Happy birthday, Richard Wright! Here are some quotes from the writer:

“All literature is protest.”

“The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.”

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

“The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.”

“Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.”

“Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn’t it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you’ve a notion of what man’s heart is, wouldn’t you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man’s frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?”

“If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my living.”

“‘Don’t think I’m so odd and strange…I’m not….I’m legion…I’ve lived alone, but I’m everywhere.’”

“‘You are your own law, so you’ll be your own judge.’”

“The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts.”

“It was this intolerable sense of feeling and understanding so much, and yet living on a plane of social reality where the look of a world which one did not make or own struck one with a blinding objectivity and tangibility, that made me grasp the revolutionary impulse in my life and the lives of those about me and far away.”

“And then, while writing, a new and thrilling relationship would spring up under the drive emotion, coalescing and telescoping alien facts into a known and felt truth. That was the deep fun of the job; to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perceptions, making new and—until that very split second of time!—unheard-of and unfelt effects with words.”

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”

“They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.”

“Every movement of his body is an unconscious protest. Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state!”

They found the Burroughs necronaut two weeks ago sitting in a Topeka bus station wearing a moldy suit and leaning on a walking cane standing between his knees.

His former manager called me. “He’ll only be back long enough for lunch, the clinic tells me. I’m in New York. Can you get over to Topeka to have lunch with him? You’re an old friend. He likes you. He thinks of you as a Johnson.”

That meant well-mannered, dependable, honest, and a good cook.

I had been reading and hearing about all the limited come-backs that were going on. You’re back for a limited time, usually a few hours. It’s hinky and it would scare me to see the Old Man this way.

But It was an easy thirty-minute drive to Topeka and I was extremely curious.  

The manager went on, “Ask him questions, but not about his writing. He hates that. I want his take on the afterlife. He always believed in it. Let’s see what he says about it.”

I had known Burroughs in Kansas, where he lived for sixteen years, longer than he’d lived anywhere. I had cooked dinner for him and a friend or two on Thursdays for ten of those years, taken him to Kansas City occasionally for his six-pack of methadone, and I was a pall bearer at his funeral. I do miss him. He was the sharpest of wits. I’m still always asking myself, “What would William say about this or that?”

I learned from the radio on the way to Topeka that helpful passengers had taken him from the bus station to a nearby clinic where, like all returning necronauts, he was cleaned, oiled, powdered, and kept in a barometric chamber for several days until the boils subsided. A feeding tube was inserted in hopes of improving his nourishment. He’d come up at only sixty-five pounds. Recent reports, however, advise that he has already gained enough weight and strength to stand and walk as much as a block or two using his cane and enjoy a lunch.

We were to meet at the Squat ‘n’ Gobble at one p.m. sharp. It was a short walk from the clinic. I waited there more than an hour, drank two Pimm’s Cups and an absinthe frappé, and was getting a bit bleary in the frosty Squat air-conditioning.

I was drunk and hungry, Burroughs was late, and I was getting twitchy. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see the way he looked now.

I called the manager. “What does he eat anyway?”

“Clabber. I manage a lot of necronauts and that’s all they eat.”

“What the fuck is clabber?”

“Sour curdled milk. All the Squats carry it for the new arrivals. Don’t worry, he’ll be there eventually. The notion of time is a little muddled when they first come back. And the clinic tells me he tends not to lift his feet when he walks. He skates along slowly. He’ll fall, too, and people will have to pick him up. All this takes time.”

I began waiting again and ordered another Pimm’s. It was already three and no sign of Old Bill. The banging, clanging, and casual talk in the kitchen area suggested the Squat was prepping for supper service.

There were no other customers at this solemn hour between lunch and dinner. Booths were empty. I crawled into one and went to sleep. It was five when I woke to a sharp pain in my knee as if I’d been struck by something. Burroughs stood over me waving his cane. “I’ve got a sudden yen for some clabber, my dear. Let’s eat.”

“All right.”

In life, he’d been a gaunt, skeletal figure. Now he was much more so, and his eyes were clouded and white. They had been bright blue the last time I’d seen him. I helped him into the other side of the booth, straightened his back, tightened his black silk tie and scraped the mold from his dirty suit with a table knife. He coughed, gently, his breath skunky enough to make my eyes burn. It’s a shame they so often come back in such a rat-gnawed condition. I wanted to see him lively and energetic, the way he was before. I felt a sort of high-level sadness I’d never felt before.

“I’d like a drink before lunch,” he said to a server. “Make it a warm Coke with three fingers of cheap American vod.”

The server looked at Burroughs’s lips. They were partly sealed with the body’s natural after-death adhesives. But there was room for a straw and possibly a spoon. “All right, sir. Coming right up.”

“No alc for me,” I said. “Bit of a migraine.”

“Are you ready to order?”

