It had taken Gottfried two short days to climb the pecking order, and now he was cock of the walk, strutting the yard in his turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey. He belonged here, in Tuscany, and was glad to be rid of Pescara, with its jagged mountains and sea ice. From the edge of the enclosure he could see the long soft hills, the rows of cypress and pine, the olive trees, the oil mills. "Belinda, Vittoria, Delia, Francesca, and Marguerite," he said, under his breath. He was still learning their names.

Gottfried had a large muscular chest, a comb that rose up in red shards, and tail feathers that glowed coal black-green. He was bigger than the other three cocks, and none had challenged him. There was Matteo: a Paduan with a slim strawberry comb, who avoided eye-contact and walked around praying to St. Anthony. And then Agnolo and Simone: two castrated pea-combed capons; they kept to themselves and shuffled about meekly with empty tote bags, talking mostly about star-patterns and weather.

In the afternoon, they all lined up against a fence to watch Matteo chase Delia around the yard, weaving in and out from under the hen house, and Delia, cross-eyed, running into the cedar stilts. Matteo’s wattles turned bluer and bluer from lack of oxygen until, tuckered out, he gave up and squatted in the shade of an olive tree. Gottfried shook his head and decided to peck around the fence, alone, and look for worms.

"What a pathetic lot," he thought.

He struck on something thicker and stiffer in the dirt: a stillborn field mouse. He made a joyous squawk though he quickly stifled it. With his spur, he started to bisect the mouse, repeatedly stabbing its side, but then stopped. He cocked his head to listen. There was a hum coming from the hen house. With his beak, he picked up the mouse and walked closer, and the hum grew louder. Slowly, he climbed the footbridge and saw, through the doorway, a hen in the far corner, singing. A warm light from the window covered her slender toes and hind joints.

"Oh Rob-ert, oh Rob-ert," she crooned. "So soft your wings! so sweet your beak! so sad your barren master-piece!"

Gottfried could see she was crying. He put down the severed mouse.

"Belinda!"

She jumped, screeching, "Gottfried, is that you?"

"Belinda, why are you crying?"

She turned around and dried her eyes on her white cape. She was embarrassed and changed the subject. "How are you coming along?"

"Oh I’m fine, thank you. Trying to get the lay of the land still. I’ve brought something for you," he said, nudging the field mouse toward her with his toe.

"How very thoughtful of you, Gottfried." She looked at the mouse, and her eyes began to water again. The air was tense and brittle, and Gottfried felt a surging desire to mate with her.

There was a muffled crunch, a squeal of hinges. The roof swung open. Sharp light flooded the room, and a man’s face appeared overhead.

"Ahhh Belinda! Gottfried! Getting acquainted I see?"

"Good morning Michelangelo!" Belinda chirped, looking up.

"Good morning to you, my dear," said Michelangelo. "How are things coming along Gottfried? Are you finding everything just fine?"

"Yes, thank you Michelangelo," Gottfried said, rigidly.

"Well good then. I am unfortunately in a bit of a hurry today, so if you don’t mind Belinda, I’ll grab your eggs and be off."

She stepped aside, and he leaned down and kissed Belinda on the cheek. "Thank you, dear," said Michelangelo. "You know your eggs are the best, don’t you?" She blushed. His hand reached into the house, patted Gottfried on the head, and grabbed the two eggs.

Michelangelo closed the roof and began walking back up to the villa, the eggs cradled in his right hand. He kept the other limp, swinging at his side. All day, he’d been under the spell of a possible sonnet and was testing lines under his breath. He looked at the cloudless sky.

"My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in..."

He paused, and tugged playfully on his rolls of stomach fat.

"My loins into my paunch like levers grind..."

He laughed, walking again, and picked at a piece of black bread stuck between his front teeth.

"My buttock like a crupper bears my weight, and my feet wander to and fro....to and fro!" he howled, his voice melting off into the countryside.

He reached the villa and twirled on his toe, shouldering his way inside. The room had low vaulted ceilings made of brick and two windows on the northern wall. He quickly searched for a piece of charcoal on the long banquet table and scribbled the words on a piece of parchment. They were disappointing now that he saw them. He crumpled up the parchment and put it in the fire, jabbing it with a poker, and went back to the table. He laid out the two eggs, and cracked one over a small clay jar, passing the yoke between the half-shells until the whites had run off. With a needle, he pierced the film of the yoke, letting it drizzle into a bowl, and, when it was fully drained, he slurped the yoke’s membrane off his palm. "Haaazza!!" he shouted. "A meal for a king!" He burst out laughing and coughed, choking slightly on the membrane.

A wooden stool next to the fire had a basket of bones, mostly thighs and wings, and Michelangelo went over and rummaged through the stack, choosing three. He placed them carefully, side by side, on an iron rack in the fire, and used the tongs to turn them every few minutes.

"Oh Rob-ert, oh Rob-ert!" he sang. "Oh Robert, oh Robert!"

The bones whitened, looking more like ash, and he pulled them out to place them on a slab of porphyry stone. With a smooth river rock in his right hand, he ground the bones together, working them first into large granules, and then finer particles. He swept the bone-dust into a clean bowl and began to hawk saliva up from his throat into his mouth, repeatedly spitting into the dust, and stirred the bone mixture with his thumb.

There was a stack of figwood panels on the table, and, after shuffling them around, he chose the largest one. He smeared the bone mixture onto the panel with his fingers, crossing back and forth in broad strokes, until the surface was ash-colored. He knocked the back of the wood with his knuckles, ensuring the wet dust had adhered.

"My buttock like a crupper bears my weight!"

He ground up an ounce of stiff white lead and a bean’s worth of vermillion, and joined them with water and yoke, stirring the emulsion. He took the stump of charcoal and began sketching the outlines of a figure, occasionally using a hen’s feather to smudge the shapes.

"My loins into my paunch like levers grind..."

He took a sip of wine and started filling in the lines with light and watery brushstrokes, and the more wine he drank, the more he felt drawn into the emulsion, the cream of the paint.

"My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in..."

He stopped and dipped his finger into the bowl and applied some of the paint to his lips, massaging them. He stood up, and forgot why he was standing, so he walked over to the window. It was dark. His vision blurred, focused, and he saw his face in the glass. "You idiot Michelangelo! You idiot! You and that stupid face!" he screamed, and lunged at the window with an invisible sword. He laughed, slapping himself on the cheek, and picked up a piece of torn cloth to dry his lips. He sat down and looked at the panel, staring at it for a long time, silent, stroking his beard. There was a plate with a small pile of salted giblets. He grabbed a handful, chewed them to a pulp, and stored the pulp in his lip, where he could suck on the salt. He went back to the porphyry stone and began grinding vitreous green and lapis and smalt, and then returned to the plate, still peckish, to finish the giblets.

The night went on, and slowly from the figwood an old man emerged, stroke by stroke. Near dawn, Michelangelo stood up and yawned and stretched, and walked three times around the table. He sat down again in front of the panel, covered his eyes, and then quickly drew his hand away, to surprise himself.

"Show me your breast, young boy," Michelangelo said in a deep voice, imitating the voice of the old man in the painting.

Michelangelo took a sip of wine and slowly, up from his stomach, lifted the thin tunic he was wearing with a mischievous smile.

"I have no nipple, old man!" he shouted. "No nipple at all!" He sprayed the wine across the table and laughed violently. He picked up the panel and broke it cleanly over his knee.

The snap would be heard far out in the yard, past the olive trees, past the rows of cypress and pine. A small queer red fox had broken into the enclosure and was in the process of mortally wounding all five of the hens.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

---
*The first sentence is adapted from Robert Lowell’s "Waking in the Blue," and Michelangelo’s poem is adapted from his sonnet "On the Painting of the Sistine Chapel."

Robert and the Fox

###### **TOUR**

&nbsp;

Not listed are the beautiful corners, the chamfers, the loiterers, and two facing benches in the middle of the street. I have not seen anyone use them, but surely they open the cold stone and tinsel-grease into a public feeling of exhilaration, periphery.

&nbsp;

I stop to take a picture. Not listed are my targets. It won’t produce knowledge with one sample, but requires a crowd of inputs to manufacture a departure, which could be knowledge, or the train this morning.

&nbsp;

The qualitative observation of the city bends off the quantitative set like a screeching bow, in that the snapshot fails, the skyline fails, it all fails in the single shot. Because we walk, and even this at different paces, because we face not the buildings, but the other buildings, because we say “the city” when we mean “my aching everything has a quiet stone to quit on,” the skyline fails to accommodate the smallness of our walking. An edge producing centers. A ledge producing pigeons. Is one step too far.

