I Just Got Done Eating This Fish Sandwich, I Think It Was Halibut with a Little Bit of Lime and Some Kind of Crazy Orange Sauce

Oh man. It was so good.

No No No -- Happy Thanksgiving to You

I'm glad to see you're happy about the cat being back. I should imagine that the cat is also pleased though it's hard to determine the relative happiness/unhappiness of a domesticated cat. The air here is very cold. I think I hear strains of Wagner. I should tell you, however, that the cat came back of its own accord via a series of improbable events and scenarios which have included variously multiple injuries to yours truly, contusions etc etc, swelling, a pomegranate, a bucket of soapy scummed up water, a night shift clerk at the local twenty-four food mart (the kind with the overly harsh lighting that is almost aural in its assault, and it is an assault, everyone always looks like they've been dead forever as they reach a trembling and clammy hand to the overpriced 2% milk, emblazoned with an incongruously cheerful cartoon cow), a pair of tongs, etc etc, the splint lighted on fire. No matter. I think that's buzzing I hear. Please think about the goldfish, which I believe are technically mine. Love.

Black Friday

I went to see this movie about vampires. I think it was about vampires. There was certainly a vampire in it, anyway. Maybe even one and a half vampires, sort of. My friend, N., with whom I saw this movie, said it was not about vampires, not really, it was a love story for our time. N. scratched at his beard and looked at the ground as he said this. His girlfriend, M., who also saw this movie, and who was with us, and who is also a friend of mine, said that she thought the movie was a parable about the dangers of radical socioeconomic inequality. Boom and bust, M. said, looking proud, the bust that just keeps on busting, vampirism as a sort of metaphor for late stage capitalism and the benefits and drawbacks of universal health care. N. thought about this and agreed, adding that it was also a really good love story, one for our own late capitalist time. Boom and bust. We three walked into the rainy night in search of a dark bar, thinking of sad vampires and of the hard times that were just beginning.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thank you for bringing back the cat.

Counter-Counter Measures Re: Please Bring the Cat Back

There's little left to say/examine re: the repository of seditious revolutionary fantasy/revolutionary countermeasures/hopelessly confused manifestos/counterrevolutionary counter-countermeasures and cat offal you left. Really, really immature.

Simply because we've decided to continue via different avenues vis a vis our relationship to each other/relationships to other people (vis a vis platonic relationships v. other), in the parlance, then: broken up.

End sentence.

Delete entire train of thought.

Start again.

You do not have license to plot bloodless (read: bloodied in actual practice) coups on our dry erase board (which I think I actually paid for, so, really, it's mine despite your own dogmatic tunnel visioned/wall eyed view of shared property -- had you ever read Das Kapital you might be more willing to share your goddamn bottle of pomegranate juice).

In short: please bring the cat back. Please bring the cat back. Please bring the cat back. Please bring the cat back. Please bring the cat back. This is the last time I'm asking. Please bring the cat back. I am worried. Please bring the cat back.

Take Good Heart

Your life is far from over. It's important to say that at the start. Do not think about who may or may not care about this. Do not think about the empty fish tank re: its immutable and undeniably simple sadness. The thin crack running lengthwise. Jeez.

Do not think about how unlikely it is you will realize the dream you once had of stumbling upon a panda/a whole freaking panda family in the forest and then petting the panda and feeling its soft fuzzy panda ear and how it made a pleasing kind of low purring as it ate bamboo.

Do not think about how you had this weird idea about delicious magic cream puffs which probably went something like this: First you will come upon a delicious magic cream puff.

(The important qualifier here is "magic", I think, being that it may in fact alter the noun, that is, the cream puff, that, being magical, may present itself to you as something other than a cream puff, I suppose.

Possibility: It may be a mushroom. It may be another person, a man of indeterminate age in a red tie, or a small child with a crusty nose. It may be porthole with a scrim of ice etched on the exterior. It may be the ice itself. It may be a blood borne pathogen. Help, help.