“I’ll have the clabber with a little raw sugar on top,” Burroughs said, drily.

I was hungry enough now to eat anything. I said, “I’ll have the special, whatever it is.”

The server fanned the pages of an order pad trying to think of the day’s special. “Oh, yeah. Fried catfish on a bun with mayo and a side of curly fries.”

“I’ll take that and a coffee.”

“Okey-doke. Might take a while. The kitchen’s just started supper service. Drinks coming right up.”

Burroughs shook his head back and forth as far as the stiff neck would allow. “I would never eat a catfish. The rats of the deep. They nibble on the drowned.”

“Well, Bill, I don’t doubt what you say, but may I take this time to ask you a few questions?”

“With one proviso…I’ll need a smoke before we start.”

He reached into his suit pocket and found nothing. “Where are my ciggies? They’ve rotted away.”

“It’s against the law now, Bill, smoking in restaurants.”

“You can’t be serious. What an awful idea…no smoking in restaurants. I’d give my right arm for a puff of a Players right now.”

“Things changed while you were gone…May I ask some questions now?”

“Go ahead, baby, ask away.”

“What was it like during that period when you were ‘gone.’ And why, buried in St. Louis, did you come up in Topeka?”

“Who knows why I came up here. It seems very random. As to what it was like when I was gone, I have only a foggy recall. I remember all of us necronauts, young and old, ‘living’ in tiny, unfurnished cottages. We didn’t sleep, eat, bathe, or watch TV, so we had few household needs. Shelter was very important, however. There was acidic rain every afternoon. Administration had to come around and replace the ruined roofing once a year.”

Burroughs’s drink was served. He took a strong pull on the straw and filled his dry mouth with the vod and Coke. He nearly swooned with the pleasure it gave him.

The Coke prompted me to ask a spontaneous question. “Mr. Burroughs, your taste for heroin and other opiates are well known. Did you do much cocaine?”

“The only way I liked coke was mixed with heroin, right up the mainline.” He mimicked inserting a needle in his forearm.

“Another question…time. How does that work on the other side?”

“You have a wristwatch, my dear. What time is it?”

“Six-twenty.”

“It’s the same there…dinner time. The smell of souring milk in the air, clabber carts pedaling by the little houses, dispensing it in paper cups.”

A server approached our booth with my catfish sandwich, nestled into a plastic basket lined with wax paper and piled with fries. “Enjoy.”

I took an enormous bite of the sandwich and asked my next question with my mouth full. “Were you still addicted after death?”

“Yes, to anything I could get. Soak the flag in heroin and I’ll suck it. But there was nothing I could get. There were rumors of dead chemists who’d set up labs in their little houses and made the very opiates I needed…I never connected with them. It was just that, a rumor.”

Burroughs finished his drink and began spooning clabber into the round hole in the space between his lips as he scolded me. “Mind your manners, my dear. Don’t speak with your mouth full of food. It’s low class.”

I swallowed the lump of fish and bread with coffee. “Sorry, Bill. I’m a little anxious…one more question…I know you’re back just long enough for a late lunch…but imagine for me that you were back here to stay. As a necronaut, with such limited capacities, how would you get by?”

“TV repair. It’s just a matter of changing burned out tubes. I’d get a tube tester, a degausser, and some tools.”

I didn’t bother to go on about the advances in television viewing in the twenty years he had been gone. I was more interested in finishing my fish bun and fries.

He smiled. I could hear his lips cracking as they separated, “I would pursue my other interests, of course, like target-shooting, saving the whales, establishing a sanctuary for abandoned cats and runaway boys.”

“Where would you live? You wouldn’t have a little home anymore.”

“On the street I suppose until some kindly Topekan took me in. I’d sleep in parks. Weather wouldn’t bother me. Rain, snow, ice, summer sun, nothing.”

He nodded and seemed to be going to sleep, until he tapped my knee with his cane. “Help me up, I’m leaving. Lunch is over. I’ve got to get back. My time is up…I have commitments of the flesh…Some poet said that. I forget who. I think he was married to Sylvia Plath.”

I hefted him out of the booth with my elbows tucked under his frail arms. It took him several minutes to steady himself before making a few furtive steps toward the door, depending heavily on his wobbly cane.

“Goodbye, Bill. Now I’ll miss you all over again.”

“I’ll be back,” he said, “some time or another. We’ll have dinner.”

A server opened the heavy door for him and he shuffled out onto Arden Boulevard. For a moment, he was bathed in the lurid neon lights of the Squat ‘n’ Gobble, but soon passed into the shadows, gone again.