&nbsp;

In a recrimination of fall, in a catapult-blue morning, in a light I thank the gunky stucco for catching, I can honestly say to you: it is the city who writes us, to ask us, please do not reply.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;



    *

But until I can free the object
         from its usage I’ll keep using
the usage like an object down
         on one knee to offer
you flowers as if to say
         as if to say
hollows out pretty quickly
         on one knee,
the only knee I’ve ever had
         and I had it
twice. Now you’ll understand
         my confusion about beginnings.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;



    *

&nbsp;

I squander tender minutes in search of the search bar. Let’s go around in a circle and each share how much we hate this form of introduction. If that rejection stitches us together, have we more deeply embedded the form through its subversion, like Wagner did opera, or orange juice bourbon? Hey asshole, you tell me why my ideas hit the page flat like seltzer. It was a seltzer always flat, the city is merely realistic, and will not carbonate your tap.

&nbsp;

Tired of such obvious complaints, such decanted podiums? The truth is no one knows how to fix the city but you, and you can’t answer, being plural, and start and part and chart of the problem.

Three Poems from *The Commission*

A new number for every time I don’t know what it means to be "black"
A new number for every time I could’ve been anything else

&nbsp;

###### 1.
###### Gelatin Silver.  (`i am)`

carving a swan’s contour out of silence
I jumped into the muted beak

and blur of William Klein
throat-locks unlock

and I sing
inside the softness

of chrysalis kingdoms

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 73.
###### Tissue red.  (`i am)`

a type of depression that patience would kill for

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 6.
###### Soft Velvet yellow. (`i am)`

where I sit by the rolled down window
of summer and watch pedestrian life

Spider by like streamers
twinkling in the handlebared air

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 6 `1/2.`
###### Less Soft Velvet Yellow.  (`i am)`

when winter comes back, again
for her throne of shivers and pejorative shawls

distant warmth of August
like the reflection of a smile

from the other side of a murky cesura

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 29.
###### Obvious Violet.   (`i am)`

poetry crumbs
for my tired peoples

who know the barnyard rink of a dark’s cold

who wear sung loops
above the hurtled-ash of their cheek bones

whose eyes— castled with sleep
are cornered with the adhesive muck of dream knots

whose fingers are the AM excavators
digging out sleep coal from eye-hole mines

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 63.
###### Understated Pre-Brown.   (`i am)`

enflamed kiss of vellum hide
widened by skin blooms


I have pulled every last tooth and pin
every splinter of celebration lost

I wrap them all in fossil gauze
to prevent an unraveling of my names

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 88.
###### Stable Green.   (`i am)`

the other day
a fluorescent string
of subway lights
swung across your eyes

leaving the impression
of machete stained glitter wounds

wash

crush pours and sliver mush
dripped into the way

I’ve learned to say
te quiero mi moreno

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 11.
###### Time adjusted grey.   (`i am)`

the clipped and elderly cornrows
resting on the floor

of the black owned barber shop
grey crawls of woven secrets

former maps
knots of eye wince

and quilts of hand cups
reminding me there’s nothing rotten

for the soul hunters to haunt for

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 221.
###### Itchy Beige.  (`i am)`

Where birds sing
debris songs

Into new nets

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 13.
###### Clear.   (`i am)`

Who humble is
and wind

no complaints
despite having been

the janitor for all these years
cleaning up and rearranging

the mess of dusk
yes. in the same way

that evening sky has learned
to clean its mouth of old clouds

I too have learned to rinse
and spit

out the distractions from my days

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### 13, 13.
###### Clear, Clear.   (`i am)`

humble doubled
the way trouble grows

the color of oppression wrap
like the sprained Achilles of our culture

injured by the speed of all unnamable things
clear, clear is the color of real danger

the closeness of unwanted absence
hiding in the sun-sheath of day break

clear, clear is broken
and the way hatred goes

clear, clear is the open apology
to the bigot and blindfold

A new number for every time I don’t know what it means to be "black"

New Clippings from an Old Numerical Means

Author_SmallLeftAlignedTitle

###### **#1 - INVESTMENT BANKING ANALYST**

At 8 in the morning I'd rise
Quelling my internal cries
Get myself to the L
A personal hell
And brace myself for their lies

We need this by Tuesday, they'd say
Tho the meeting'd be far far away
I'd scramble to do it
They'd start to review it
Tho we all knew the ask was just cray

We lived under Parkinson's Law
Our work and our time at a draw
As the time was expanded
More work was demanded
But no one saw this as a flaw

Tho I can't say I would have hired me
Inititally they had desired me
But I grumped and I groaned
And I mumped and I moaned
Until one day I found they had fired me

&nbsp;

###### **#2 - SUSTAINABLE ENERGY FELLOW**

So the corporate life isn't for me,
Globally South I did flee,
I say I'll do good,
I feel like I should
And sure, why not do it for free?

My NGO works with the poor
Mostly to help them get more
All employees like me
Young, Western, carefree
With regrets of not doing Peace Corps

In the mission the others subsume
So in myself I try to exhume
Some sense of purpose
That isn't lip service
But these feelings I just can't assume

This probably comes off as petty
But I tire of hot dogs in spaghetti
Same goes for rice
And showers like ice
And nightmares of rusty machetes

In six months I have done nada
I'm ready to leave, inshallah
And as for my fellow man,
Whom to aid was my plan
I abandon him to Guatemala

There's two modes of living, it seems
And now I had tried out both teams
If money won't thrill
And mission fails to fulfill
From what wellspring do I draw up dreams?

&nbsp;

###### **#3 - GLOBAL STRATEGY MANAGER**

At my last job each day was the same
None of my bosses to blame
Between me and you
There was no work to do
So there I sat, playing a game

Post banking, this job was a lark
The paycheck, a walk in the park
But the hours slipped past
Two years at the mast
My time there made nary a mark

At jobs I can't help it, I shirk
Only the suckers do work
Two years I spend toodle-ing
Idly doodle-ing
And now in my head these thoughts lurk—

What if the drones have it right?
To pull in the harness, to fight
Sure, I can laze
But at the end of our days
What gives a person delight?

I know this one is the doozer
Me, the freeloader, the user
Cast myself as the winner
For not earning my dinner
But now I fear, I'm the loser.

Three Jobs

Let’s just start talking and writing and we’ll keep something. I remember when we first met—who came up to us? In any case, Nick came up and interrupted us—another man wearing shoes. It was Nick. He stuck around. We learned how to untie those shoes, put them back on, take them off, put them on the wrong feet and waddle like Chaplin even though the cards were stacked against him. Just kidding. He taught us about Beaujolais, or as the industry called it, BoJo. Then Nick dropped out. He had anxiety. Heard of it? And then, one summer. Our big bonding moment was when he asked me to bring his briefcase to 23rd Street because he left it in a class he ran away from. That’s the one with dogs in mosaics—that subway stop. I’m about to get my period, I’m eating everything, my boobs hurt like nothing else. What’s on my face? Food? I didn’t see it: I don’t see food. Nicky got a job at a wine shop. Wait that’s jumping too far ahead.

As you were saying: you were in LA I was in NY, you were you were, I was having a great time in LA and I sent back a great picture of my big naturals they were on display at a Dodgers’ game that was a good day. I do remember that I wasn’t taking it SERIOUSLY I was on a blowup mattress wearing elf ears, I think Sof and I were basically at a bar brainstorming as much wine as possible. I’m glad I didn’t interfere because we came up with a perfect name, the names were bad, they were difficult, how were we deciding some of them? Sounds she made me discover. There are some amazing words. She saw, I don’t know. Listen, day one, I wouldn’t have...YEAH said, “yeah Recliner.” I wanna sit down, I want to lean back, I want to get my dinner. You want to be a Mr. Fix-It? Should I put the chair in the microwave? Want to take it out and take a bite? Anyways, well I’m glad you guys are doing. You were getting into White Claw in Lake Tahoe and you got addicted with your high school cousins who are the best I love that. We FaceTimed and got the TV Guide idea, so nice, there was a heatwave. I came after the heatwave. I don’t know what happened. Time flew. That was summer. We started and we are in November this is our first issue it’s hard to believe it’s over already: In Memoriam: Recliner. In the arms of an angel...I did Shazam at a funeral once, it was such a good song. We’re ready for our elegy? There’s something in the sky, spirit in the sky, that was the song. I got the sense he wanted me to...let me play it. I got the sense it had to do with the casket. I wasn’t that close with him. Not that close to the body—I couldn’t touch it but I was pretty close.