Certainty: The magic cream puff is a certainty.

Conjecture: your flight will be delayed, twice. You will miss your appointment by a wide margin. Sub-conjecture one: bitter weeping, recriminations. Sub-conjecture two: Who cares. Sub-conjecture three: scrim of ice over the vodka. Breath billowing in the cold.)

I don't know how the rest of it goes and I've lost all taste for further conjecture. Do not think upon my extreme and total disinterest in this, nor my similarly listless/dismissive attitude toward your other secret histories and/or passions, chief among them how beautiful you look in that red gown, sweeping across the ballroom floor that is polished to the highest gleam so that it appears you are gliding, dancing with an anonymously handsome man on some vast opulent expanse, how tilt the champagne flute up, how it catches the chandelier, the chandelier reflected in the tall, tall and black windows.

A Second Short Note/Announcement From Management: Go Read Opium Poetry

Good poetry abounds:

Ross Vassilev has a very cool poetry zine going right now here: Opium Poetry Blogzine. You really need to take a few minutes and go check out the good work people are doing over there.

Ross Vassilev.

Opium Poetry Blog Zine.

And when you're done, don't forget to go read issue eight of InDigest.

Reading is glamorous.

"This Was Sometime a Paradox, But Now the Time Gives It Proof" (Or: "Phony Beatlemania Has Bitten the Dust")

These are dark times. Thing is: times are always dark (cf, open a book, eg, Polonius is stabbed: "O, I am slain!" (III.iv.26), and but to which not long after Hamlet says "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room" (III.iv.213) -- exit Polonius).

Elsewhere, there is a crush of people in need. Cue: muted trumpet. Cue: on the rocks, make it a double. Cue: a surprise number one hit on the charts for this scruffy group of lads. Cue: a distinguished career distinguished in part by: distinctive haircuts, bubble gum sadness, drugs (later), screeching, clawing teenagers.

The needs of the people vary: light blue pills, a waste bin, a stamp, a tissue, a hug, a wheel, basic sustenance, a nail, a dictionary, oxygen, a pat on the back, a bone, a cookie, a transfusion, a level-headed group of people fairly elected to represent their needs, a letter guaranteeing safe passage through treacherous lands/entrance into graduate study.

Now we seemed to have dropped your much-valued (wedding?) ring into this vat of sauce that cooks on the stove. Is its worth primarily monetary or sentimental, we wonder as we look into the slowly rising and thickly bursting red bubbles.

Fact: one of these modes of value will barter safe passage across the water to lands that have the potential to be more fruitful and the other will not. Fact: there is no need to panic: it is retrievable.

A Short Note/Announcement From Management: New Issue of InDigest Is Up and Running

This makes issue number eight for InDigest, I think?

David Luke Doody and Dustin Luke Nelson and their army of really fine contributors are ready and waiting for you right here. Go check them out.

The Quickest Route to Complete and Utter Stupefaction

1

General Sherman strides through our dreams. He is larger than life, etc. He chews horseshoes. He has a woman slung over each shoulder. When we crosses his arms over his thick chest, farms explode.

2

Other than General Sherman, we regret to conclude, there is nothing remarkable about our dreams. (Really, though, there is no "other than" when it comes to Sherman. He is a planet. He is a lens through which to view that planet.)

3

Our dreams, however, are boring, terribly dull, as most other peoples' dreams are. We wish people would stop telling us about their dreams. We wish we had never brought up the subject of our own dreams. We wish we had never told you about General Sherman.

We are embarrassed, appalled.

4

Probably we could say more interesting things if a) we were more interesting people, which, sadly, appallingly, we are not and have little hope of becoming, or b) we had some sort of instrument for measuring the various particulars about our dream life so as to render in greater detail the way, for example, Sherman's beard positively bristles.

5

Enough about Sherman. Instruments that measure the qualities of dream are more interesting. For instance: dream-microscope. Dream-binoculars. Dream-seismograph.

