, the end of the earth, men and their languages, tries, after the fact, to keep a journal, with the forgotten, fragmentary and rudimentary instruments of a language… (Jacques Derrida 159; my transl.)

I squeeze his hand recomposing my attraction, in advance mourning our inevitable separation. Jacques cuts in: “tries, to explain it with pebbles, little pieces of wood, with gestures of a deaf-mute from before a Deaf Mute school, a blind groping from before Braille…” (Jacques Derrida 159; my transl.) It is precisely that spectral, otherworldly and prodigious turn, I tell him, he endows his sticks and stones as he calls them that I seek when I put pen to paper, one foot in front of the other.

Yes, he says to me and in that very instant I feel my left knee bend, my shin splints are killing me, please god, don’t let me fall here in the street—I can barely straighten my leg when I hear:

The rhythm of a step which always returns, which always has just left. (La Carte Postale 433)

Could it be then that my sudden limp, that inexplicable genuflexion, bowing to the lotus feet of the guru—vande gurunam—binds me, literal logic of the limbs, to the desire of repeating that “yes,” toward which my body now turns, covering over the traces of my malaise. As if he had read my mind, Jacques falls into step with me — “the infinite flow of one into the other” (Glas 141) — and resumes his riff on that bobbin game: “Fort: Da, The Rhythm: Il faut que le pas le plus normal comporte le déséquilibre, en lui-même, pour se porter en avant, pour se faire suivre d’un autre …

Mais il faut que ça marche mal pour que ça marche; s’il faut, s’il faut que ça marche, ça doit mal marcher. Ça boite bien, n’est-ce pas? (La Carte Postale 433) 1 Indeed. Look for yourself, I feel like saying. The fetishist in me half hopes to keep this limp forever as a trace of a trace… I am not done with you. Wait, I haven’t told you about catachresis being my favorite trope nor how I laughed when I heard about your mother’s discovery of différance spelled with an “a”: “Jackie, how could you?” she cried with indignation.

Perhaps I could graft on a small scene from long ago: I am taking my orals in philosophy in a Parisian lycée. I’m clutching Hegel and Descartes under my arm, the two texts I’m allowed to present. Girl after girl emerges out of the examination room in tears while all the boys sport triumphant smiles. It turns out, the good professor has two scales. For the male sex, fifty printed questions, for the second sex, a little system of his own. When I

1

The most normal step must hold in itself a disequilibrium in order to go forth, in order to be followed by another…

But it must work poorly for it to work; if it needs to work, it needs to work poorly. It limps well, doesn’t it? (my transl.)

enter, five little paper boats await my hand. I quickly explain that due to our professor’s maternity leave, we didn’t finish the cursus. That’s not his affair, he spits out. “Hegel, Mademoiselle.” I start presenting the Hegelian aesthetics as if my life depended upon it, and it does, when I hear, “That’s enough.”

“But I’m not done,” I cry out.

In the end, if it is true that there are only traversals, crossings, under and over the grids and laws, then my affair with Jacques will have been “what leads me by the nose to write” (“Ja, or the faux bond II” 48), the precise structure of that embrace.

And so, philosophy and I will forever run after each other, into each other and under weather conditions permitting, sleep with each other.

Works Cited Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz.

Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

---. "Avoir l'oreille de la philosophie" with L. Finas. Écarts. Quatre essais à propos de Jacques Derrida. Paris, Fayard, 1973.

---. La Carte Postale: De Socrate à Freud et Au-delà. Paris: Flammarion, 1980.

---. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln and London: Nebraska UP, 1986.

--- and Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

---. Points: Interviews, 1974-1994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf & others. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.

Ariella Ruth reviews

Floats Horse-­‐Floats or Horse-­‐Flows -­‐ Leslie Scalapino

“In the morning a new rose juts in a morning.”

Floating in the unknown and the undiscovered, we are blinded by words from the immediate beginning. On the first page of Floats Horse-­‐Floats or Horse-­‐Flows, Scalapino claims this work is based on the notion of alexia, world-­‐blindness, that unknown words create a future.

Where is this future? Who is there, and why? How is it obtained? Is this future one to strive for? Is it controlled? In the confusion created by narrative, time, location, people, animals, and earth matters, there is a loss found in the nonlinear bewilderment and the baffled language. This work exists (or doesn’t exist) in an unknown future created in every section of Floats Horse-­‐Floats or Horse-­‐Flows. Nonlinearity paired with disjunctive, strange ordering of language brings the reader into a different world, or at least, a different realm.

Floats Horse-­‐Floats or Horse-­‐Flows is bodily in its nature in a complete, yet subtle, way.