Windows lap up the rust belt, entire counties at a time. Gram’s in the seat next to me, working her way through Matthew and Mark and their two brothers. Crossing the New York-Pennsylvania border, Gram tells me mom got married again. “She said to wait till we were at least six hours outside Buffalo,” Gram says, “in case you wanted to jump ship,” nudging me with the knuckle doubling as a bookmark between gospels. “You know how much she loves you,” Gram adds, me not quite overboard but queasy over what I’d thought would be easy sailing.

The bus dumps us into a parking lot somewhere in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the night sky is billboards and fast-food signs and every slogan and jingle you’ve ever heard. “Get in,” my mom says from an idling car.

“You got married,” I say, the timbre somewhere between hello and huh, my mom glancing at Gram, who shrugs, saying, “I waited till past Erie.”

“We’re going to my reception,” my mom says.

“Wait!” I blurt. “We’re going right now?” My mom winces and flips her keys around in her hand. “Right from here?” I tell her we’ve been on a bus for two days. I tell her I need a shower. I tell her I want to “fully appreciate the big event.”

“You smell fine,” she says, snorting and hoisting my luggage into the trunk beside crushed Solo cups and two-liter soda bottles. “Besides, this’ll be pretty quick.” And I see the sheet cake on the backseat, “Congratulations, Constance and Morris!” in fat curlicues across its flawless surface.

The reception’s on the second floor of a country western bar, where a life-sized cardboard cutout of Dale Earnhardt presides. And there’s a neon BINGO sign partially obscured by a paper placemat with the sheet cake message on it.

Clapping his arm around my shoulders, Morris hands me a shot of whiskey and calls me “kid.” Everyone asks if I’m the award-winning journalist, the one who works on a survival ranch, the one who’ll soon be awarded a doctorate. I look over at my mom, who pinches my arm and says, “Don’t be so humble!” And a lady wearing a bolo tie says, “I could never dangle from the side of a mountain on a skinny rope,” and I say, “Me, neither,” and my mom slaps me and I say something, but my mom talks over me, loudly, says that I’m also an artist, and brags about my cathedral frescoes, finally adding she’s the source of my creativity, that it “runs in the family”—wink, pinch, nudge, whiskey.

A woman offers me a Dixie plate of Doritos and the road’s still spitting long yellow hyphens from under my feet. Someone pops the cake out from within its plastic coffin and a dozen disposable cameras start clicking. Gram leads everyone in prayer and Morris smears frosting on mom’s face and a kid behind me gulps Diet Dr. Pepper right from the bottle.

A hirsute version of Morris stands in front of the “I” in BINGO and sermonizes about the “rare diamond of true love” and “keeping the flame alive” and “putting your faith in the Man Upstairs.” Everyone nods and lifts their Solo cup for toast after toast, the speeches getting longer then shorter then longer, the love more urgent, more bedazzled, God going from Chicken Soup for the Soul to Kill Bill.

The road finally slows and we all get out. Maybe we speed. Maybe we forget which direction we’re going and then just watch the counties macerate into the word “meaningful.” Maybe we become our own gospel. All of us: the rancher, the writer, the medic, the whiskey-breathed one they call “Little Michelangelo.”

Away from the slurry of cardboard cutouts, we say “Fuck it!” each of us knowing that everyone, everywhere, becomes someone else when drinks are on the house and love is what the hirsute version of Morris says it is.

My mom appears and I agree with her about whatever, folding everything within a blanket of good intentions. We all sing our congratulations, even Little Michelangelo, whose face is a neon sign. Then we all look up and wait for light to turn the night off and the jingles to sound like something brand new, something we can love.

Lopez’s micro-fictions here build strange worlds through subtraction, prohibition, and absurd instruction, exposing how much ordinary existence depends on fragile assumptions. They dissolve the coordinates of personhood, perception, memory, nature, work, and social life, until even everyday things become difficult to imagine. Their dark humor comes from the collision between the flat certainty of the instructions and the instability of the worlds they describe, revealing how language itself struggles to account for ever-slimmer pickings.

Follow that by reading “The Future Home of the Wymans,” which we published in 2019; and “Say No More,” which we published in 2022 in Big Other’s Puerto Rican Writers Folio: A Hauntology. Also, read Joe Sacksteder’s review of Lopez’s The Best People. And cap it off by listening to our podcast interview with Lopez.

What Not to Do, How Not to Live

Don’t get born, don’t be a person, don’t get born as a person to a family of people. Don’t be black or white or brown and don’t be short or fat or skinny. Don’t be a brother or sister or cousin or uncle or mother or father. Don’t go to school or get a job or consult with colleagues or attend meetings. Never sit at a table where other people are already seated.

A Church by Daylight

The sky is not up in the sky and the moon is no longer the moon and there are no trees or dogs or electric fans or kitchenware and there is no daylight savings time because there is no daylight to save.

