The Anthologist Fall 2021

Without Him, With Others // Aniza Jahangir Sun set rose, do you nibble my skin? Is it body-red, body-stark, body-razor, or a simple resistance, insulin. Kiss kiss and cut cut, the pattern, xoxo, xxx, ooo, drybumpying the lips they're tattering. Oh god oh god, is it getting hot in here? Or is the sky just falling?

Give it a week. Package up seven days and all of its hours and all of its hours’ heads and knee caps into the eclipsing part of the garden. The shanties and shacks of poor souls that lived on its skirts were hard enough to hold twenty one years of breakages, but this? Can it be held?

Dark blue and black, solidifying, wide, dismembering cubes of tizzying and zippy twitchtwitchbzzzzshake- cold and ever splitting, fragments of moonlight and nonmoonlight.

Just in case, to sooth the inevitable immigrant tirade of “i had one quarter in my pocket when i came to this country just to watch soft women cry”, as if, like peaches, all our heads, kneecaps, hard at birth only become softer and more jelly with rotting sweet age. Just in case, install the bars, make them thin but many - think: lungs too lungy to breathe - and attach them to disk shaped plates above and below the week. Tighten the screws, but please, if you can, be mindful of the peonies; yes i know they are greying, but what did you expect? Would this skyfall not eat them too, fleshy pink and organous? Don’t open your mouth to answer, from garden to sky, 343 m/s, your voice won’t get to me until this is all over anyway.

Stepping back from sympathying the grotesque buds, how awful to feel ugly, prison looks a fine carousel. The seven days are expanding in nurture and torture and locked in tight even as they molecularize. The days, like the red toothed and unblinking white and brown horses that usually attach to golden rods, so full of menace and god fearing that they form invisible spindles of hopedeath between them, are in between stagnance and escaping speed and rhythm. Spinning spinning spinning.

But it all still lives in the hippocampus of the world. Its ancient aliens and its ripe speech, and in the trickles of navels and watermelon juices around sticky amorphousliquid nude bodies from the mouth, eyes, and ears. These seven days will live in all of it. As stunning as it is to see time turn to cubic landfill waste in front of you, inside of you, all around you. As alive making it is to know you are going to die, mildly escaping death’s sun and moon and fruit swallowing void as you tip toe around the garden. Seeing an eternity of ongoing thought continue to rupture itself into greater fits of ambiguity, all the possible scenarios of 168 hours, and every hour’s minutes’ seconds’ milliseconds’ microtime’s microscenarios, it seems like consciousness is its very own state of being, and we were never, I realize now, its body. Intermingling with itself, killing itself, millions of consciousnesses mass suicide before your eyes, and ressurection. I might not believe in a Christ or a god, but I do believe that I know nothing, and is there really a difference? Seven days locked in a cage, spinning with carnival music under a decaying sky.

The expanding orb we sit in still goes peach like and rots, and the juices from the universe’s bite, that one that will kill us all and laugh, drips down the innards of the universe, streaking the atmosphere, erasing the blue into black with silver edges. Turning the clouds into smoke women with nectarines for breasts and honeydew for the between thigh spot, hair made of microneedles and everyone’s decaying teeth from childhood.

Oh would you please just give it seven days, lock those days away, don’t feel them. Don’t stare too close, they are brighter than the sun. they will burn you, cure you, melt you away, 12