This work functions as a mode of transportation. Her language feels almost foreign; it keeps us grounded enough to continue reading but, at first, not quite grounded enough to hold on to something. “Is dark air closed or lit? It muffles the illuminated trees, dark’s skin, that now spread further than skin.” Although there is a lack of tangibility at the very beginning, it doesn’t cause the reader to pull back. Instead, it is a balance on a tightrope. Continue to the other side to see what awaits and, more importantly, if you’ll even get there in one piece.

Scalapino forces us to question the texture and sight of everything. This experience through her hybrid form of writing is that of synesthesia, our senses are constantly challenged.

“Violet (violent, actually red).” Scalapino invites us to feel and taste color through her organic phrasing and descriptions of the natural world. The reader, upon entering the text, touches elements of sky and water on the page. “Many light circles turned inside out as if they were already dead by/from chrysanthemums there they’re drinking in dew.” Her use of personification creates the realm in which we enter fully. Although bizarre at times, every inch alters the perception that allows for the believability to surface. Even in its magic and mere incomprehensibility, the language plays in a contained space of anastrophe. In this, still, the language is quite present.

Woman asks are you ever affected by the impossibility? (Of what? asked.) Of the present (the present as: everything being in it at once), because then the linear couldn’t ever take place, she says. (If one is continually striving to be in the present—where? she thinks this, always attempted derailing, is merely intellection not occurrence.) But is doesn’t! (In the present, “the linear” a long stream doesn’t take place. Not in the past either—and to be future is not there then.)

In the world illustrated by Scalapino, one filled with piles of corpses, deserts, and herds of wild horses in the landscape, nothing on the surface appears to exist, at least not in any tangible or concrete way. Her narrative is driven by seemingly concrete descriptions in a pool of disassociation. “That’s his skin but it isn’t him at all. Then he limps outside across the night city, his skin sky.” Her descriptions seem nearly in reach, until they pull farther into the distance in the last moment.

From the content to the lucid phrasing, this work is floating, suspended comfortably in air.

“Drive from the now floating city. Instilled breathe.” Through this suspension, this veiled, fragmented poetic novel becomes vivid even in the dark shadows it has created. There is never a feeling of falling in Floats Horse-­‐Floats or Horse-­‐Flows. Although we are not always able to draw distinct meaning from her slight use of trickery in repeated phrases, scenes, objects, and color that build on one another, we still have our heads above water. In a world of blue and grey, a world putrefied, we remain living, floating.

***

Floats Horse-­‐Floats or Horse-­‐Flows / Leslie Scalapino / Starcherone Books, 2010

Matt Dube reviews

The Taste of Penny -­‐ Jeff Parker

Jeff Parker's two earlier books, the novel Ovenman and story cycle The Back of the Line, presented flawlessly authentic pictures of punk rock youth, kids whose choices and inclinations left them with no future and a surplus of energy for pulling apart their own lives.

They were stirring narratives, as urgent as a three chord stomper. The stories collected in Parker's newest book, The Taste of Penny, though, show us a writer with a larger and more expansive vision than that, even as they reprint the stories from The Back of the Line. Context is everything, it seems, and this book expands the context in which we read Parker's work, and the wider range of possibilities we find here flatters Parker.

The collection’s first story, "False Cognate," immediately expands Parker's range to the former Soviet Union, telling the story of a bus trip from one dusty Russian village to another.

"False Cognate" undermines Parker's formerly confident authenticity by putting the narrator in an environment he pointedly doesn't understand. In fact, the story itself turns on this misunderstanding; the narrator is unsure about the difference between the words "barber" and "prostitute," the same way that Russian soldiers can't tell the difference between promiscuous girls and Georgian "black widows" sent to infiltrate Russian towns and then blow themselves up. The failure, shared equally, to distinguish what is really going on is literally explosive. The story gives you chills, the way it fumbles with the world it records, striking an anxious note that might be the key to this new collection.

Russian, or otherwise more properly Slavic characters pop up in a number of stories here, and their struggles with language reinforce a general sense of linguistic dislocation, that even the most competent recorders can't quite capture what has actually happened. This unease affects even native speakers, like the narrator of the title story, "The Taste of Penny." The difficulty of explaining the difference between "moving" and "hauling" leads to violent confrontations between rival moving companies, emphasizing for those who didn't already know how serious trivial things can be. In this story, my favorite in the collection, Parker opens a window into a closed subculture, and then gives us the password to enter, if only we'll embrace the particular values that count there.