What’s Not on the Radio

The song isn’t on the radio because there is no song, the same as there is no radio. If there were a song it would be a slow blues or shuffle, probably in E major, probably called Milk-Cow Blues. There would be no person in the song as subject or object, no milk or cow mentioned in the lyrics, just as there would be no one playing the song and no one singing the song. Perhaps there would be the memory of a song, something like a faint echo barely audible, but there will be no one to remember or hear it.

Some Other Metal Than Earth

There might still be dirt and air and mountains but it doesn’t seem possible if there’s no sky up in the sky or no moon hanging in the middle of it. Just as carrots don’t seem possible though they grow in the same dirt. But the dirt carrots grow in is called soil and there’s likely no soil. There’s no way to differentiate dirt from soil, if there is a difference. There’s no optimal time to grow carrots in either dirt or soil because there are no seasons. There’s no fall and no spring, which is what’s best for carrots, but carrots need fertilizer and there’s probably no fertilizer.

The World Must Be Peopled

Go to a place called Road and try to make a life there. Learn a trade. Be a plumber like the guy in that movie or an electrician like the guy in that other movie or be a carpenter like Jesus even though people say that Jesus couldn’t have been a carpenter because there was a paucity of trees in Galilee so he must’ve been a mason.

The Gun Is Where Any Could Find It

You live in America so there are guns. Always have your guns with you, take them with you to school and to work and to the movies and to the mall and to the barber or beauty shop. Have a gun for your right hand and a gun for your left hand and keep one tucked inside a boot or shoe. Only a certain kind of person looks at a lower-case r and sees a gun. Always be that kind of person.

When That Final Trumpet

When that final trumpet sounds
(and when was the first one?),
when it’s time to cross that bridge
into something you can’t quite see from here,
stretch and strain as you might,
will you at least try to be dignified,
or will you cackle at some private joke
and spoil the mood?

It’s a knife-edge, that final-moment scenario.
Lament the books you didn’t read,
or celebrate the perfect mocha brownies
you ate along the way?

Maybe you’ll be distracted by
the visitors, who elbow each other
to get near the bedside.
Or for the first time you’ll appreciate the blood
flowing in your veins, your ability to bend
your big toe, because how many more
opportunities will there be, unless
we have toes in the afterlife, or
reincarnate into something with toes
instead of, say, a lily
or a butterfly?

But then you’ll feel annoyed at yourself
for such trivial thoughts at a momentous time.
It was ever thus.

And as the monitor emits that long, mournful beep
and you feel yourself swinging up and out, and
you’re light as an eyelash,
no time, no time, say goodbye
and laugh.

A Yea or a Nay Is No Answer to Why

The books you wrote
arrive at the wake,
official mourners.
“It was time,” they murmur.
“We were ready.”

Did you regret those long hours at the desk,
like Casaubon, searching for the key
to explain all religions,
unlock the riddle of patriarchy?

But all you ever did was un-explain.

When asked for your finest moments,
your niece recalls how the two of you
took turns reading Alice in Wonderland aloud
and roared with laughter,
how you baked cookies together,
addressing an imaginary TV audience
in faux English accents.

But now your ghost has hoisted itself up,
stands wobbling on the rim of the casket.
You natter on about climbing a steep mountain path
red-faced and wheezing, heart heaving.
No one there to see your accomplishment,
but you looked down through hemlocks
at the rushing stream below.
“Swift Run, it was called,” you mumble.

The guests at the wake,
embarrassed on your behalf,
talk among themselves:

“The undertaker did a nice job.”
“Doesn’t look too bad for an old crone.”
“She never could get to the point.”

Quiz for the Afterlife

It’s halfway down the questionnaire
they give you at the Pearly Gates:
“Explain your faith, or lack thereof.”
I take a pen and try to draw,
but lack of skill yields mere cartoons.

In panel one, a church pew holds
a stick-limbed girl, who puts new words
to every hymn as friends nearby
try not to laugh: “When will this all
be o-oh-ver, I’m so bor-ored.”

Here’s panel two. She grits her teeth
as words balloon from mouths of nuns
in tarnished haloes: “Think like us
or go to hell.” It wounds her soul.
She wants no heaven without her Dad.

The third scene shows our heroine
imagining how God must feel.
With eyes closed now, she concentrates.
The church dissolves, she floats above,
does cartwheels in the stars.

Black Forest

In that black forest,
we’re strafed by
silence.
Sunlight on
forest floor
a death knell
to those for whom
shadow means safety.
We huddle against
the earth,
the leaf detritus
of generations
embraces us,
says, “You are home.”

The thrush trills
that evening is near.
Bats swoop down in a
froth of beating wings.
Night, and brilliant stars
through the branches
catch in our throats,
like songs we want to sing
but have forgotten.

The Dark, the Light

It’s a mystery, what the crystal
knows, what the runes
reveal. Words
conceal it.

