A fetid smell of not-quite-alive. Ad memorandum concealing little foyer, “My roommate's mom died last month,” she said. “Don't mind the mess.” I didn't. The only salvageable personal affect was an old Singer sheened in dust.
We rounded the corner and she led me upstairs. Underfoot, the matted carpet was dingy, catching my socks on the steps.
Demarcating the two railroaded bedrooms, a rifle lay.
I began to salivate in this wretched place.
I found her through last-ditch desperation, combing through some gimmicky gig site–professional cuddlers for hire. Her profile was a forgotten relic of pandemic loneliness. Called at midnight, back in the city that same afternoon. Smiled reassuringly through therapy; parents expressing relief, gratitude for my resilience. An hour from this intervention I sought comfort in the arms of a stranger. Over the phone she spoke rapidly, a gnostic quality to articulations so nebulous–trailing, disjointed; it thrilled me. Her voice possessed such neurotic intensity. A hark that jostled me from my brooding.
I lapped up her unintelligible gospel, especially when it veered into freneticism.
And so there I was, at the top of the stairs, rifle and obese pitbull staring back at me.
I was deeply sheltered though nothing scared me anymore.
Yet these surroundings were staggeringly unfamiliar in a way that evaded hostility.
I was in another world, one of filth and poverty, desperation, illness, death.
I had gone from watching Water's Multiple Maniacs that morning and effectively entered “that world”.
Her room–a mess of visually tolled warnings warning of an oncoming stroke. Skeletal wires and circuit boards snaked her walls. Shelves bore tools I could not name. Hardware and stones and ash-greedy windowsill and three monitors, arrays of fantasy wear and toys and emptied estradiol bottles lining her desk. It was disorienting and I relished it. I had chosen this, chosen to come and she had soft eyes and trembling hands and a racing tongue and a story so unwound it made me forget about yesterday and wanting to lie on the train tracks so everything else could be ground to a bloody pulp.
After hours of talking we both went hungry and stared at each other feverishly. We made to the bed like animals; shared desperation overtook us.
I was scared and sad and my heart broke open many times as I felt littler and littler. It was beautiful but all wrong.
I need to write this in segments. I don't think I will ever forget her.
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The sink was clod with a pile of dirt. Out from it, a thousand shattered porcelain mouths gaped. Centipedes snaked through the bathmat and I felt like I was going to die. Hunched over the toilet wringing chicken vindaloo out of my cunt scared I was going to get sepsis or something. Christ. I tracked the bathroom with sativa laden vision and the dirt in the tub on the floor in the basin and the fissured ceiling and flushing humid walls but all I found was two ply and I just prayed like hell.
I trundled back to the bed and she grasped me in apology. We watched some sort of Starseed documentary on youtube and her granite eyes widened while she told me her thoughts on transhumanism. She kept apologizing for hurting me, but we were both too far gone to realize my vagina and her cock were mortal-pestling the remnant spice.
I crawled to the window and fixed a pillow behind me. Stuffing was pouring out of it like guts. Poor thing was gashed. I raised up the window and lit a cigarette. We looked at each other a long while. She moved closer, resting her head near my pretzeled legs and so I stubbed the stale Newport and laid supine beside her. She turned then to face me, raising her torso with bent arm and her black-walnut curls were all sticky and static. She furrowed her brows as she looked me square in the face and told me that when she looked at me, she saw fire.
She told me she thinks she loves me, falling in love but that it was real reverent shit. Her pupils mooned big eclipse. I said an awful lot after that; all sincere, truthful to inhabiting this marsupium. It houses the wretched indigence of two one-time lovers, both dying, one a mother with a thirteen year-old girl and a head that's gone, she said, ‘cause of my schizoaffective. I, the other.
I left early that morning. I had worn a romper over–fitting for that rumpus room–and drew a shirt out of her hamper for more cover. I still wear it to sleep, but I don't have it with me now here at school. It's at my family's house.
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Cherlin rimmed her eyes with yellow cream paint. She did this because its consistency reminded her of foam insulation. She let it fill her esophagus and trachea once. She lubricated her throat best she could with trickled glycerin. The sweet pooled a bit in her lungs. Cherlin breathed shallow as to carry that growing cough til she swelled all up with that pressurized bile.