Some BoJo? I don’t mind if you keep the music going. Should I spill it on the Kenneth Koch? Claire visited the deceased while you and I were packing for the shore? We waited for her to go to the shore. We were waiting so we could pack and go. We all went up to the shore, the dog came and had many kisses with our other dog. At the shore we went to the carnival. I’ve never seen Claire so active, so alive, what were we doing when we were going up? This is before *Joker* came out. We were vaping the CBD pen, we had all become addicts, we were doing hybrid hits, that and the other, didn’t we meet a Slavic worker that I tried to coerce? As much as you could coerce a Slavic worker at the Frog Toss. Don’t make me a part of your Frog Toss. I thought we all wanted it. When we went up in the Ferris wheel I felt it was so important to document us all laughing. I didn’t even feel ridiculous. The photos from that night my hair was tangled in the way it was always tangled in middle school. A good tangle. I hate Bob Dylan. The celebrity death I’m least looking forward to. I’ll delete my social media. Men were on their period when Bob Dylan won the Nobel prize. No worries. In conclusion and nativity. Nope, basically it’s been a lot of hard work. I’m proud. We reached out to a lot of people that we like and didn’t know if they would say yes and some said yes and some ignored us which is fine. A lot were effusive and didn’t have anything, at the moment a lot of people didn’t have anything which we really need to focus on. At the moment of not having anything, anything is possible. We’re unbelievably excited. Nick and Sofi get really stressed out and Sofi treats Nick like a brother. Sofi says I can’t handle the energy if you can’t come correct. If you can’t come correct stay in Brooklyn. Nick comes with his tail between his legs and a big baguette. Sofi comes with a big cheesecake, tail between her teeth. Claire makes a thick family soup. We hope you enjoy.

A note from your editors

###### **On the Discovery of Veronica Lake’s Ashes While Antiquing**

O love, I am tired
              of writing rape poems.
I’d like to write one
about the old man who owned the bar on Tremont,
                 & had for more years, he said, than he knew,
                                                 O Jack, how I loved you in my way; & you
who, when I walked in, would yell
                                 —HEY VERONICA;
                                                 after Veronica Lake,
because at the time I was platinum my hair fell over my eyes I was an incandescence—
surrounded as I was by leather daddies sucking each other off in the bathroom;
& I, incandescent, shooting pool ridiculously, railing Adderall in the doorless stalls & sipping
                                                 vodka grapefruits
                 (*bitch drinks*, was the joke
                                 & the joke too is that I was there at all, a bitch in a man’s man’s man’s world)...
Not so many recall what became of Veronica Lake.
She died an alcoholic at 50, Veronica did,
                                                                 having lost it all to the drink. Career in the shitter.
In the 60s, Ms. Lake rambled through the halls of cheap hotels.
Her bangles would clink and her heels clack. She had her kind of song.
Ms. Lake. So full of clear liquor you could see right through her.
Every place like that accommodates its necessary ghosts.
A reporter found her in the Martha Washington. Women’s only. She’d known enough of love.
She was cocktailing in the lounge downstairs.
She called herself Connie. When she walked into the bar maybe an old man might yell
                                                 —HEY CONNIE—
& if he did; when he did—would she feel beautiful?
                                 How often does a naming bestow such a gift.
Veronica was not beautiful in death, having cirrhosis of the liver
                 also acute hepatitis 				also acute kidney damage…
                                 —HEY CONNIE—
Her ashes were scattered according to her wishes in the Virgin Islands,
although rumor has it some were later found in an antique store in New York,
which is a tiring thought—
                 to have a body never ever left alone, no, not even when it is dead.
But as I said, I am tired of writing rape poems
                                                 —HEY VERONICA...

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### **from *RAPE GIRL***

IX.
My mother and I would *go for rides*—
this is how she called
a drive without destination.
We would HAVE TALKS in the car.
Or we’d avoid HAVING TALKS in the car.
She’d tune the radio to a country station.
Then as now, as before and hereafter,
men lament beer, fish, their fathers.
Women seek love, or else revenge.
Or we’d wade through silence, mother &
me: hum of engine;
pulse of tires beneath us. Gas, then,
was cheaper. I paid less mind to oil
tycoons. I couldn’t see the end
of the horizon. I thought it was without end.
Later she’d purchase a Toyota Tundra
off her father, on a payment plan.
That I can’t recall
if he charged her interest seems important.
Though perhaps it isn’t.
To this day, jangle of car keys
increases my pulse. What unearthing

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

X.
The Shenandoah Valley comprises eight
counties in Virginia; two more in West.
Native etymologies dispute its origin, though
white settlers inflict meaning, say *Shenandoah*
denotes *Beautiful Daughter of the Stars*.
When I was a girl, we hiked the valley
each summer, June, or else August,
spying vervain, flowering indigo, attracting song
birds; also ironweed; also beebalm, humming;
& swamp milkweed for monarchs; also my mother’s
favorites—black eyed susans, and silky
dogwood—white flowers falling, catching in our hair.
We would wander off path, my sister and I,
never knowing if it were safe
to nibble elderberries, coloring
oddly at the start of their season; always unsure
how to differentiate between the poisonous
and delectable. We were someone’s daughters
of the stars then—of course time passes.
I do not need to tell you this. And uncountable,
the stars long gone, weeping signals
from so far their light succeeds them. What
brackets hold a life, or all the rest—

Three Poems

&quot;An activation.&quot;

&quot;Activation? For what?&quot;

&quot;A new kind of whole-grain pita chip. Super healthy. And gluten-free. I think. Come in and I&#39;ll give you a few free raffle tickets. You could win a car.&quot;

I followed his lead into the astroturfed parking lot, a temporary branded zone.

&quot;International School of the Hague, right?&quot;

&quot;Wait. Yes. I went there. Do we know each other?&quot;

&quot;Was only there for third grade. Military family, moved around. Thought I recognized you.&quot;

I looked at him. He didn&#39;t seem familiar at all. His face kept changing, as though in a dream, a pair of oaken eyes the only constant.

&quot;Ok, yeah, I think I remember you,&quot; I said. &quot;We were in different classes, right?&quot;

&quot;Yeah exactly, I was across the hall.&quot;

I didn&#39;t believe that school had hallways—I was envisioning separate portable classrooms, trailer-like, plopped down on asphalt, each a self-sustaining pod, where eager volunteers had to rough the outside chill in order to ask the teacher next door for a dry erase marker. But what would you call those demarcated alleyways in between the little elementary houses? Hallways? I didn&#39;t think so. All I could recall was the tall brick building reserved for the middle school and the long shadow it cast upon the lower grade encampments, an insistent reminder that a place of true halls and gymnasiums lorded above us.

&quot;I&#39;m Gavin.&quot;

I stared at his outstretched hand, slender fingers with nails left slightly long, a hint of chaos. I squeezed his palm firmly, the disembodied voice of my mother reminding me &quot;no dead fishes.&quot; But I was holding on for too long and jerked back my arm unnaturally. He smiled. The late afternoon was fading. Amber light mingled with his teeth, his eyes, his olive skin—he had strands of long hair that he habitually stroked back behind his shoulders, with every other fidget. Black bile was beginning to mix inside me with something unknown, metallic in taste, a liquid akin to mercury.

&quot;You live around here?&quot;

&quot;Kind of. Was on my way home from work.&quot;

&quot;Huh. Seems like no one in this city walks anywhere. You have a car though?&quot;

I paused, searching for the lie and coming up empty.

&quot;Well. I recently got a DUI so my license&#39;s been revoked for the next 10 months. Not my best moment.&quot;

&quot;No shame in that. We&#39;ve all been there.&quot;

&quot;Have we though?&quot;

I looked at him in mock-puzzlement, a bit too performative for the conversation&#39;s current tone. I saw a snapshot of myself: cocked head, face pinched, mugging for the invisible camera. My face went slack.

&quot;Well, I&#39;ve personally been there. Got pulled over in high school. It sucked.&quot;

He told me what he was doing (temp gigs, trying to become a model slash actor), I told him what I was doing (internship at an agency, trying to write spec scripts), he told me where he lived in the city (some art collective&#39;s loft), I told him where I stayed (on my cousin&#39;s couch), he said he liked living here (laidback attitude, positive vibes), I said I hated the people here (emotional vampires and grifters). This comparing of notes lulled briefly and a man, looking to be Gavin&#39;s supervisor, took the opportunity to make eyes at him from across the pita chip sample tent.

&quot;I should probably get back to soliciting on the sidewalk. But what&#39;re you doing later? I get off in like, forty-five minutes.&quot;

What was this exactly? A pick-up; a friendly gesture; a professional connection; a grasping for Dutch nostalgia lost? Like his face, his intentions seemed ever-morphing, always on the verge of articulating themselves. A more forward, solid person would nail down these grayer details, would motion to define the dynamics at hand. But I was someone else, a different beast. I&#39;d make my settlement here, upon this ambiguous mound, embracing the indistinct until evicted into clarity.

&quot;I&#39;m meeting my friend for a drink a few blocks away. You should come join us after you&#39;re finished here.&quot;

&quot;Great. I&#39;d love that. Let&#39;s meet there.&quot;

&quot;Can I still get those raffle tickets though? For the car?&quot;

&quot;What do you need a car for? You wouldn&#39;t be able to drive it anyways.&quot;

We laughed at this and shook hands again. Before leaving, I surveyed the parking lot, unable to find any reference to the car or raffle tickets, no real marketing to speak of at all, save for a large inflatable bag of pita chips in the corner of the mini-mall, its body rippling upward in the air, finding and losing its form, constantly re-asserting its existence.