6

Here is a partial list of what such dream-devices might reveal:

dream-couch
dream-porch
dream-sunshine in a
dream-house
dream-knives
dream-blood
dream-death
dream-murder
dream-guilt
dream-existential crises
dream-dune buggies revving through
dream-sand dunes
dream-self-pity
dream-marriage
dream-meringue
dream-betrayal
dream-reconciliation
dream-yeah right
dream-dream
dream-crayfish, scrabbling up
dream-muddy banks of a
dream-creek to feast on the
dream-nightmares of
dream-children dreaming of
dream-secret police saying get up it's
dream-time to
dream-go.

Schools of Thought

1

At the school, a dog runs through the hallway. It is too fast and its path too erratic to discern what breed of dog it is, whether it is stray, feral, or some person's escaped pet. The children burst into shrill screams.

2

This man is a genius. He stares out the window, smoking.

3

The time for smoking rubble is now. Too long have we labored under the rigid artifices of rectilinear design planned out generations before. These are not our geometries. These are the wrong planes. They perniciously influence our modes of thought.

3a

(The time of smoking rubble is transitory.)

4

The children are currently thinking of the world in dialectical terms. Sort of. Dualisms. Us v. Them. Hot v. Cold. When they are introduced to the prospect of fallacious metaphysical systems they burst into shrill tears.

Some Stray Thoughts Regarding the Peculiar Sunsets We've Been Having

We like to think that we have done the right thing. That the right thing is not always clear is self-evident, yes, totally axiomatic, yet as the world changes, shrinks, heats, as people grow closer to one another sometimes/often unwillingly, in physical and psychic space, it does become more complicated, the world, it does become harder to tell what is the right thing to do e.g. re:

1 the space launch -- was it the right thing to do?

2 axioms -- the updating of for the benefit of future generations who may come to resent us for what they perceive to be our oppressive wisdom, which leads us to:

3 questioning of authority -- do we let people make mistakes and learn from them or do we intervene and if we do intervene at what precise stratum of seriousness/danger

4 where (and who) are the authorities, exactly, and who is it that has conferred the power to them? ...did we do this in an absent, idle moment?

5 furthermore, who is that at the window?

There are more examples, of course (say, quickly, sharks, the hunting of, or the climbing of redwoods to study the delicate ecosystems at the utmost layers of their canopy -- does it harm the tree, are we disrupting the natural biorhythms of the planet in ever grosser, more distressing ways, we're not content to simply drive our cars, nope, not anymore, sorry, charlie, because now it has proved necessary to climb thousands of feet into the air to shit all over everything, etc etc), but for now these will suffice as record and testament to our swelling sense of unease that indeed something terrible is coming and what's more: it is our fault, we are the architects of our own failure and death, that we have tried hard is self-evident, we hope axiomatic, we have tried so very hard to bear in mind what Hamlet tells Gertrude, "For 'tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petar", we are sorry, we did our best.

Several Interrelated Observations Probably Pertaining to the Human Something or Other

1

Ahab stalks the deck, grimly surveying the horizon.

2

There is a moment (if someone is any kind of person of worth, someone worth any kind of damn at all, there is such a moment as will be set forth now) when a person will have the distinct feeling of being watched. He or she will wheel blindly about, disrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic along the sidewalks, or throw the dog-walkers off their stride and send the dogs being walked scurrying forward or back a few steps, often accompanied by a high yip (seldom a low growl), or stall many cars in the middle of a busy intersection, so that she or he, in their wheeling about, might locate the point of origin of the sensation which may be dubious.

3

Shortly before falling into a fit of hysteria, the waiter says, "Gee."

4

The pack of nuns roams the city after dark. They have been compared by various persons to wolves. There is some validity to such a comparison.