You'd think she'd die right away with all that junk pumped clear inside her, but she couldn't seem to make herself die.
Anyway, her eyes are done now. Convex abscess, Nice red weepers And how she'd get that phoam-again once it set enough, couple vessels burst in her temples she'd just cough and it'd pop right out. Two sticky casts. You'd know how it'd be smothered with the takings of her insides. That's just how some things are.
She did lots of experiments just like this.
If you asked her why, she'd shrug and say,
"Because my lungs are flush like butterfly wings and I want to be outside.”
I want to carry myself aside this hollow mound. My skin is sallow and my knees are riddled with digging scabs.
Repeats this to herself lots.
Cherlin lives in a brick walled house with low walls.
Ranch home.
She lives in Iowa with
her grandmother
and thats it.
Her grandma is in an iron lung, Cherlin is all alone.
Much like dying,
Cherlin couldn't make herself ugly when she tried. And she tried real hard.
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A small mole blinks. Eyes rimmed sediment. An unwanted figure aboveground. “Let’s play pretend,” a voice warbles from the upturned topsoil. The little girl spoke with her mouth pressed into the dirt, mouthing bits of ground as she does so. Sparrow kisses form loamy mounds. The mole whiskers twitch, tossing air upside grin. Nose furrows. It blinks again.
The girl’s father mows the lawn. He uses a mechanical pushcutter. The blades churn from strained, pushing forearms.
The girl has no pockets. A tulle tutu with cheap plastic glitter garnishing blooms beneath a gingham collared shirt that used to be her brother’s. Eyelashes so thick surrounding wellspring eyes ring around like fur. She’s a little furry herself, too. Vellous hairs bloom like algae about her arms and legs, forming whorls down her back which you wouldn’t know existed anyhow but they really truly do.
“Darla, Darla—there’s ambrosia left over for lunch, that and tuna salad,” Father bellows. He is behind the garage with the plastic siding. She doesn’t say anything.
The mower lurches when the blades catch. “Fucking root,”
The girl Darla grovels. She’s eating grubs off the ground.
The girl is sick today. Norovirus, mom Ruth sighs. Bare feet, long painted toenails flap on fuzzy slides. The peeling laminate flooring catches sticky on the undersides.
“God fucking damnit, Ruth! When will you learn?” She feels her father’s steps turn the corner.
This betrays a certain kind typicality of the mudworms that few fully account for. They grow and whirr, yes, but only at the pale-blue suggestion of a cracked dawn sky. Listen - do it hunger fortitude?
The voices thinning muffle by walls. A suggested egg-skin yolk on bitter plate?
She isn’t sure.
She’s running a real temperature, ruddy rosepetal cheeked her veins all jutting out a conflued spiderweb of all things there is could be early morning.
“Dear”.. Momma palms the forehead. “Damn…” Could cook breakfast right up on you.”
Darla’s eyes hurt open. They are clogged with rheum.
“Sandman came,”
Ruthmomma braces a meager smile.
Darla’s back tongue of mouth so swollen she can’t speak, the
She’s got anticipatory saliva dribbling out so she’s a basset hound with red soggy eyes waiting for the bile wave to crest onshore goddamn monsoon leaching dark off the back of her throat, claps a commiserating whine as her maxim.
Assidual mom sigh breaths draw away and Darla is alone.
In her room the walls are painted mint. Her mom likes the color accents to be brown so she’s been calling it Ice cream room. Mom taught her how to take down stickers a penned cursive alphabet–she was proud of her progress– and mom told her the drawing and the stickers and the bug exoskeletons and gathered leaffall clump terrariums and god forbid the ghosties of spilled acrylic which cracked the carpet in two, made the room awful, so awful, and dirty. Unbelievable to do these things to such a nice home.
Darla’s room is still filthy but a different type not one by choice but as Darla contested filth. Real filth. She hated having the throw up bowl beside her. It took up space as a bad aquarium. She could see little bits of fruit cocktail and raisins all jimmied up and swimming inside there.