I met Alisa at the back of the bar, twenty minutes later than our agreed upon time. She looked at me, smiled, and rolled her eyes.

&quot;So where&#39;s this boy that made you so late?&quot;

&quot;He&#39;s going to meet us here.&quot;

I had texted her on my walk over, summarizing the encounter with Gavin. She&#39;d only responded with a clenched teeth emoji, the meaning of which eluded me. I was beginning to realize my disdain for our relationship, this hold-over friendship from high school that had been briefly rekindled post-college and was now souring into something like a bitter rivalry. Her small head, pygmy-like, those inwardly bent teeth, the metal band tees she always wore, her job as assistant to a high-profile video editor, the droning on about work, as though it were her only tether to the world—I listed these personal affronts in my head as I drank my beer and nodded along to her venting, unlistening and bored. A basketball game played on the TV and I watched it fade into a Geico commercial, the glow of the LCD reflecting upon the lacquer of the bar, the winter dusk outside making every illumination in the room heavy, exaggerated. A melancholy, sharp and acute, pawed at my left lung—I would soon have to respond to Alisa, her speech pattern moving toward a concluding tone, and a pin of anxiety also formed, this time from the right flank; it was becoming a full-pronged attack. I was there, in the bar, but tenuously so, my membrane on the verge of rupture, if not for Gavin placing his arm on my shoulder, introducing himself, dissolving the previous interaction and holding me firm in a new one.

&quot;So you guys know each other from school?&quot;

&quot;Yeah a long time ago. Elementary school in Holland.&quot;

I listened to them talk to each other for a long time, barely speaking myself, enjoying Gavin&#39;s genuine interest in Alisa&#39;s work, her own fascination with his acting career. He recounted for her a recent student film he was in, describing having to get naked for a sex scene while a tungsten light dangled precariously over him, the temperature getting so hot that his pubes began to singe. The teenage director, who was shooting the movie &quot;on precious 35mm film stock,&quot; had to beg Gavin to finish the scene while his crotch was slowly burning. Alisa was laughing, close to crying. I winced. Part of me questioned the story, his skin would be blistering into third degree burns if the heat were really so intense as to ignite human hair, but my less cynical side believed the story, or more, believed its mythic value, this image of a fire raging on this man&#39;s lithe body while he finishes the sexual act, a gif of his ejaculate extinguishing the surrounding flames, reanimated over and over again, action, cut, action, cut. I carried on with this train of thought until I realized Alisa&#39;s voice had shifted to a lower register.

&quot;But is it, I don&#39;t know, more relaxing for the girl in the sex scene, knowing you&#39;re gay?&quot;

&quot;Oh, I&#39;m not—&quot;

&quot;Oh my god, I&#39;m sorry. I just assumed—&quot;

&quot;No, no, it&#39;s totally ok. I get that sometimes.&quot;

He smiled at me widely, amused without agitation, as though beaming with a newfound confidence. There was something of an expectant reflex I felt I was meant to give, a mournful moment for the desire, once excessive, now energy trapped, without egress—but I felt hollow. All these previous fluctuations along the axis of despair and intrigue—they fell into nothingness, theatrics for an absent audience. I was bored again. Maybe a little angry. Not being able to listen to another industry story, I got up abruptly to close out my tab. Upon my return, Alisa and Gavin were arranging for him to take care of her cat when she went on vacation to Brazil next month, a job typically reserved for myself.

&quot;You said you needed odd jobs to support yourself, so this could be perfect for you. If you think you have the time.&quot;

&quot;Wow, yes, that would actually be really helpful.&quot;

I stared at them both blankly. I said I was exhausted and needed to head home. Alisa gave me an unconvincing look of concern. Gavin, on the other hand, seemed startled, the emotion foreign on his facial features, as though things were going off script for the first time since our meeting earlier that day.

&quot;Wait, give me your number. I want us to hang out soon.&quot;

I handed him my phone and almost flung the thing across the table, barely catching it between my index finger and thumb. I bugged my eyes out, into the middle distance, as if to communicate a &quot;yikes,&quot; or possibly &quot;yeesh,&quot; though at that point my aims were operating on a different plane than my actions, so who can say what I was doing. He put his name into my phone.

&nbsp;

hey gavin, nice (re)meeting
you today
see you around


Yeah man! Was so nice!
Lets hang out again really soon :)

Been good! Just crazy busy with work.
Auditions keep piling up, plus a new restaurant gig.
How about you?

been ok, busy with work as well
intern life is not all its cracked out to be

so what&#39;re you up to this weekend?


hey oh

Hey! So sorry I went MIA
Been swamped with rehearsals for this new play I&#39;m in.
Lets grab a drink this week though?

oh cool—what&#39;s the play called?
and yeah sure, just hit me up with a good day/time
&nbsp;

What&#39;re you doing this weekend?
I have a film premiere on Sunday.
Student film of course, nothing fancy.
But you should come! Free food and booze.

ahh that sounds really fun
but I&#39;m actually out of town this weekend
for a family thing
lets meet up soon tho?

No worries! Have fun with the family.
And yes, let&#39;s definitely set something up for next week.

Hey
Can I ask you a big favor?
Kind of in a bad situation at the moment.

I&#39;m at Alisa&#39;s right now.
Taking care of the cat.
And I think something might be wrong...

It&#39;s being a bit weird.
Not moving around much.

you should take it to the vet
maybe call alisa?

Could you come over and help me?
I feel really uncomfortable with this.
And you know Alisa and the cat.

Can you take a break and come here
Just need someone to help me sort this out
Won&#39;t take long.

you really can&#39;t do this alone?
or ask alisa for help?

Would like to keep her out of this.
If possible.
Because maybe it&#39;s nothing?

ok
ill take an early lunch
be there in about 20 mins

Oh my god thank you.
I owe you big time.
It means a lot.

its cool
im doing it for the cat, not you lol

Vespid

###### **In the Era of Efforts**

The millionth one under suspicion.   Pressed it with
my heel anyway.   Her pins in a row—no legs, no flight.
Held them tight between her lips.   We had ferried over,
so goes the version.   I had lessons coming, for weeks.
Made my rounds in the house.   Dye left in a bowl and
the smearing that held fast.   My palms revealed the hunted.
Everyone mentioned the smearing.    A thread down her calf
and my feet anchored to the floor.   Let’s not be so fast
to forego the comfort.   Like gasoline leaking from a cuff.   Now
the numb side of my face showed nicely.   After all, the puffs
had disappeared.   The iron arm of the up and down.   Most pins
had their spaces.   When it flattens out they sting more.   Deliveries
came with the breakwater.   Wasn’t I elbowed when she left?
Jarring to think so.   Engineered for tasks like that.   What’s Saturday
without it? An outcome of the dirty trip up North.   So much
wedged in the tote.   Her hair loose at the shoulder, sometimes idling.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### **Whose Secrecy Lapsed**

No world outside.   The radio blaring behind the door.
So sulk with summer.   Not that I’d forget.   To check on
the morning nerves.   Her signal from the window.
Like a mood that needs to unwind.   Then empty.   Preferring
synthetics to security.   Burned through to the other room.
I’d transfigure myself into a table or chest.   The more
possible it became.   Might seem commonplace.   To bank all
we made.   To walk outside while it’s still habitable.
Didn’t have it *in* me in the end.   Not native like the purple
clover.   She retained her plastic silhouette.   Good to know
the race had started.   More static, grew louder through
the transom.   Flecks on the tile.   Soon the city turned around
on her, insulting without saying out loud.   If it weren’t for thunder
or the miracle.   She’d offer her ears.   She wiped the thicket clean.
Kept trying to lay her coat down.   I wouldn’t stay.   Without cloth
for protection.   Pushing forward.   The door gleamed like scissors.