Cards, tea leaves, planchette:
stasis after a whirlwind.
Ballast. And when
the dream sword
is drawn,
we rise.

Amends

Pinto beans. Their camel
coat. A bowl like
a halved pumpkin;
how tall its sides slant.
How soaking thrusts
water up into millimeters
of concentration.

Five minutes more
to overnight supine—lie as
fetal as sleep forfeiting
its heat. So my eyes won’t
dry out from voracity.

To surfeit myself
I needn’t describe.

Amends

The house smells
of apples after just
an hour or
two’s absence.

There is no more
now. We have been
cohabiting with some
secret fermentation.

Some filth
as transparent as
desire; some attachment
as filthy as the occupation

of rubbing an eraser.
Does erasing sculpt
the eraser’s loaf-
like wedge or scuff our
miscellaneously emoting

“oops”es as it paces
the paper? Our to-do
list is forbidden from adding
captives. What

is coincident and what
is reciprocal? My grip
experimenting with
your doorknob, your
hand jangling mine? What

might bother to
exalt all our panting? Some
intermediate zone behind the naked
walls medicine has infested?

Amends

blue naproxen bluer
than viagra blue

blue I ingest
to disaffect my tennis elbow

how can I not remember
over and over
modeling again that injurious gesture
there’s no “this” without
even half a picture
or the poignancy it intimates

injurious gesture
impressionistic mechanics
my tendons retain
limp and miserly
an old knuckleballer packing one side
of his satchel with receipt
papers glossy as crickets

do you describe pain
as radiating
fire or ice
a numbing bonded
to scalpel or
bib’s smother
exponentials
or sleigh bells

cupping my hands around
the weight of water
is pretty dire
a flushing bluer
than naproxen blue

I must confess
I am cauterized
by carelessness
in the presence of others

in embalmed company
cocked-up with menthol and camphor
I lack for fostering
calibrations of care
some self could score
hash after hash
space
invaders in their inexorable
columns

some self believing somewhere
a slide rule isn’t
the stub of a dodo

Amends

night squirms

ladybug in reverse
black elytra
daubs of blood

night twitches
with none of my ideas

atop this hard and borrowed
mattress an ache like
a vine splints and strangles
the side I’ve been
handcuffed to

and I am absorbed
utterly by the screaming
the toads recycle

Amends

the fig tree has gone out
its flimsy oyster shell split

no more prefiguring
as many arms as paradigms
of flaw and epitome
darkened life five a.m.’s
brownout anthropomorphizes
as colossus

eidolon in a bottled Venus

spring obtains and
the air exchange sweats
through the carpentry

one morning, rising
from the toilet
I stumbled against the door
my wristwatch’s crown
and bezel turned adze

the core accident unhollowed
peeking still out of those
palmate rudiments

Amends

the stove coil
a spinning wheel
the knob snaps

into its detent
this hidden noise
of what’s disallowed

transmutes early into
latethe last minute
into time to spare

to fit into daughterhood I had
to resist crouching and
stretch to fill that sultry

chamber taken to more monstrous
extremes day by day
the rice spits forever boiling

over helpfullya wooden
stirring knocks it down but first
gravity must be centered

a simple experiment in improvement
becomes a promise in the toils
of plundering’s

rhythmI plant
my leg straight
up to my waist

and tear
my wantonness
in two

(Image: Barnett Newman’s Cathedra (1951))

Perfume

In the expensive gym, the girls are uncertain. They parade their bodies, young or old or approaching some pure azimuth of animé hyperbole. Or they are aspirational, regretful, immature, or aged, because here in the precincts of the expensive gym, even the women stay girls in how they parade. Here please find body professors in blue shirts, ready to explain and instruct, cajole, gently insult. Here please find an ideal of consumption, one blasted from the video monitor and even in the nightclub dark of the classes, lit by epilepsy-inducing strobes, by the cathedral heights of the neon-blue hallway you traverse in order to enter the peak zone of the parade, the one where men wear their tropes, pecs, triceps, and abs, the competing religions of gladiators with numbered sport shirts signifying whether they love that lazy, gifted, tiny plug of a soccer player or the one with the imitable work ethic who disputably cares little for his teammates—in that blue hallway, at any rate, please find more images of the ideal. Here, then, please blast into the huge converted industrial space with its cramped machines made for more cramping, around which you navigate invisible social etiquette made up of tradition and innovation. Be sure not to trip on the invisible silk of the agreements since, in this expensive gym, in the antique binary, women keep their gazes down and bodies exposed. Somber rituals attend all rites, especially true for the women, gravest when approaching exercises for their gluteus minimus or maximus, signifying the fecund. Huge plasticine balls are here hefted instead of anything agricultural while men continue their grunting work alongside. It is, in fact, an ancient village gathered around a watering well. Even the act of drinking water requires a bright screen, one you press because this is how your logic has conquered your libido: you must figure out the screen before the water flows. If there is a perfume to these women, it is contained in the makeup glow of afterward, in the private worry as they get dressed in the locker room, berry nipples always toward the room’s center, a quick glance to ensure they still exist in the mirror stage, a subject with the choice to anoint herself, bearing the aroma of all the gazes amassed out on the major stage of the expensive gym. At night, again, finally no victim of global capitalism, they undress again and waft about all the gazes they amassed that day ripped from such diverse locales, moss-grove, iron-red soil, fuming earth, all to remind themselves that perfume can also delight the wearer.