Even the stories that previously appeared in The Back of the Line, which are here grouped together as "James Stories," are transformed by their context. I once thought of the stories as funny, larking takes on a life outside of mainstream consumer culture. Now, though, they feel desperate and lonely, a race between a culture that has no use for the narrator and his own desire to marginalize himself. Throughout this collection, Parker steps forward as a writer with larger ambitions than I had previously credited him with. Instead of being a talented chronicler of a particular subculture, some ultimate punk rock insider, Parker reveals himself here as a linguistic anthropologist of many different cultures, each one embodied by language and each ready to expel you if you misplace the stress on a single syllable. Parker himself never misses the beat.

The Taste of Penny / Jeff Parker / Dzanc Press, 2010

Joe Yeoman reviews

Rue the Day -­‐ Shane Joaquin Jimenez

Waking in the desert, the land still cool under the body, the boy looks down to see his boots are gone and only dirty socks remain. He is forced to keep fleeing, as blood stains the socks. We are terrified for him and his situation. We know not of where he flees to or from. His author has not told us. His author makes us mad, because we want to know. His author makes us keep reading instead. His author is kind of a dick. His author is a master of the journey between boarder lands, and what to leave in and out.

Rue the Day is a six-­‐story collection by the author Shane Joaquin Jimenez. From Texas, to the desert and abandoned countryside, to a wandering Europe, Jimenez looks at being an American in transition. The book creates an on-­‐going narrative of the space between.

The sequencing of the book mimics Ernest Hemingway’s first collection of short stories: In Our Time. Jimenez facilitates transitions between three distinctive styles by including a one-­‐ page story entitled “Chapter One,” “Chapter Two,” and “ Chapter Three.” The buffer creates a physical boundary in the text, adding to the straddle between zones of humanity. By creating a barrier, Jimenez also sequences the story by similar style or themes.

In the first section, the stories take place in the first person point of views of Texans, who are struggling with being Texans. They clash over Texas things like love, land, families, Mexicans, slamming beers while burning rubber down the Interstate, getting lost to fishing holes, and the communal past. Jimenez and the narrators spin together a weaving of history and fiction, blurring both of the lines. The sentences are steeped in both the narrator’s fiction he is creating—both images of the revolution and trying to understand why his girlfriend left him— and the reality we see—that the narrator will never find the tragic flaw he seeks.

In “No Cerveza, No Trabajo,” Brazos returns home from prison to find a Mexican sleeping in his bed, that his step-­‐father has rented his room, and that his mother thinks it’s a blessing.

The writing is great. We laugh. We feel danger. In turn, we trust the narrator because he is part of this culture, and he is our guide. “I stared at the boats of fried hog and batter afloat in the maple syrup of my plate and forgot my mother tongue.” His world is both askew and familiar.

This is the Texas that borders on a bigot becoming drinking buddies with Mexican and the struggle to survive in the hot outside world.

Then there is a break in the text. We are left in transition, to be by ourselves, and then Jimenez hucks our scared imaginations into a borderland and a boy being hunted. The two stories are haunting, and we feel utterly alone with the struggle of the protagonist. The style, word choice, pacing, and themes are like an iceberg from the previous stories. We can see the connection, but we are drifting further and further away from the “realities” established in the first two stories. In “Vultures,” a boy approaches a fire being attended to by a gritty man in the desert. By the end, the boy is bootless and wandering through the heat, looking to escape. The beauty in Jimenez’s straightforward prose is the comfort that the stories will push our iceberg

toward some resolution, some ending. Even if his characters are alone, in the desert, we need not worry that Jimenez will desert us.

The final break in the text and “Chapter Three” reminds us that this could all just be a dream world, that maybe everything before it was just fiction. By pointing out the blur between reality and fantasy, Jimenez circles back to the place between narratives, the transitioning American. Then we are propelled into two stories, “You & Me,” and “Foxhunting,” about an American journeying through Europe. In both instances, the narrator’s aimless momentum and gravity snag a woman, and she is thrown into the same trajectory. The characters are moving trains, and the women that get tangled in the mess, eventually have to get off the train. This writing choice, a continued space of journey and movement, automatically fosters conflict. The pairing will have to come to a clashing point in their relationship when the narrator wants to keep moving left and the woman needs to go right. In “Foxhunting,” it is best described as: “She slowly walked away until she was out of sight. She didn’t look back once.” Jimenez shows that an individual’s journey is his or her own, and this arc might intersect with another’s, but that doesn’t mean that the routes change. Through the sparse prose in the last story, we can see that the space of transition is a lonely space.

Some quotes from each story to make you understand that Jimenez knows a good journey story:

“It’s strange the things that live on.”

“Chavo just slammed the rest of his beer and added it to the Yucca Mountain of aluminum at his feet.”