Two Poems

Outside Seine Books on Euclid, here in St. Louis, there is a dilapidated bust of James Joyce, a deglittered teal-looking copper that, I think, is a nice picture of the city itself, this one where I’ve now lived for eleven years, and here on Euclid it’s quaint, quiet, cold and not altogether clear above me, a late winter sky full of junky clouds that let up every now and then to show what blue is possible behind them, so it’s here I’m standing keeping company with the bust of Jimmy J, and I’ve gotten the news my old friend Z has dropped dead in St. Paul, an aneurysm at 33, so I’m here with the effigy of A Master yet still alone, and the little placard that Sam my favorite bookseller at Seine likes to put outside on the sidewalk with a quote, in order to sell people on the idea of pith, imagination, romance, whatever can be found inside of a book, spells in white chalk on its blackboard framed by what seems to be

*The sun set in the
sea; the same odd
sun rose from the
sea, and there was
one of it and one
of me¹*

newly sanded plywood, but it doesn’t matter what the board’s made of, what anything here is made of because I am lost, up and gone, to somewhere coastal and far from here, this landlubbed place where lube is too expensive and oysters suspiciously cheap, back to the sea where I watch this Elizabeth Bishop news of the day lead me by the hand along wooden plank paths striping dunes brown where they are otherwise full of green, recently planted goldenrods and beachpeas and bluestems, so I am here and what, eleven, twelve, no no too young, fifteen, one summer, middle August, though maybe it wasn’t Z and it was A then who wore my navy blue sweatshirt and whose hands I cupped to keep from late Atlantic winds so we could succeed in our mission to get high and lose our minds to the warmth of touch where fingers were Martian rovers the first to tread their marks and where we laughed to mean that feels good, but no, this Elizabeth Bishop news of the day has brought me here to find only Z, only ever Z, who had escaped to the middle of the country and though I hadn’t heard from Z in years, over a decade,

*The sun set in the
sea; the same odd
sun rose from the
sea, and there was
one of it and one
of me*

it is immediate as now that my hands are sixteen tucked safely inside Z’s pants cupping a strong ass whose feel the cool cotton smooth of underwear and hands doing the same to this back side of me and was that erotic I remember thinking for years and were we not kissing no we were not so what were we convinced of ourselves doing then, I don’t know, and yet how many times had we slept together with love though without sex, and yet how many times had we, always with alcohol, indeed kissed one another or placed wagers upon the other’s nipples with our tongues without mutual admission that it seemed our mouths were shaped and divinely proportioned for each other’s parts, I don’t know anymore of this without knowing of

that fall break, mid-college, back home our tiny beach town in Delaware, an impossible windswept place with bars named things like The Miracle and whose air was scrubbed clean by the salted loogies of quietly cresting Atlantic waves, whose houses could never rid themselves of the heartknockingly-soft sand that made no sense next to our sweatshirts and addictions to WWE or Ravens Football, our plagues of rough love and dens of illness and deep need for an ocean breeze in winter to knife us open and be filled with gentle moonlight, yes, that fall break there in that place we were partying inside at B’s house, the attic, and I fell into Z’s lap several times, permission of my head resting on Z’s center so my head could feel Z, but that was all I’d be permitted there in front of everyone, so I was marooned and Z’s twin, K, who I never found unattractive solely never let myself think of K that way because Z was my friend after all though of course I did think of K that way and when I did think of K this night I found I had been thought of too and we were eventually caught somewhere at 2am undoing ourselves and I realized only after it was done I did this because I’d figured maybe K could be Z, that this was the closest I could really get to Z since there was always something left over and empty when we were together, so maybe I could find some of Z under this tongue that was, after all, so genetically similar to Z, and I scared myself when I realized I hadn’t even cared how I’d used K, and that I knew this and did it all the same because I needed Z and I was had at whatever I needed to do to get to Z, but after this I only found silence, that Z’s tongue for me had been cut out for us, so we never spoke again, rage of silence I hadn’t before known, aside from pleasantries and heartknockingly-short check-ins on what had, over the years, sunk into Z’s alarmingly happy marital condition and

my own life of mid-western double-love and hospital consultancy, but now it’s over, and so far from Z I feel something rises above me, the currents of ocean water, and what do I do with the fact that we never spoke of this memory of my transgression in drinking, of this transgression of my drinking in memory, of my drinking in memory of this transgression whereby something deep was broken and I could never be anything but the weight of betrayal and how I’d never know what Z had really ever once thought of me, and since I did not want to drown Z, boulder of past I was, I found I could never say, and now gone, am beyond this plea: come down Z, Z, come down, to this place where water becomes pressure becomes too thick and tight and heavy for light, to here, this place become so dense there is nowhere at all that is not our bodies, and so we are together, but we cannot see it.

¹Excerpted from the poem “Crusoe in England” by Elizabeth Bishop, once and always seen on a favorite bookstore’s advertising board.

###### **It is**

difficult to be a chair
and be likeable
She can’t feel her arms
How does she
How does she read a book
Read a book

    *

The house we went to
was not ours but we stayed
because it was sturdy and nobody
else was there

Most of the furniture looked fine
though there were still pieces inexplicable
to me and I liked
to take pictures of myself naked

We waited for raccoons
to reveal themselves in the cypress
proving that everyone has a home
like this and knows
about furniture
Art, how to decorate, and
History

From there we went
through each day as if
Thursday
and eventually stopped
at a new place like I said before
but hoping it would be better

All the houses look the same
I forget how to read
I used to say I miss you and now
I’m sorry I was so mean
and that you’re displeased with
my green curtains

I didn’t want this to happen
for this one reason
which is the chair told me
she whispered to a stranger
don’t turn around
I’m naked so of course
he did and they fell in love

    *

Is anybody house?
Is anybody roof?
Is anybody window?
Is anybody wall?
Is anybody desk?
Is anybody chair?
Is anybody bed?
Is anybody lamp?
Is anybody clock?

    *

And now you are leaving!
This place looks like an Apple Store!
Marry me!
I scratched and sniffed myself bare!
Sit down I decorated!
Over and over!
Watch me be filthy in a glass-walled house!
I might have come!
So I didn’t hear what you said!
My house is full of strangers!
But it’s so easy not to feel!
Trying to find an outlet!
I had two thoughts like two eggs!
I want to be perfect for you!
October took so long to get here!

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### **Slushy**

Cool cherry do you think about me?
When I bite my tongue it’s cherry
Crude childhood games
Fall and found us all
Spring
I blame her
The wife
That’s where we came from and
Our father’s age
Was entering heaven
Washing hands incessantly
Looking at you and there are openings
There are
Cherry
Keep quiet
My voice I see now
On the other side is garbled crow
Crows feet laugh lines power lines crow
And the cat who licked my lips
Your assumptions are interesting to me
I’m trying to come
Close my eyes and
Imagine you alone in a foreign place
I want to be overwhelmed
Lose for a moment
Nobody on the streets I like
The fantasy not the product
The time of day the light
And we’ll live in a big apartment
A house it snows
Photos overlap become
Cherry
It’s not that early it’s
Not that early to catch a train the ocean slams
Against my window this makes me nervous
There is space to hide everything
Works out I hope
If I’m never with I’ll never
Be without you
And all the fish rush up to
Nibble on my white ankles

The empty glove holding the other empty glove is patience and hunger.

&nbsp;

The gloves are green and probably leather.

&nbsp;

My mother wore gloves when I was a child and she was driving.

&nbsp;

Slim gloves.

&nbsp;

Only in winter.

&nbsp;

Around her thumbnail her skin would flake.

&nbsp;

How beautiful her flaking skin thought the child also satisfied by the shape of her nails in general, medium-narrow and medium-long.

&nbsp;

They weren’t real driving gloves, and they were actually red.

&nbsp;

Green driving gloves appeared in a recent email advertisement; I wanted them for myself.

&nbsp;

Ten fingers for ten very special purchases.

&nbsp;

Bonus neck massage and bildungsroman.

&nbsp;

Fit them inside a mitten like coins fit in a mitten when you don’t want to differentiate.

&nbsp;

Please let’s not go to Staten Island tonight, it’s too late for that kind of thing.

Future Plans

The profound uncoolness of R.E.M.’s 1994 album *Monster* was placed in sharp relief earlier this year in David Robert Mitchell’s thriller *Under the Silver Lake*, in which the callow, self-styled private eye played by Andrew Garfield invites a much-younger girl to dance to "What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?" It’s Oldies Night below Hollywood Forever and Garfield’s Sam is feeling his age. "I don’t know this song," admits his date, popping a red balloon as if to literally burst his bubble. Their exchange could be a millennial update of Steely Dan’s comically Nabokovian "Hey Nineteen" except that they definitely can dance together. We cut to a fish-eye lens to watch our thirty-something hero peaking to a nameless drug, abjectly and shamelessly pogoing away to Peter Buck’s chunky power chords. It’s more than a feeling when he hears that old song they used to play.

 "I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines," sings Michael Stipe amidst the stream-of-consciousness wordplay of *Monster's* lead single.  In a movie whose pop cultural signifiers have been obsessively curated, "What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?" pulls double duty as an I-Love-the-90s punchline and also an aural corollary to the protagonist’s paranoiac headspace. Stipe  famously derived the song’s lyrical hook from the mantra of a mentally ill man who physically assaulted CBS anchor Dan Rather on the streets of New York; the assailant was allegedly in search of some grand unified theory to tune into, the frequency of those in the know.  The track’s symbolic utility in a thriller tethered to an unreliable, impulsively violent narrator is readily apparent; the query "what’s the frequency, Kenneth?" is unanswerable, even as it suggests some deeper conspiracy to be untangled, or some subliminal wavelength to hang ten upon.