5

The lobster, crab, whatever, who cares, snaps its claws in a way that can only be described as horrifying. Why is it doing that is the question for which we are desperately engaged in answering. This search has led us to several realizations, chief among them being that we know jack shit regarding the subphylum arthropods, the crustaceans, and, thinking that perhaps our lack of knowledge (read: total ignorance) of the subject matter has in part fed this fear (which may be pupating into hysteria (brown paper bags are on hand)) we have undertaken to learn as much as we can, a strategy similarly implemented to varying degrees of (non)success regarding the terminal cessation of an organism's automated bodily functions, death qua death, immutable, death death death, all together awfully impossible to wheel back into the subconscious once it's out all over the goddamn place and does not bode particularly well for the work now ahead of us.

6

Ahab lights his pipe, claps his hands together briskly.

Not Doom, Exactly

The kids go outside after dinner to play in the gloaming. Inside, we clean up the dishes, tend the fire -- its crackling and popping is always pleasant, it's a pleasantry we conscientiously maintain, secretly we are pleased that we are "tending the fire" -- pausing now and again to fix each other against the wall with significant looks, nodding gravely, or not.

There comes a need for a hug. Someone with a brightly colored balloon, or many of them. Someone with a big painting titled God Only Knows #49 that gives nonrepresentational expression to this strangely felt something keening through us.

The fire is pleasant. Misstep in logic, birds. Nicked hardwood. This is part of it, yes. This need is fully present and felt completely, totally, before any inkling, any inclination is present. It is akin to being ambushed.

One moment there you are, holding a cream-colored cup, pausing by the window which is beginning to return your own pale reflection, the kitchen behind you, some glazy orange smear of fire, and then you are leveled with absolutely zero point zero warning. You are pinned to the ground, which is cool and dusty. You didn't really want to see yourself anyway. Others may be fixing you with significant looks at this very moment. If you stay here much longer you are going to sneeze.

Advantage of Corporate Bankruptcy Is Dwindling

Your ballots are being collected and placed in large canvas bags. These canvas bags have sturdy drawstrings that close the aperture via cinching action. They are then being marked with bright red adhesive tape, which acts as a seal. If a seal is broken, the ballots will be considered compromised and may be thrown out.

Ballots that are thrown out are thrown out in the following fashion: in order to ensure transparency the entire process is videotaped. The footage is simultaneously:

1. streamed live on the internet

2. transmitted vis a vis subterranean fiber optic cables to local and national news programs, some of whom may run the footage, others not, but all of whom will retain said footage in sealed vaults, the keys to which are placed in secret hands, hands determined by the board of directors

2a. said board of directors is in turn beholden to stockholders, ensuring that transparency in this regard runs down all the way to the hoi polloi

2b. or at least as close as we ever get to the actual hoi polloi, which may be something more closely related to myth than actual fact, though sometimes we look about us at a bus stop, waiting to cross the street and we wonder

3. sold to the highest bidder

4. bidders include various investment banks, think tanks, watchdog groups, 501c3s, private parties, and foreign speculators

4a. what bidders do is up to them -- most successful bidders retain their copy in something of a "shrine"

5. a digital file is immediately created and sent via email to email addresses and lists purchased from robo-spam advertisers, cf, not able to land a job, does she laugh at you, great offers to spice it up in bed!! czczn4d [sic]

Ballots that are compromised are stacked in pyramidal fashion, severally. They are then arranged in such a way that, when seen from a height over fifteen meters or so, they resemble a "sad face." (This is all recorded as part of the aforementioned footage that is in turn disseminated in the aforementioned ways.) The pyramidal structures are then set on fire. The ashes are swept up and deposited in the sea and/or buried in the forest.

An Illustration Submitted For Your Approval

It is with the utmost humility and hand-wringing that we must now tell you what has befallen your formerly alive and well pet turtle. We are glad that you never settled on a name for said turtle, as that would more likely than not make the present situation that much more complicated and emotionally singular.

Singularity of emotion can in fact be a very complicated situation, an unpleasant experience, which we dutifully wish to avoid, not just no but in all cases. Do not think on just how miserable you are.