When she stirs from dreams, they’re the bad, heavy kind where her limbs feel too heavy and she’s stuck climbing through staticky space heavy blanket lint mold.
It’s very not good but something sores her brain so she doesn’t want the fight in staying awake.
Down - arguing. The house hums with malfeasance.
And you’ve gotta wonder, what kind of knock job is this?
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Carmen lays supine on the beach. Beside her, a sunken statue. She crowned it this—a piece of flotsam, likely driftwood. A disfigured head shorn from a ship’s helm a diaphanous film flung across her sage-green eyes. She traced whorls on its now-decreed crown. Like a rogue porcupine quill the scalp splintered beneath her index finger.
She brought her finger to her face, cradled by her right fingertips. A dark salt swollen hair adorned the sliver. Microscopic oceanic workings, perhaps the surf, maybe the wind—rendered it precariously inextricable…melded over time? She considered this, turning her hand the other way, the flesh now flush with the sand. There seemed to be dark pooling at her nailbed. It didn’t really feel all that deep, she thought. But no matter. It can wait. She noticed parts of the wood were visibly spongy. She righted herself, rocking once on the balls of her feet. She stepped on a mermaid purse. That was on accident.
She padded along the beach. The waves caught her every fifth step. Carmen fixed her gaze on the obfuscation.
It was alarmingly large and eclipsed the coming dawn. It looked like a second ribbed moon. Since it was wintertime the skin remained plasticine and firm from distension. Her legs gave from the choking percipience, awash in odious fumes. A big whale, harpooned and corked
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I want you to know how much I hate you, I said. The words clung to the dead air.
He seized me furiously, lunging out from matted carpet and the walls were slick with our perspiration. We could have left at any time, I say, but instead we told ourselves we liked it there. Confined in a Punch and Judy show.
I performed the coda spectacle he demanded. He, indulgently leering, lock after lock of chestnut shorn. He was all sprawled and thrashing like an animal. I imbibed my revulsion–reduced to a pathetic supplicant to this leper we crowned love.
He drooled, lolling tongue and loathsome grin. I set down the shears: replaced with an electric razor, guardless. I stroke his soft-clipped little lamby puppy-dog hair all gentle while I graze him down to the quick. A little nick, drawn blood. I drive the toothy blade deeper into his nape. Rivulets of blood streak down his back but he hardly notices. So I drive the blade all through his scalp, scoring the tender flesh. After the flesh his ecstasy lapsed.
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‘There's something about it that is so sick. It's palpable, this looming dread. It's nauseating,’ I murmured to her, leaning over her seated shoulders.
‘This one's the worst of them.’ I tapped the page.
I want to consecrate this event now. It is 163 days old on a 9 day.
I have roused something horrible and have been bottle feeding it. It spits and chokes yet never relents its colic tantrums.
It's the only way I can think of this thing in a way that makes sense. This baby is jacked up and has gripped me in a tailspin those around me with any modicum of logic and common sense have tried to wrest me from.
But I'm in Oz now, and I don't plan on coming back.
I met a girl, know a girl, loathed a girl deep into obsessive, blind, barely tempered rage, wanted to hurt a girl, wanted to keep the girl all for me, tried to domesticate the girl, longed to draw out the hurt inside her and invite the little one out to play with my little one (the little girls curled inside our chest, of course), beholden to the girl I clung, I admitted and I hurt myself in punishment, and the girl and I found each other again and laughed and there returns the love tenfold and the inlove tensile attraction is warming us to true.
We are opposites and neither of us are Woman to the other, barely Girl. This is the closest address I'll manage; though we act a lot more like girl teen boys.
We always held each other a lot, even in the beginning. We'd preen ourselves, hold hands, arms draped across small of the back, grasping pelvis like a saddle horn. Skips became gallops.
But she'd fright easily, spooked by my doggedness. I fed my sticky limerence and it subsumed. It still flares in hives, boils and rashes. Roused hunger for her comes not from vying for bounty but from the driving threats of scarcity. Still now as unabashed lovers the Fear rears and bucks.
The reason why I like her so much is because we meet on that certain plane of unreality—things are absurd, nonsensical. I’ve toyed with the idea of rusing strangers into believing we’re related. The incest stains clotted on contact—that damning palpability.