 Hitting radio in the wake of *Automatic For the People’s* majestic, empathetic anthems, "Kenneth’s" buzz was like a fly in the one-song-heals all ointment R.E.M. had been rubbing all over everybody’s hurts. The second verse quotes Richard Linklater’s hipster-ethnographic classic *Slacker* (1991), observing that "to withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy." Translation: just because you hate everything doesn’t mean that you don’t care. In lieu of communion, its narrator opts to marinate in his own hallucinatory confusion. "I never understood," he confesses in the final line; "don’t fuck with me." Hold on: was that an F-bomb from America’s most huggable rock star? "Oh no, I know a dirty word," Kurt Cobain snarked three years earlier on "Smells Like Teen Spirit," as if anticipating his future pal’s enfeebled stab at profanity.

*Monster's* uncoolness, then and now, was and is a byproduct of its attempted coolness, an approximation that makes it an outlier in a catalogue mostly unconcerned with such superficialities. R.E.M.’s grand narrative in the 80s had always been a coercion of the mainstream to meet the band on their own oddball terms; even by the time of "Losing My Religion" the foursome was still cultivating a Southern Gothic sensibility (stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but that title is just a little bit of Athens slang for catching feelings). The bleak, gorgeous, death-tinged folk of *Automatic For the People* slotted in nicely alongside Seattle’s various flannel-clad complainers, and was also a natural outgrowth of the more mid-tempo austerity that the band had developed while under contract to Warners with *Green and Out of Time*.

*Monster's* louder, riffier approach was intended as camouflage and commentary on the nascent grunge movement, a cycle whose leading lights dutifully evinced admiration for R.E.M.’s work ("they’re the greatest," fawned avowed fanboy Kurt) while encroaching significantly on their market share. The story was that the group had embraced a harder, amped-up sound organically, but there was clearly calculation in the record’s contents and rollout. When asked about the inherent goofiness of "Shiny Happy People" or "Stand," Stipe would say that they were experiments in R.E.M. playing a "cartoon band" like the Archies or the Banana Splits, yet he wouldn’t cop to such motives with *Monster*. Instead, the album’s startling visual and sonic metamorphosis, beginning with the singer’s newly shorn scalp and extending to more eccentric, aggressive physical postures and wardrobe choices across the board (i.e. Mike Mills’ Nudie Suits) demanded to be taken at face value.

At literal face value circa 1994 — let’s call it at least fifteen bucks a CD and ten per cassette in the U.S.— *Monster* was worthy enough to sell four million copies, less than *Out of Time* or *Automatic* but still a lot. The joke goes that that probably two million of them were eventually stranded at used-record stores: all those blurry orange-and-black bears staring out forlornly from resale racks and bargain-bins like Cordoroy, forming a metaphor for the hardcore fans accrued and alienated as their college-rock heroes crossed over into hockey arenas once and for all.  (When you literally sell out Madison Square Garden, it means you’ve sold out figuratively — that’s the math.)

It’s not that people thought the record was *bad*, exactly, but even the reviewers who got what Stipe was doing with all that posturing had to point out that there was, for the first time, something to get with a band whose very name implied the unconscious, involuntary, revelatory quality of dreaming. *Monster’s* thoroughly received aesthetic, a glam pastiche layered over grunge thunder, represented something new and unwelcome: a dread self-consciousness. "I don’t sleep, I dream," Stipe insisted, a bit too coyly. Those fluttering eyelids were now frozen in a wink, the musical equivalent of sleeping with one eye open.

There are a few unguarded moments on *Monster*, and at least one deep cut is open enough to signal permeability in its title. During interviews, Stipe spoke with uncharacteristic directness about "Let Me In" as plea "to, for, and about" Kurt Cobain, whose suicide serves to contextualize the song’s every aspect: the murky guitar; the desperate lyric sheet; the choked air of despair. In terms of tempo and melody, the lovelorn "Strange Currencies" is *Monster’s* sequel to "Everybody Hurts," a blue-eyed soul shuffle with a sing-along chorus that works equally well when addressed to God, your girlfriend, or a ceiling mirror.  But it’s "Let Me In" that revises the earlier hit in a meaningfulway, concluding that sometimes reaching out to touch somebody is not enough. It’s futile for everybody if the somebody who’s hurting won’t reach back. "He gathered up his loved ones and he brought them all around to say goodbye/nice try," Stipe mumbles in the tone of a detached depressive; later, on the final chorus, he adopts a keening falsetto that cuts through the album’s almost uniformly deadpan vocal performances and elevates the song’s careening melody into the stratosphere.

It’s fair to say that *Monster* as a whole is haunted by Cobain, and so is *Under the Silver Lake*. Sam’s love for Nirvana is such that it actually compels him to commit murder. In Mitchell’s most inspired scene, he comes face to face with a mysterious, ancient composer who claims to be the secret brains behind countless top 40 hits — a spectre modelled on Phil Spector who tickles the ivories with the Invisible Hand of the Market. His story insinuates that the pop music that’s catalyzed the most radical individual and collective revolutions has only ever been industry formula, including the Gen X rallying cry of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." "That song was not written on a distorted guitar... I wrote it, here, somewhere between a blow job and an omelette... there is no rebellion, there’s only me earning a paycheck." Mitchell’s conceptual gambit is cleverly rooted in Cobain’s own self-deprecating claim that he nicked the riff for "Teen Spirit" from Boston’s "More Than a Feeling," a song that is explicitly about the visceral, full-bodied joy of hearing a beloved melody on the radio. What Sam has for Nirvana is more than a feeling, but the Composer is telling him to eat crow. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" isn’t an homage, or even a copy. It’s a forgery. Oh well, whatever. Nevermind.

"Exploding Head," R.E.M. thought of calling *Monster*. If they had, then the gory, fatal money shot of Sam’s meeting with the composer could have been another in-joke in the most reference-infested American movie in years (comparisons to *the Big Lebowski* and *Inherent Vice*, themselves hugely allusive works, only scratch the surface of *Under the Silver Lake's* exhaustive annotations). When our hero bludgeons the pop-industrial Moloch with a replica of Kurt’s own electric guitar, it is an act of vengeance to subsume Stipe’s gesture of mourning in "Let Me In"; it provides a righteous gross-out giggle that catches in the throat. Does his this-machine-kills-fascists gesture re-inscribe significance to Nirvana’s signature song, or does it suggest something more bathetic, a murderous fury wielded on behalf of an ersatz anthem?

"Let me in" could be Sam’s mantra as he cruises through the Valley like a fuckboi Philip Marlowe, and so could "what’s the frequency, kenneth?" What he wants is access to a hidden world (and its spoils) as a salve for the existential pain of being on the outside looking in, which presents here asaging out of coolness and so clinging to the idea that the things he loved as a teenager actually *mean* something. As a parody of male savior-narratives in which the missing femme fatale doesn’t actually want to be found or rescued by her shady one-night stand, *Under the Silver Lake* is a swing and a miss, attempting the old Lynchian trick (and this is the only way in which its mostly bland surrealism is actually Lynchian) of being about misogyny and female exploitation while indulging in it. (See also: *Eyes Wide Shut*, which Mitchell probably has a billion times. I’m guessing mostly on VHS.) Where it’s sort of revelatory anyway is in its timeliness as an Epstein movie (the secret global sex cult is real and only the super-rich need apply!) as well as its Reddit-level understanding of how desperately we narrativize our experiences and seek synchronicity. The search for meaning in entertainment becomes jaggedly double-edged.  In the end, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" *does* mean something, just not what Sam thinks. It’s not a gesture of resistance, but the byproduct of a music-industrial mind control project flattering every generation into thinking their own personal heroes invented rock n’roll. (Here we are now, entertain us.)

The issue of whether or not the Composer was behind any of R.E.M.’s mid-90s hits is never raised in *Under the Silver Lake*, and that’s fair enough. There’s nothing epochal about *Monster*, which may have been the first R.E.M. record 1) to seem anything less than, and 2) certainly the last about which anybody would have even tried to make the claim. (Actually, 1996’s focused, greyscale *New Adventures in Hi-Fi* is 1) better and 2) a masterpiece, but that’s an essay for a different 25th anniversary.) There’s also probably nothing epochal about *Under the Silver Lake*, which won’t likely stand the test of time alongside other cult classics because 1) it’s literally the end of the world as we know it and 2) it’s already been fully reclaimed, a beneficiary (or is it a casualty?) of an ever-accelerating cycle of hype, backlash and explanation. To give Mitchell credit, it’s these very same topics —i.e. incipient apocalypse and the yearning for something that’ll endure — that make the film impossible to dismiss (compared to the Coens and PTA, the director is all thumbs, but he’s got at least one on the pulse). If nothing else, the sensation of being seen as Garfield lip-syncs with eyes wide shut to Stipe’s nonsense poetry, briefly luxuriating in a coolness that’s long gone and was also never really there in the first place, will stick with me like something out of a horror movie. Turns out that there’s a *Monster* at the end of this essay, and it’s me.

Oldies Night: *Monster* at 25

Going home at night excited to eat.
Running home through neighborhood backyards.
The Lift and Disruption Effect became the Hutchison Effect.
Unnucleated microbes learned to disrupt atomic nuclei.
He moved his head briefly into a howling position
Crying in short gasps for no concrete reason.
The pleasure of rest guided him toward sleep.
He had inflamed hair-follicles on his scrotum.
He became irrational when he thought about __.
He tried to look at people who didn’t get seen much.