Obsidian

I always lost myself in groups, being made of lighter elements formed where heat spills into water, and always I sought the cool turning of becoming a sheath of glass, hard and tightened, in which others mostly saw themselves and not how good I was reflecting them while all the while some small part turned brittle, so much so that when the doctor of my discontent sought a new scalpel, only this one angle would help. These days, I seek groups and whenever that blade swivels, wishing to cut, I stop to remember our sweet beginnings: silt and sun, water and a mountain so hungry to express itself its tongue was fire and the sound it made spilling into sea was like nothing ever heard since—someone beyond me and that first story of connection.

Rumbles

To the woman with the cancer diagnosis, he listened carefully. She had on her bucket list to sleep with someone other, she said, but for some reason he wanted to make her happy and did his best until, to avoid being pitied after she went in for the first of the shots, she blocked him. Making others happy was not the problem: mortal gravity and leverage were, and he brought the baggage about his ex-wife with him everywhere he went. Seeing his cheery, small-boy smile under the porkpie hat, you could tell he had been a youngest son well loved by mother, granny, aunties, older sisters. To carry around this grievance about the ex had to do with his love for the daughter; he was afraid the ex prevented the next generation’s fountain of love which he deserved without having to work for it. For one thing, he left wife and daughter in Sweden and came here to this tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic for a better life. He shared all this with you while you both sat on the seawall watching tourists disembarking, similarly looking for their own release from home lives, wishing to be brought to the exact edge of sensitivity and thrill-seeking their sensitivity might no longer be able to handle. They could go jet-skiing, canyoning; they could swim with dolphins, sight whales, shock their very bones. The boats rattled up to the pier and those watching absorbed the rattle, all on a spectrum of thrill-seeking, all with some bucket list to be crossed out the same way the woman had wanted it. Under his battered hat, he smiled his lost older-boy smile that had been useful at fending off the greater disturbance they were all trying to fend off, what shook the ground beneath them, the swell of life with all its indignities.

Palimpsest

What is it about certain women who sit with one leg crossed at the table, and serenely attack one task at a time? They cannot leave the oven glass until they have scrubbed it fully. Their libido is shocking, empathic, a fierce hug, their faces glowing from sunscreen. You work at the table with her and are shocked at her beauty; it perfumes the air around you as you, too, try to tick off tasks with your method more akin to a butterfly scenting nectar sun-warmed at the right moment. Your grammatical structures may echo this habit. Out in the world, you have learned, whenever you are about to leave a place, you see that people rush in, as if to proleptically fill the gap you will leave. Yesterday, at the lake where you swam naked with women of different generations, you left early because you were trying not to be a butterfly; you were trying to be prudent, to hug the shore, but it is hard to change old habits. Returning to shore, you swam against this small current. If you called out to the chorus of windsounds, who would come to your aid? You sat at the bank and the wind caressed the surface. Your friend, roughly your age, paused the car soon after pulling out and said: “I want to take this moment. I want us to acknowledge that I will really miss you. You’re my anchor, my bud.” This idea of missing is quite difficult for you—as if it were cauterized out of your psyche back in childhood when you were left alone, but it remains the dimmest imprint. To try to take that in, you looked at the surface of her, the raw, narrow, hungry, present face, the eyes with their warmth welling. Sometimes, she has problems with people who don’t look straight into her eyes, but recently your daughters have been telling you that you have a gaze a bit too penetrating. Their friends say it is as if you look into the back of their skulls. Call this “habit survival.” You are looking for their erasures and hills, the ventricles and sulci, the crenellations of habit and longing; and in this way, you will find a place to attach. Were you a pseudopod in another life? Is there not enough suffering in this one life for people to go seeking it in others? They want these layers; these might give them meaning. The richness of time is feeling all the striations in this one life, in the lake that will become part of the story of your friendship, cradling your head so it could be still for once. To have an injury means to allow silence. To go on a trip means to allow in no silence, all injury. To allow things to change is that you must trust in the endless recording stone that carries all the truths. The woman envies artists. “I’m so logical,” she says, her admiration a sheen across her beautiful face. Her mother had to send her and her siblings away after the father died; she was raised in an Indian orphanage and learned how to be neat. She speaks many languages and is starting to learn Korean; she loves K-pop. In the shed where you write, a hatbox—a present from the bald pioneer woman boss from your first serious job—holds all the tiny notebooks where you wrote observations such as: “In Italy, mothers cook for school on Mother’s Day”; “Nosepicker in a fancy suit with cuffs and manicured nails turns away from wife and slides his finger down her neck”; “The men come in to play cards, shrugging on entry, take ice cream out of the machine, singing opera”; “The underside of a garment shaped like bare olive trees; “She never missed an opportunity to either humiliate or glorify me”; “The only difference between a casket and throne is a few pieces of wood”; “The former POW who says, ‘Seventeen years of retirement here. We’re lucky. Let’s pray for good weather.’” The river of words—it will soothe but never understand the stone that contains them all.