By way of illustration, consider Mars. It is a planet, it is large, it may have at one point fostered life, a remarkable proposition, all things considered. Now think on what you know about Mars. Its position in the galaxy relative to that of the Sun. The composition of its land. Its topography and density. Its color: red. Do not think about the various names you might have given any thing under your care: Karl Marx, Vesuvius, Patty or Patti.

Focus instead on a guess about the surface of Mars: red dust that is at once both rough and finely sifted within and by a crushing non-atmosphere. We now humbly posit that what you do not know about Mars in part contributes to your general attitude toward Mars. Probably you like this planet. It is red. Very occasionally, so very occasionally, it is visible in the night sky. Perhaps there have been moments when you have looked upon it with the assistance of some sort of oracular device.

We ourselves once saw Saturn and its rings with the aid of an oracular device. We glimpsed it through an enormously powerful telescope -- the planet appeared to be white, very bright, much of it hid in darkness, and the rings appeared to be simply one ring, curving sharply around the sliced disc of planet. It looked nothing like we had been led to believe. It resembled a child's glow-in-the-dark sticker version of Saturn.

Singularity of meaning and emotion eludes you. In truth, there is no such thing. You think this is a dead turtle. It is a valentine. It is our heart and it is our love for you. It hangs in the night sky like a distant planet.

Concerning the Interfacing with (If Not the Reversal of) General Myopia

Go in and look at the baby. Tinkling music like some kind of toy waterfall. Reflected patches of light slowly rotate on the softly colored walls, beige, blue, cream, upon which moves what can only be described as little galaxy-in-miniature, the macrocosm turned inward to soothe.

Consider the rise and fall of Kevin Costner -- cautionary tale concerning the nexus and various loci of ambition and ego. Not unique but good to remember. Travesty, waste, retroactive assessment of past accomplishments inevitably reinterpreted as less successful, more indulgent, sanguine.

Now for green tea, contentment rising like bread in the oven. Consider the snow that is falling slowly. The current crisis will likely extend for a long time. There is no telling how long. Consider other artists -- what is happening, say, to Klee at this very moment. Does he gain in solidity and importance as we simply sit here, tea, snow, considering the Angelus Novus.

Promulgation of common sensical advice -- eg, maintain focus counterbalanced with what basketball and tennis players call "court view," that is, the ability to see clearly both near and far, environs as a whole, the wide-angle view of events helping to dictate what is done in the immediacy of one's own vicinity, rest, vitamin c, plant life a plus -- met with disdain even as regret and ominous portent shifts, heaves its bulk onto the horizon.

Consider the radio. Luxury makes a move underground. The dead include at least a half dozen police officers. Slight uptick.

A Partial Delineation of a Small Segment of the Thing that We Currently Refer to Perhaps/Probably Mistakenly as the Totality

Precis: lines have been crossed.

The results: disruption in clear communications, affronts to personal honor, the sky changes color, spaghetti, we are mesmerized by a tree, what kind is it, it looks somehow more dense than a normal tree, very black, it begs for the red of a leaf in photochemical change, bird.

Further study: it is impossible to tell if affronts were intentional or whether they are the results of the aforementioned crossed lines, why we now hang our heads.

Question: lines, existence of. For the ruling out v. in.

Further study: wine.

Question: sweatpants, the wearing of. Is this the liberation of self from the heretofore confining mores of polite society/largely unspoken rules of a certain socioeconomic stratum or is this the outward manifestation of a keenly felt inward collapse.

The results: wine.

Symptoms: variable, rapidly changing, sadness, of course, headaches, a pinch behind the eyes, indecision, sudden and easy rapport, photochemical spikes and dips, careful blotting of a nick in the skin with toilet paper and red blood blossoming through at once, is it hard to get a handle and/or read on.

Interpretation: looks to be a challenge. It fills us with dread, other unnameable anxieties, etc. We are ready to begin.

New Toilet for the International Space Station

I do not exactly relish my role as lead space walker; I do not exactly thrill at the possibility/inevitability as we approach 0800 hrs, there is no thrum of excitement in my spine, my stomach, no tingle in my toes in the tired phrase, though I did feel that way when we received our new toilet, state-of-the-art-art of evacuation here in our multilingual slowly revolving home.