I get turned away at bars ‘not having my wallet on me’; the bane of my assuredness; reinforcement of our age disparity I evade in all other elements spare for the ‘I'm Still in Undergrad’ and ‘I Remain Under Jurisdiction of Certain Limiting Legalities’. I really wish this Thing were trivial. But it's shameful for me that the fact is ineffable. It nauseates me to be made to feel so young, so new. This is the reality and the reminders just Are. And just Are Terrible all the same.
Nightmare conflation for maximum psychological havoc set upon me a plague of terrors—self-exacerbated and corroborated by very real and true things beyond my control. Occluded by a feeble veneer, our misaligned stages in life often gave way. This tore me open again and again. I compulsively externalize, heeding impulses to pry til I'm at the tippy-top of that hill I'll die on. She withdraws and goes somewhere very far away. She does without thinking, I think without doing. And the Big Black Tassel as shown above closes in.
Nevertheless.
We keep returning.
We both like metal scraping sounds. SWANS in concert, Gira commanding the stage, I could see the whole world in blanket rapture. Swooning at the scale of Ambera Wellmann's paintings up close, even trash swept up in tailwinds move us to watch in quiet contemplation. With her I can express these things in exactitude and know it will be received, lossless. Ferrying absurdities nill could understand.
And between this lays the soft ache that cleaves us in two. I wring my hands deep inside her to grab recalcitrant truths by the scruff. It's rotten work but she's got less squeamish with time. There is/was the Wall, yes, but also the ragdoll meekness that offers itself when a child that passes over the threshold. I welcome that little girl when she comes around. I hope she stays a while.
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Vicious scratch marks aplomb melons round
The corner warps half size and
The air breeze hustles us onto
The leaves and shorn grass
You’re all dirty with worm castings Your Chin making furrows in the nematode tilled ground
Smile with shit stuck in your teeth
I think it’s really beautiful, baby bird.
You ask me why is that? lots.
Is it really so indeterminate?
No, it’s not hard cause of that.
All my words are winnowers.
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It’s the infernal noise
Need to get back to baseline
Biography abridged each year is a sentence up until 4 years old. Maximum is four sentences for each quarter year
The infant mobile played a Mozart sonata that I cannot find anywhere. The music notes I remember by how they made me feel which were overripe pangs.
When I was two I remember the blue betta fish I don’t remember its name. I used to take it out of the water and hold it in the palm of my hand.
I watched finding Nemo on the beige chenille couch and found my clitoris during the whale-mouth scene. I would rut against the blush pink crib blanket my aunt bought me and this discovery made everyone uncomfortable.
I was three when I held my newborn brother in my arms. He felt heavy to me, the responsibility, I was scared I’d drop his head. I didn’t like that it was soft the fontanelles felt like they’d give way easy bruised fruit.
I was three and a half when I moved to Phoenixville, four for Wallingford. Texas roadhouse rolls, red neon sign calling me out of afternoon nap, I wanted hot bread and plasticbutter pats. There was a red bouncy slide and a birthday party in an indoor play center.
Wallingford I’d dig for worms in the front yard, go grubbing for no other reason than to hold something small and writhing and then put it back. It snowed a lot on Christmas that year.
I liked taking care of babies at the Y care center while my mom worked out. I was five and would often weep from nostalgia. I worked myself up over change and endings. I had a crush on a towheaded boy named Wyatt in my kindergarten class. I’d see him around later in middle school, high school and his head still stayed really big like a cow’s.
I was six and ballet made me nervous. School made me nervous. I was told point blank I was ugly and weird and it felt like there was very little I could do about it. I had a hamster named Rosie who I loved, but really adored my grandmother’s dog, Macy, who was only permitted to stay in the narrow strip of basement in the mudroom.
My friend Kate and her family moved up from Orlando, rented our neighbor’s place for a few years. She liked how easy it was to hurt me
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Cuckoo call rang round the block and I ran faster than my shoes could hold, rubber lashings on the asphalt. I was screaming your name real loud and long and mean. A howl curled in my gut lunged forth. I kept running even when my toes nailed inside out and boy, were they ingrown.