“’I don’t like it amigo,’ the man said. ‘Being watched by a man.’”

“He called her name, but she went off, as near the woods as she could without actually going into them.”

“‘You slept outside?’”

“We took a trip to the coast.”

In every story, Jimenez’s characters are on the move. They travel between the spaces on the page, in our imagination, and to the borders of their reality. They are always in transition, and they will never cease their American journey.

Rue the Day / Shane Joaquin Jimenez / Fallout Books, 2010

Contributor Bios:

Erin Costello is a writer interested in the digital possibilities of all art forms. Her poetry manuscript, "The Sciences Of" won the 2010 Jovanovich Imaginative Writng Prize and her work has appeared most recently in Trickhouse, Umbrella Factory, Edge, Palimpsest and Crash. Her video, "Girls Risk High Morals" won first prize in the 2009 Issue Lab Remix Contest. She is the co-­‐founder and editor of SpringGun Press and lives in Denver, Colorado where she studies and teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado. www.erincostello.org

Tim Roberts is a freelance editor living in Denver, Colorado, and copublishes Counterpath Press. His recent work has appeared in Alice Blue, OR, Tarpaulin Sky Journal, and Denver Quarterly.

Jennifer Dick is the author of Fluorescence (U of GA Press, 2004) and the chapbook Retina/Rétine (Estepa, 2005), as well as the BlazeVox eBook Enclosure (BlazeVox, 2007). Other works have appeared in over 6 anthologies, and in magazines. Jennifer lives in Paris where she teaches and translates French.

Lindsay Bell got her MFA from Columbia College in Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from: Puerto del Sol, Barrelhouse, Spinning Jenny, H_NGM_N, Diagram, Requited, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Signs Point to Yes, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press (Fall, 2010).

Nancy Stohlman’s debut novel, Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009), was recently taught at Denver University. She has a total of five books to her credit, including Fast Forward: The Mix Tape, which was a finalist for a 2011 Colorado Book Award. The first act of her opera, The Monster Opera, co-­‐produced by composer Nick Busheff, debuted in Denver on April Fool's Day, 2011. She lives and works in Denver as a writing professor, a founding member of Fast Forward Press, and lead vocalist for the 80’s hair metal lounge trio, Kinky Mink. Visit her at www.nancystohlman.net

Wythe Marschall is a graduate of Bennington College and the MFA fiction program at Brooklyn College, where he teaches undergraduate literature. His stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, 5_Trope, Knock, The Kennesaw Review, The Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. Wythe is also the senior editor of the Atlas Obscura and an editor of the Brooklyn culture magazine Pomp & Circumstance (pomponline.com). He writes a biweekly column on the novella for Electric Literature’s blog, The Outlet, and reads frequently at Electric events. With Ethan Gould, Wythe is the co-­‐author of Suspicious Anatomy Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius, a limited edition of which will be available in July. Each Suspicious Anatomy explores a fantastic organ, highlighting in what we’ll never understand about our own bodies. Wythe & Ethan are now working on their next book, The Human Longula.

Jen Tynes lives in Denver, edits horse less press, and is the author or co-­‐author of Autogeography (w/ Mike Sikkema, forthcoming from Black Warrior Review), Heron/Girlfriend (Coconut Books), See Also Electric Light (Dancing Girl Press), The Ohio System (w/ Erika Howsare, Octopus Books), and The End of Rude Handles (Red Morning Press).

Michael Sikkema lives in Grand Rapids, MI. He earned an MA from Central Michigan University and an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California. His chapbook Code Over Code was put out by Lame House Press, and his chapbook Saying Things As an Engine Would was put out by H_NGM_N Books. His full-­‐length collection of poetry, Futuring, was published by BlazeVOX books.

Chris Tysh: Poet, playwright and translator, Chris Tysh has been on the faculty of the English Department at Wayne State University since 1989, where she teaches creative writing and women’s studies. She has authored several poetry collections and completed a full screenplay based on a novel of Georges Bataille.

Recently, her play, Night Scales, A Fable for Klara K was produced at the WSU Studio Theatre (April 22-­‐May 1, 2010) under the direction of Aku Kadogo. She has given numerous readings, both here and abroad. She is a recipient of a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship.

Ariella Ruth: is an MFA student in the department of Writing & Poetics at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She is Associate Editor and the Graduate Assistant for Publications for Bombay Gin, the literary journal of the Kerouac School. She received her BA from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts in 2008. Ariella Ruth was an assistant editor for Letters to Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics, and Community released Winter 2008 by Saturnalia Books. Her creative work has appeared in Other Rooms Press, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Boulder, CO.