Antibiotic Eyedrops at Birth

Some days my body feels more like stone than it does like water. On the mornings it rumbles like it will crack open, I walk more slowly to carry the fragile thing within me with grace. In the past month I have often wondered how anything could be so delicate and heavy at the same time, but maybe we can’t grasp the weight of certain things.

Perfectly lodged inside me, its arms—or are they wings?—sit poised like an anchor. I imagine it hanging in the balance, the sole survivor of slow earthquake. Some days it feels like an entire war is waged there.

The Kyleena® is a small, white, T-shaped, soft plastic. It is predated by decades of copper and metal, synthetic tools like emergency keys or allen wrenches with girl names. We were escaping the tyranny of biology, the women of the Sixties said. In contrast to the pill, the IUD is endorsed as low maintenance—by fully integrating with your body, it eliminates the need for a daily routine, monthly refills, and trips to the pharmacy. To adopt the IUD is to become what Manfred Clynes coined the cyborg: *an organizational system in which robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving (wo)man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.* Positioned as an emancipatory technology, as female contraceptive historically has been, the IUD allows women to resist the natural forces of evolution and reclaim control over their bodies.

Feminist theorist Donna Haraway fantasized about a future where our hybridity with technology would turn us into cyborgs. As creatures of a post-gender world, the dissolution of binaries might set us free from a certain determinism, set us free from *Woman* who has only retained value in contrast to *Man* (the default, the first and foremost, everything). This fever dream of ultimate synthesis was to make ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed—dichotomies formerly applied to non-human organisms and machines.

It was a fantasy of pathological destruction.

---

While we are in bed one night, a man I have only known for a few weeks asks me to take my nipple piercing out. When he handles me with urgency and the metal pulls in its home, the pain is sharp like the original needle. I push our bodies apart and he looks at me with hunger. I know that what he will ask of me is not out of care. But because he asks, I take the piercing out.

Although it enhanced nothing but some sense of immunity, the nipple piercing was the first object that made me feel part-cyborg. Four years ago I watched blood bloom through the white silk shirt I wore exactly for that occasion: to bleed. To bleed and to know that the decision to do so was entirely mine. To know that my body was not an immutable thing. For four years it would represent my ability to hold something cold and non-belonging and declare it as part of me.

Detached from this object once emblematic of control and resilience, I am bare and missing. I wonder how much of its removal serviced the maintenance of his pleasure under the guise of removing a source of my pain. I wonder how much of myself I have surrendered for the sake of someone else’s desire. Returned to unadulterated human form, I do not feel whole at all.

---

Days later, he asks me if I would consider going back on birth control. I don’t remember how much of the conversation I spend in silent reflection on the decade tethered to my circular pink pack, a sundial I constructed my life around like it was the only way to tell time. While the pill was supposed to release me from certain biological fates, it had routinely restrained me to others. When you have to remember something every day, to set an alarm for it, to stop time, to make room, your life adjusts around this extraordinarily minute detail. Following Clyne, to restructure for something else is to become *a slave to the machine.* Hadn’t I wanted to be free?

We talk about the studies that proved the pill robbed women of their sanity. I am reluctant to revisit the madness. We laugh about the lack of male counterparts. I wonder why his gratification so frequently seemed to come at a cost only my body could pay. *You guys won’t even use a fucking gel,* I say. *Of course it is women’s work, to bear this for you,* is what I really mean. *Men will have none of it,* he responds in agreement. *Men will have none of it,* is what he means. Since 1990, only seven male contraceptive efficacy studies have been executed—none have advanced to FDA approval.

Only in hindsight do I understand that by the time he asks me to go on birth control, I am already primed to agree to a myriad of other modes in which I integrate with the world and separate from myself, in the way women often do. That by then, the road to compliance had already been paved. Opposite in action but identical in consequence, this reunion would become the perfect foil to the severance from days before. At the time I wonder why, in the age of powerful women, of so-called nasty women, of free women, we continue to place the burden of bearing and *not bearing* on women like our bodies are first homes to hold and be held in. That we are first *mother* or *not mother.* That a man can be infinite things, but firstly and lastly a man, and never for the sake of anyone else.

Sitting across from him at dinner, I wonder just how much of my body I am willing to give him. A final silence falls. As the conversation closes he says, *I want to come inside you.*

---

![IUD looks like a baguette](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/BettyWang-ReturnToDust/1.png)

The morning of the insertion, I carry the IUD in its comically long rectangular box from the first floor pharmacy to the second floor OB/GYN, noting the outsized absurdity of its form. Though my doctor had warned me of potential discomfort during insertion, I only feel adrenaline at the prospect of passing another test of survival—to prove myself closer to immortal. Whether it was through the delectation of my own pain or the merging with metal, the piercing years prior was an act of playing God.

And yet the IUD insertion turns out to be something else entirely. If I had a clear and uncrossable threshold for a pain so intense and raw, I absolutely did not have one for a discomfort so quiet and widening. It ripples through my body, muted; a slow violence impossible to pinpoint.

I don’t notice how truly uncomfortable I am until my doctor asks me if I want my phone to distract myself. It is dead, a useless and unreachable thing, so I count the tiles on the ceiling instead, like I did when I was younger, without the internet to placate pain. This regression throws into stark relief that I am, in fact, in a woman's body. The whole thing starts to feel anachronistic, like a dystopian vision conceived of twenty years ago. My doctor moves with rigidity, sterile like the procession of tools she uses inside me, calling them by names far too technical for my understanding but naming them nonetheless.

Sometimes it is hard to recognize pain that isn't fast. You begin to wonder: does this hurt or am I delusional? Resistant to giving space to the subtle and emerging thought that there was something undeniably wicked about this procedure—nearly Atwood-esque in affect, gloomy and austere—I ask her questions like *When are women the most fertile?* and when she answers as expected, I laugh like I had already planned.

I leave the clinic feeling more Woman, more horrifically Woman, than I have ever felt. When I am in bed with a hot pack on my body to pacify the battle waging against the new invader, I am more synthetic than I have ever been.

---

These days the blood does not stop and I can’t help but to think it was blood I did not ask for. The process of merging with technology as Woman was romanticized as a liberating force, one that would shatter the way power emanated through everything. Haraway imagined we could blur the boundaries between human and machine so deeply that we would break through our narrow, binary conceptions of gender. To become the cyborg would be to deconstruct the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations—to become a kind of disassembled and reassembled, collective self suited for postmodernity.

And yet as I sit here in my cyborg form, I can only think that we often carry the same entrenched capitalist forces from the outside to the inside, from public to private. I am reminded every day that as a woman, there are kinds of labor that are always only ours. How do we conceive of new hybrid forms of being without embedding in them the social relations we have carried for histories? Even as the IUD is championed as a release from our grueling obligations to the pill, such automated enhancements often extricate us from one kind of subjugation only to bind us to another.

Thinking back on the equal and opposite actions of removal and insertion, of breaking apart from metal and merging together with plastic, I wonder if there is anything inherently emancipatory in our synthesis with the artificial. Underpinning both processes are questions of who we are asked to be, who we are allowed to become, and when.

The morning after I took my piercing out I had wondered: *do I feel more authentic without its interference?*

With a new device now deep in my body I ask: *do I possess more agency when fused with machine?*

Yet buried in both of these questions is really one: *is my own liberation enough?*

Return to Dust

This is lion country in little ravishing puce suitcases.

Curiosity cabinets of purpling noose yogurt & pining in the seeded carriage.

The power plant ash veils a filthy avenue parlor
where twin blonds slick nickel buzzcuts.

A mantle of boys pressed as ferns to lime kiln.
A moth muzzle led to fret.

The possessed sheep blink in the pink bells of grotesquerie.
Aphrodisia in little brown vials.

Edging luminol arabesques in striped socks.

I spoil a paper cup of blue cheese sopping mint jelly.
A slinking of fox whelps by the mortuary gloss shop.

Oculus cord yokes a gush of horehound.

Asylum missalette—the children’s ward bowls of brute apple, low kingdom.

Vulture Paper with Beet Juice Stain

I wasn’t face blind at all. The discovery came as a shock. We did the test together, my mother and me – tearing a selection of famous faces out of magazines, trimming off the hair, quizzing each other. You’d be shocked how many people wouldn’t recognize Hillary Clinton like that. My mother missed six out of ten, which makes her average. I nailed every one, which makes me a freak.

So why couldn’t I see what was so beautiful about my sisters’ faces? Every one of them – all six before me – had been crowned Queen of the North Star State Dairy Fair. A lot of nouns there, I know. We keep their heads in the freezer in Barn #9, the ones carved in effigy from giant blocks of butter – winners’ trophies. I found the heads lifelike now that they were tightly sealed up in Saran wrap, dusted with frost. They were like the faces of women pressed up against a shower curtain, suffocating with a smile.