A man turned the corner but there was none there. A gaudy nylon bowtie clasped about his neck. It was a mucousy creamy yellow and it smelled hideous and the sun streaked off it like it was tugging the plastic fumes out by their throat. All of a sudden he got real close to me. His face was a bloated moon. He had pockmarked skin that had oily little black bits coming out of it, maybe acne but I don’t know what. His eyes seemed like they’d been stretched open for years. Pleading, bulging, he opens his mouth to speak and his Adam’s apple rises up like a great big frog.
“S’ glad the wax horse is here.”
I couldn’t say anything because his voice felt like eels.
We stood there a while, facing each other. He smiled a great big crescent, his teeth all rotten and smoke stained, expectant.
“Where can it lead you?” I asked in earnest.
“More up the hill, off road in the glade where the cypress knees are purging.”
“What are they doing?”
“They’re getting rid of it.”
“Of what?”
“Clings there.”
“To what?”
He drew back from me. Turned over his left shoulder and trundled on his left leg. He pulled a mask from his pocket and put his nose on the ground. He pawed furiously on all fours into the brush.
I can’t find her. I couldn’t even hear my voice coming out of my own mouth.
“Do you love me, Franky?”
I love you more than my tongue could tell.
Without you I have no reason for being.
“How much do you love me, Franky?”
So it could be those ones
If you cash the bank of world traveler from ten months ago
I undressed to the air.
Uphill seemed to last forever. My palms slapped the pavement, heels raised. On my haunches like a street dog. I found a ditch to piss in like an animal. It started getting colder. It was twilight now. I started at dawn. I started looking for you, Franky. I don’t remember what you look like anymore.
My ribs stopped aching after a little while and I returned to my legs.
I think I still look like what I did this morning. I’m more feverish now. My body is coated in dust pooled on the vacant, wind-torn tunnels. My breasts are swollen, milky discharge streaming tears for the baby in the basement, buried. My womb is inhospitable. My face, chest, back and ass are coated in fawn spots, pustules that won’t go away. A hormonal hermaphrodite, testosterone swarms took my fucking baby from me. I always thought it made me more like an animal, what with the hair and all. I’ll fuck anything that moves but I don’t. There’s nothing left here for me anyway.
I follow the vultures to their carcass. I kneel by the stag’s head. A great big thing, its antlers curled inside its skull. Still had half a mind to bludgeon himself to death. I opened his jaw wide and made like I was kissing him long and deep. I bit off his tongue. The birds already got the eyes. I pooled his blood in my palms and drank long and deep, pulled deep inside his chest for his heart and lungs.
I drink full.
Palming the soil it falls to ash sifted fine through my fingers. Past the body there is woods. Evergreens tower far beyond their loamy roots. The rich dirt is heaped into mounds. I straighten myself, stand erect with my elbows melded to ribs, scaffolding my breasts, palms cupped skywards. I walk like this for a while, into the trees. Stag’s blood forms rivulets down my arms. I walk, balancing on the balls of my feet, heels splayed outward, legs bent. A mockery of Pan.
I fixed on the pile ahead of me, wet shiny teeth sat on its pillow. I knelt to cup them in my palms.
“I remember you said you’re coming back on Wednesday,” I whispered.
I placed each tooth in my dry sockets. I had four and there were five teeth. I turned around ‘til I made myself dizzy looking for a rock to make way for the fifth. It fit real nice, real smooth where my left canine used to be. I left mine on the mound.
I howled with pain but I knew I needed the hurt. It fit real nice but it hurt real bad.
I went to another place after that.
It was a field I didn’t remember getting to. It was a wide open prairie. Hot as hell. My nose was clipped with a rank smell. Acrid with a bite to it. Something organic, no doubt. I was overcome with desire to repent.