It is honor/duty and also a job not to be undertaken without due conscientiousness and gravity involving precision and care in ensconcing the human form (delicate! fragile! preparing, eyeing the airlock, seeing space beyond) into a complex system of padding webbed with transistors and two-way radios and various biological monitors (blood pressure, oxygen/carbon dioxide intake/outtake) all geared toward safety though still nothing more than two heavy-duty woven metal cables as tether.

Simple as a beagle tied to a parking meter with an old piece of clothesline. Outside of an ice cream shoppe decked out in colorful bunting. I am thinking now of silent films, G.W. Pabst, Keaton, the broad smiles, over-wide, the exaggerated contortions, the movements oddly quick, choppy (I'm putting on a boot, snuggling toes that are now set to become not just ordinary toes but flexing space-toes, that is, toes inches away from space), I am envisioning the silent film version of my task, black, white, choppy, frame missing, the sucking nothing, lubricate the solar alpha rotary joints, orchestral rising, one space-booted foot in front of the other.

A Partial Account of Our Findings

Your sadness has its roots in historical complexities whose origins and variables have been carefully limned, delineated, articulated, re-articulated, de-constructed, and approached from various post-modern and poststructuralist angles. The overall picture remains hazy as a boat glimpsed through thick fog, the kind of fog that heavily hangs in front of you, not moving, mixing with your breath, nearly leaving moisture on your upper lip.

What we can say about your unhappiness is that it began as mild dissatisfaction, even not wholly unpleasant as such, a kind of warm grudge to nurture, a thing to look after. Here interpretations and readings vary as we factor in probabilities of blame. We also think that mimetic art has its origins here as well, as well as mimetic art's ultimate failure in what we now are rather forced to conclude is a wholly hopeless endeavor, vis a vis the immutable changes that happen every five seconds or so within our synapses that crackle and zoom like a steroidic brushfire.

And our brains are not even exceptional, they are pedestrian, quotidian, a representative sampling. Does this thought cause sadness? We have just noticed that we switched terms from "sadness" to "unhappiness" in the beginnings of the first and second paragraph, respectively, which cannot help but underline the total hopelessness of the endeavor which we have heretofore set out, nay, swore, to doggedly chase down to its final conclusion, which is here presented thusly:

The preponderance of evidence -- e.g. a powdered wig, empty kitty litter bag made of multi-sheeted heavy paper, old science project, several nails, one rusty, a dictionary, other various nostalgic constructs, art as artifact, etc etc -- suggests that issues of unhappiness/sadness/despair (read: the implacable mixture of death-urge and death-dread) require further inquiry as we have also just now this very instant realized we have yet to take into the account the exact moment when the fog burns off and we see the sea, the addendum to the epilogue, the exquisite relinquishing of control.

Rag and Bone

We were constructing the stairs one by one, carefully placing each new stair above and just a little beyond the previous stair. In order for construction to be possible at all it quickly became necessary to employ the function of existing stairs -- that is, we needed to stand, kneel, squat, shuffle, et cetera on the already-constructed stairs so that we might reach the always-progressing point of access, an event horizon always receding but which we ourselves constructed.

After a several weeks of labor my fellow constructor turned to me and asked if this were a metaphor for something. You know, for existence. Where are our stairs going? Is it possible for us to turn back? Would we want to if we could? Is this boundary we ourselves create and bump against and move back unassailable? Is it a Cauchy Horizon existing in real space time? Or more properly speaking a Killing Horizon, the null hypersurface in which geometrical quantities lose all significance and meaning?

I was about to confess that for many years I have been deeply afraid but just then we were met by a construction crew building a set of descending stairs perfectly in line to meet our own.

Moonshine

Here's a check for $75.
What are you going to do with it?

Oatmeal, ant farm,
toy ukuleles, a dozen.