A Starling’s Defense

Ambience and verse
on the surface of the clouds.

A mouthful of moist élan
in a pocketful of wind.

A talon of fuzzy-
green caterpillars.

Tall moonflowers
with immobile heads,

eye above as eye below,
following the draft of the shadow,

or the slim slow spiral
of the carrion wasp

gorging on
yesterday’s dead.

Into the Unseen

And it goes deeper
than you could imagine,

deeper still than the very last layer,
for there is no full stop:

the butcherbird scries these pastures
since the day the sky

reflects in the water;
she knows each cell

is linked to one another,
deep to their eternal end:

all those circles of infinity
bound together in a single forever

of voles and beetles
and crickets and parasites.

[Insert Raptor Here]

They wanted us to say, we’re beautiful killing machines in beautiful killing fields, or through the scrubby woodland until we reach the pudgy pixies in the forest. They wanted us to say, we drive market fluctuations, and never quite know when to bottom out.

They wanted us to say they wanted to get a panda into this poem.

Instead, we inserted something else, something mildly terrifying:

Imagine, it descends from up high, way above the clouds, or a brief flicker on your retinal lens…and suddenly it falls: you hear the whoop! the scratching molecules of air (and you know that sound, you’re a warm-blooded creature, after all), then that slow whoop down the tunnel, that last outburst of despair…

Then, you’re nearly there, admiring that exquisite mother-of-pearl inlay in the more common pearly gates, but well-crafted lacquer work on the doorframe.

Instead, we’d rather say nothing at all; but isn’t that always the way when you’re put under heavy pressure?

The Rhinoceros Affair

Even after the party, after being plied with all manner of quaint aphorisms, I still hungered for his touch.

I couldn’t resist spreading the word that he was the best ever to grace my ramshackle cabins.

And, as I told the others, he made my blood simmer, broil and roil.

’Course, the theory goes all the magic came from that single, majestic horn, sharpened to an immaculate point.

There were those who enviously wanted to lop it off.

Others figured it might be useful later, and considered renting a warehouse down on the docks, so whichever parts would be harvested and sold might be hastily transported anywhere in the known world.

Late in the early hours, after the last nightcap, his legend still circulates the empty halls.

Rats, Sparrows, Mosquitoes, and Flies

After a third breakfast pestered by mysterious buzzing flies, with his mouth full of bananas and buttered raisin buns, the great dictator announced his new campaign.

The real mouthpiece of the party, a woman named Hailey Comet, who proffered feathers and felt fabrics, had her underlings denounce the pests of the cities: the rats, the sparrows, the mosquitoes; and, in particular, she noted, the flies, who had a penchant for the great dictator’s sweet lemon teas and those cream cakes he ate almost every morning for breakfast.

The Four Pests Must Be Eradicated!

stated the headline in the Agricultural Daily News.

The article went on to announce rates of pay for each and every of the four critters presented to the Ministry of Pest Control in an unanimated state of arrest. For rats, the tail would suffice. For flies and mosquitoes, the whole body would need to be presented, and would be sorted and weighed by the ounce. The dead sparrows would fetch the most, and their eggs, half their dead mother’s bodyweight.

Tomba, a lad of no more than fifteen, grabbed his slingshot from under his bed on the way to school. He figured he might supplement the family’s watermelon sales income with a handful of sparrows and a couple of rats. After all, what could be the use of a sparrow or a rat, he muttered to himself. Right out of his house, he spied a sparrow on his neighbor’s rooftop, whipped out his handy minion, David, and shot a rock. The rock missed the sparrow, but smashed one of his neighbor’s clay shingles.

He ran, and kept running.

Meanwhile, back at the capitol, the great dictator sat in his boudoir and dispelled all his imagination to his court. The butlers had spatulas, fragrant towels, wet wipes, and freshly laundered underpants at the ready.

“Actually, I think it’s the sparrows,” the great dictator said, “not the flies, after all.”

Slipping into his underwear, he glanced at his fourth butler, Amagoo, and asked if there was a full moon tonight. Amagoo nodded and sprayed a great dash of LOVEINDASUNSHINE in the great dictator’s general direction.