“I know I hurt you, Franky. I hurt you real bad. Now I don’t know where you are but I know I made you better in the way I knew best. And you said you liked it. You said you wanted it more than anything. Yet here I am and our baby is gone and the earth is taking it right now, right now on the packed dirt basement floors. I swear to it, I didn’t do anything to her. I wrapped her up real nice in bandages, the last we got and she’s tucked in the walls. She barely hatched before she breathed her last. I tried to keep her safe in my mouth but she was done moving and done crying before I even placed her in there. I carried her there gently like a marsupial for days until she began to stink up my teeth. I had to get them pulled. And now I’m here. And I don’t know what I’m doing here. But I think you hear me. I hear you talking all nice and pretty like you used to and I think it’s you going all telekinesis-like. When folks put their heads together ‘spite the distance, right? Can you hear me now, Franky? I’ll keep calling even if you don’t answer.”
Heady stickiness descends on the prairie. Through it the wind is howling like a cold steel train. My girl left me, and she’s not coming back again.
I parted the long-stemmed grasses. A depression beyond where I stood. A foal encased in dark black pine pitch. I crawl to it, gnawing at the waxy hardened sap. I couldn’t clear it to breathe, my mouth and nose dripped the stuff, glistening like crude oil. I leaned against its body, clicking my heels three times to go home. I fell asleep on my side, curled in the dark spread. Back against the foal, curled in the pooling black, in the little valley, I felt like my baby Diedre
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IT'S NOT NOW NO MORE BUT THE SHARDS—
SKIRTING PAST ME IS THER PET HAMSTER—
ARMORED BUBBLE BALL AROUND IT GLOWS IN THE DARK.
AT ONE POINT YOU MADE FOR A REAL GOOD STORY AND WE SMILED A LOT HYSTERICALLY
CROSSING NEATH BOOKSHELVES YOUR LIMPS THEIR IN SLUMBER PARTY PANTS YOU HATE. BUT FOR WHAT I STAKED IT OUT FOR YOU AND IT WAS ONLY TO MAKE ME SAFE, THE SAFE ONE. BUT I AM NO ONE LEFT WITH REFRACTIONS AND I TENSE LEERY AFTER SEEING THAT BLEACH BLONDE HAIR AFTER WHAT SEEMS LIKE YEARS.
THOSE WERE THE DAYS AND YOU SAW TO IT—ABOVE YOUR THRESHOLD BELLOWED EXPERTISE I CLUNG TO THE NOTION THAT ONE DAY WE'D BE WHOLE AGAIN AND I THOUGHT THOSE DAYS WOULD COME SOON AND FAST BUT INSTEAD I DAMNED YOU TO HELL AND TURNED THE OTHER CHEEK TO FACE ITS WRONGS.
I DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE BETTER WAY WHICH'D OPTIONS BECAUSE I KNOW THE GRASPING IS NONE TO BE AND IN THE DOING OF, A BULLISH TEMPERAMENT AND A DISTASTE FOR ANYTHING HALF REMEMBERING ITS DURESS LIE BLEEDING OUT AND BLAMED YOU FOR NOT FIXING THE CARPET.
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The night was deeply, infallibly wrong. At this hour the birds sang still. Nothing moved. Miriam felt around her for anything besides the nothing, and she produced bare flesh. You see, all she had left was herself. The city wailed in worsening retort; the sidewalk cried raw—mangled leopard panties lay discarded on the eroding corner, adult diaper bundled up with something awful strewn aside it. The ambulances sounded all wrong, flashing yellow shrieks. A woman beat her chest like a ruddy tom tom, her flesh decayed from years of drugs. Two chairs faced each other in an alleyway crook; one was red velvet tufted buttons and was a loveseat reasonably distended and rank and the other a soiled cream furniture slip atop vacant putrid vinyl. Lots of ants were inside. Carrying out pieces of dead wet rat and its fur peeled just like it was the real thing.
Miriam saw the shadows in the alleyway. She felt the absence and the danger in the deficit still life. These things disturbed her with their lack. Miriam felt voided as she bit down her babybell. All around her the lack carried on listlessly.
She felt the waxy mound waste between her teeth. The squeaky fake food promise coated her mouth in a deepened tepid squalor.
“The thunder.. remember the thunder,” she murmured to herself. “It rang out with naked gunshots. And the light looked all funny then, like it does now.”
The stoop had a kelly green overhang. There was no wind to disturb the dreadful fraying.
“Many things are not good right now!” shouting toward the tin horn.