What colorful imagos
crowding the proscenium.

Later, just for fun,
we'll try tempting a saint.

So Happy You Could Make It

Welcome to your new devastation,
we hope your stay will be long.
This is a pile of oily rags,
somewhere between the past
and the next incident there
is another state we've heard but
locals here they like to drink,
so, you know, don't count on it,
and over here are charred husks.
Did you remember to change your address?

A Little En Medias Res

But then again I'm not
one to ask. I've already

turned my back twice,
air sticky between

hot blood, blackened
fingertips, heat wave,

you know, good friends.
Wind howls at the mouth

of the cave, the sea
moves through the fish,

exoneration through the air
for everything you've

yet to do, teal mini-van
idling at the curb,

beagle hanging out
passenger-side window,

symbol for our times,
Tijuana bible bildungsroman,

howling pretty much
what we've come to expect.

Poem In Which We Trash the Well

Is this our dust-choked scree?
Possibly the projection of desire.

Malformed into TV westerns?
What does this say about our desire?

Possibly the limitations of imagination.
Possibly you do not approve.

Of yourself?
Of the landscape?

The immediate viscera turned external?
This parking lot goes on forever.

Not a cactus in sight.
A scrap of foil.

Do we know the difference between good and well?
The gulf between thought and action.

Are stars, properly speaking, born?
They die.

A scrap of foil?
Dependant upon the light.

The last time you danced?
The saddest discotheque in the world.

A Friendly Reminder From Management: FOU 2

Hey, all. Below is the link for the second issue of Fou with the list of excellent contributors. If you haven't already, go see their beautiful, beautiful website.

FOU 2

Tony Aarts * Ana Božičević * Heather Christle * Adam Clay * Peter Davis * Denise Duhamel * Adam Fell * Emily Kendal Frey * Brian Henry * Brad Liening * Chris Martin * Clay Matthews * Corey Messler * Danielle Pafunda * Matthew Savoca * Michael Schiavo * Brandon Shimoda * Mathias Svalina * Chad Sweeney * Bronwen Tate * Dara Wier * Joshua Marie Wilkinson

8 Million Things At Once

I hope you're eating your vegetables,
staying away from the business end of this chainsaw.
Now is the time of night when it's still afternoon
but so dark you feel all fidgety,
whispering/singing, oh baby,
be my world of hurt whoa-oh
to no one, the microwave, sashaying
in a bathrobe past the business end of the window,
though it's always the business end all the time
in the chainsaw and the window and the flock
of crows that leaves the trees for the river.

Our Best Guess

Whatever ties doubt to hope
is whatever makes

the heart inscrutable,
an abstraction made of muscle,

the cosmic Whack-a-Mole
stuck between your ears.

Here, have an orange.
Have a whole bunch of balloons.

You should really go check out the second issue of Fou Magazine.

Our Epic Beginnings

This probably isn't the tree of death
but unless you lick its rough bark

how will you ever know?
Its branches are full of diamonds.

Its root system is rumored
to look like an EKG

or some other signifier
of electrical potential or abnormality

which might be why every autumn
it lights up like a city skyline

and children gather there
and are never heard from again.

Your Future Starts Now

You thought you were lonely before
the next big onslaught of snow

but turns out that was just gas
but don't be embarrassed

about the kind of gas that really
fucks with your head it's so toxic,

the kind that makes you look
at the bathroom tile and see not

how long it's been since you cleaned
but at the tiny bug you think you see

wriggle there and think about
something both significant and

just beyond your grasp like the snow
that for now is still high in the clouds.

Modest Ontological Progress

Ruffle the unspeakables,
blow-dry the elemental.

I have not yet begun
to waste my life.

No Sweat

Here, the land tilts
into the distance.
What a relief
to find no stunted pines,
no denuded vale
beneath deepening blues.
Though I don't know why
it reminds me how
yesterday I held
a power drill
against the drywall
and thought, my goodness,
just depress the thingie
and lean into it.