“But, in the end,” said the great General himself, scratching his testicles, “it’s all about the intellectual property rights.”

Acid Rain

That eve, the herons landed on Honey Lake and were fussing and fussing, strutting the shores in a frenzy, poking each other, scratching the dirt, pulling up riverweed and tossing it fretfully into the woods.

From the edge of the woods, the hares stared on. They knew the oak leaves protected them.

Up in the maples, a magpie heaved, then puffed up his chest, believing his time had surely come.

Soon the frogs chimed in, singing off-key—this was no mating call, more a call to arms.

A field mouse zigged and zagged down from the upper meadow, stopping briefly at each unexposed boulder to see who had previously engraved their initials. He saw his own next to his first love’s, and resolved to scratch them out.

Field Marshal Toad led his well-equipped regiment straight through the woods and down to the riverbank, where the ranks dispersed, each setting up their own rat-saddle and tack, and raising their glasses to the mothergod, Mrs. Frogmoore.

The lake water bubbled and fizzed and swirled. Microns of unnatural elements whipped through her confluences, strange shimmering colors, some never seen before. (Fragments of a life once led, on another continent in another constellation.) And along the edges, a damselfly skimmed the surface searching for life, but found no one.

On the shore, the frogs were delighted as the worms rose dutifully to be devoured.

(Image: Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity-Nets [XSHTQ] (2017))

Meditation on Roget’s Paradox of Choice

You have your preferences proclivities
inclinations predispositions
tendencies favorites

You make your    choices
exercising your    free will          your     autonomy
your         volition            your     voice
your         liberty              your     judgment
at your    supermarket

You have options alternatives
you pick what’s to your liking
pick take grab
pick take grab
decide determine opt
decide determine opt
deliberate adjudicate select
pick take grab
you are judge and referee you are umpire
each selection is also a rejection
you accept this avocado               you decline another
repudiate the raspberries            spurn the squash
turn down the turnips                  jettison the jam

Selection is about what you want             what you will
What you wish    what you desire
What you covet   what you crave              what you fancy
What you hanker for
What you yearn for         what you itch for          what you thirst for

Within limits naturally   the limits of your wallet
What does your wallet want
Where does your wallet go
You can wander at will
ogle and fondle
the pure products of Ameriker
but when you get to the register
you must hold up
your end of the bargain

Picture yourself entering plenitude
profusion multiplicity abundance
the heaps the reams the scores the scads
the volume the slew the tons upon tons
the excess the plethora the superfluity
the flood the mountains the piles the surplus
the bonanza the deluge the bevy the surfeit
the oodles the throngs the legions the armies

I must confess
in the easy abundance
I am overwhelmed I am overwhelmed
by the number of whatnots and wares
it is numbing I am numbed by the number of goods
the items all the items the goodly items
it’s daunting dispiriting disheartening
I’m intimidated demoralized debilitated dismayed
unbalanced unsettled unstringed
I’ve abandoned what’s valuable practical compatible
for all that is maximal palpable cashable
the chimera of what’s fashionable collapsible extractable
I expended my rational capital
my basketful of taxable laughable lacrimal capital

On the pure products
I’ve spent my deposits
my days and my dollars
My terrors are boundless
My dreams and my doubt
though both may be groundless
will never average out

$$$upermarket Cento

I’m all lost in the supermarket    I can no longer shop happily

tripping in the fruit     aisle    Falling for her   berry lightness

the burden of debt   as your granny might say   heavy as sin —

the lettuce full and moist with    a fresh spray of mist and neon   my cart wobbles giddily

whispering to the saints in supermarkets

dreaming of your enumerations!    I wander in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans

Everything is fine, will continue to be fine, will eventually  get   even   better as long as the

supermarket does not slip

I’m all tuned in, I see all the programs    I save coupons from packets of tea

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

The supermarket does not change except for the better

Note: Certain lines are adapted from writing by Wanda Coleman, Don DeLillo, Alan Gillis, Allen Ginsberg, Juan Felipe Herrera, Mona Van Duyn, and The Clash

Happy birthday, Jorge Luis Borges! Here are some quotes from the writer:

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

“Before I ever wrote a single line, I knew, in some mysterious and therefore unequivocal way, that I was destined for literature. What I didn’t realize at first is that besides being destined to be a reader, I was also destined to be a writer, and I don’t think one is less important than the other.”

“Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.”

“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”

“In the critic’s vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

“Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”

“That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvelous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable….”

“I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”

“A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.”

“As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don’t know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves—and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity—are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we’ll be just, well, cosmopolitans.”

“Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.”

“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”

“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”

“Years of solitude had taught him that, in one’s memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises.”

“Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment—the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.”

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

“Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.”