And what smiles they were. Though the heads had blurred and softened in the time before they were iced, the twelve rows of teeth remained distinct. I felt ill when I looked at those terrible scored rows, those molded grids, those grooved cells. Like I had swallowed a large lump of butter. “Our husbands liked our smiles,” my sisters said. Yes, no sooner had their heads been carved than men arrived and made wives of them. But soon enough, the husbands went away, and the explanations never did make sense. To inquire further would be to stomp on thin ice and to end up in deathly black water. Better to stand silent and still, holding our breath, even if, six husbands later, it was still only us beautiful girls wringing out the milk, sloshing uphill with the hot heavy tin pails, skimming the frothy cow shit off the cream.

That my mother thought a seventh husband, my husband, might be different sums up all my frustration with mothers. But I held it in. For whatever properties my face possessed, I was also declared a queen. Fairgoers gathered around a chilled glass box, wherein I would sit facing the sculptor tasked with carving my head in solid butter. My mother hugged me and shooed me in to where the sculptor, her back turned to me, awaited.

When the sculptor swiveled around, I saw she looked exactly like my mother. But she couldn’t be my mother; I had been with her outside not a moment ago, my palm still moist from holding her hand. The butter sculptor wore a raincoat the color of sunshine and rubber gloves that were robin’s egg blue. Forgive me, I had just spent the morning painting lush, eloquent verbal pictures of the dairy industry for the judges. The sculptor bade me sit down before her, sharpened her lengthy pointy knife. As if to say, why use a blunt instrument even when a blunt instrument will do.

Smile! she commanded.

I didn’t answer. I kept up an oyster’s tight-lipped simper. I thought of a story that had been read to me as a child. A fox wants to eat a mouse, but the clever rodent, who also happens to be the fox’s dentist, insists on giving his teeth a special treatment first. The mouse and his mouse wife paint the fox’s teeth with a clear fluid and tell him to hold his jaws together. The solution is glue, of course. I wished my saliva would turn to glue.

Smile, smile! The sculptor was in a fury. Smile!

On that final injunction, I felt my lips – smack! – warp like heated metal. Painfully, unnaturally, like I’d sprained them. They wouldn’t unsprain. My teeth felt very rigid and very bare. The feeling flexed through my whole body, as though I were teething through and through, inside to out. The sculptor’s knife flashed, the watchful crowds devoured burger dogs and Snicker bar salad, and I kept telling myself that everything was still as ordinary as could be. But whatever this feeling indicated, it didn’t subside, not in the eight hours of sitting, not when I felt a kind of ripping when I stood. There was blood, but only blood. I blushed, seized my head, and ran.

As was her custom, my mother rejoiced over the butter head and impaled it on a stick. She displayed it thus, in the wintertime, at the boundary of our farm. This was how each of my sisters’ suitors had known how to find them. I was not eager to meet a man who was attracted to my horrible rictus. Please note, I didn’t wish him ill. Didn’t want him to tumble down cellar stairs and break his neck, slice open on wires that had sprung out of grandfather clocks, choke to death while attempting to hang something innocent on a tree. I simply did not want to be bound as wife to such a man. Alas! My mother commanded and I had to obey. In any case, my man was enticed in. He popped my butter head off the pole and he licked the butter lips in front of me. “Salty,” he said.

I will say this – his smile was sweet.

A week later came our wedding night, and I was not as unwilling as I had imagined I would be. My mother had told me that a great pleasure awaited me. Oh, I realized afterwards how, in spite of herself, how very right she was. It was a great pleasure to vitiate all that my mother so wanted me to have. As my sisters had already known. It was the last time I could speak of my innocence – not knowing how I would hurt – and then the eager man thrust himself in between my legs and I screamed, but not as loudly as he!

Grin to Grin

An exchange of two surfaces
both dosed high with hormones.

Policies, mine, prevent myself
from committing malpractice.


Surviving a grand opening, myself takes in
patients, providing the most basic.

            *Dying is so scary and bad.*

Myself was made to make difficult
the possibility of dying. How, in the face
born of intention, maintaining biological
life, could the desire to die make sense.

            *You should leave your phone at home
            and go out for a walk. It is fall. The leaves
            are still red, and it isn’t too cold. When light
            from sun is set at such an angle, things are
            so gorgeous outside. This will remind you
            of how gorgeous things are inside.*

How in the face: desire is the proliferation of exchanges.

Myself, bearing bottomless sex organs suitable for affection,
becomes a welcome site for any other that looks me over.

            The mouth of my lover’s hospital
            produces spit. My hospital’s opening
            mouth makes room to receive the spit.

            By way of a glance, my hospital demands
            my lover’s hospital to coil, grasp
            around my throat. The hospital
            responds accordingly.
                                                              Is there anything
            I cannot internalize. I have

stopped going to the doctor’s since a misdiagnosis.
My teeth hurt, and I will keep them. My headaches,
occurring more and more frequently, hurt. I will
keep them. When reconstruction seems impossible,
one must be willing to feel lots of pain. I do not
like pain. I want for the grip of my lover

                        to hold, even tighten, in order
                        that I might be held. My desires
                        slowing in order that I might

                        part unperished, biologically
                        refuse destruction. Displaced grip
                        instead arresting my quick belly.

How All Spit in the Place

###### **Brad**`here they all pretento exist? You're such a bore today. en your third ey`
`e. Maybe`
`you're just too hi. . `Hey Brad
if you chuck me that
lighter I might yum you
yes Brad I ring bells and enjoy
caboose uh huh yup I swarm
macadamia mountain
and knock 'em all down

You are such a fucking ferret
Brad you are a ferret named Ms.
Ferret fuck you Brad I will
order a blue icee at the movies
if I want to I'll buy popcorn too
and I'll share I don't care I didn't
tell the big bang to happen
and my poems don't
exist for you Brad

Oh but your caverns
look so delicious so
divinely black and smoldering
and blue I don't want
you soggy in the sink
I want you all the way
down on me Brad will you
buoy me or at least
generic hug me

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### **John**

Tipping then flipping then
smashing into the café window
where the cat on Prozac
lounges in the sun,
the roller-derby size queen—I mean
a dream to work with, to access

the lost pulsing feeling with—
found an antidote
to the healing process:
canned beans and the wet
of the mud’s seeping through
my polyester! I was too

eager, and that’s a peach tea!
Take it slow now,
John. Take a breather.
I don’t care
if I finish
last. I just want to.

I couldn't work for the Lonely Planet, I knew that much. For starters, the name made no sense to me and I didn't care to find a way in which it would. I supposed it was a reference, Jacques Cousteau or Ponce de Leon could have said *It's a lonely planet!* in a journal while writing at sea or something like that and then the phrase took off, but references are only useful if you get them right away. Looking up a reference is pathetic, like doing 23andMe—it's better to feel the answers in your bones. One of the clowns running for Branch Manager (BM) of the country recently got in trouble for her own DNA results, I mean, she never should have done the test, identity lives in the shadows of myth, why prick a finger unless you have diabetes or need to do blood brothers with a cousin? Don't get me wrong, I don't like this potential BM, she reminds me of my preschool teacher who accidentally murdered all of the baby chicks our class was raising by turning up the incubator too high (foolish, utterly), but I don't think our BMs should be running around proving weird shit and doing tests like that. I really don't.

&nbsp;

If I could find a job maybe my headache from yesterday would go away. The interview with Lonely Planet was pure shit, I kept bringing up this picture

&nbsp;

![image1](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/1.png)

&nbsp;

and repeating the male founder's name, over and over again, to his face: *Tony Wheeler, Tony Wheeler...Tony....Wheeler*. I couldn't stop, it was one of those tics, I mean when someone's got a really good name, I mean really good, like Tony Wheeler or

                Hella Jongerius
                               I. M. Pei
                                                Rem Koolhaas
                                                                Walter Gropius
                                                                                Eero Saarinen

&nbsp;

I just can't get enough. Wheeler was dressed like ass and visiting New York for the weekend from Melbourne. We were in the West Village having a latté on top of a gay bar that had become a monument, then a coffee shop, then a coffee shop monument. He had the waddle of someone who doesn't understand the concept of home and said "Melbourne" in the worst way possible, you wouldn't believe it, *MEHL-LA-BOW-NUH*, a place he described as *a livable wine city* before bullishly switching gears to blab about the process behind the Lonely Planet's first guide book, *Across Asia on the Cheap*, co-written in 1973 with his *stunning Irish wife*, Maureen. When he finally exited memory lane I looked him dead in the eye and said *No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity*. He thanked me for my time and declared the interview over. That quote's Cousteau. That one's definitely Cousteau.

&nbsp;

*It's for the best* I told my mom on the phone afterwards. She said I should treat interviews like sampler platters, *sometimes you need to order one to figure out what you don't want*, and I told her I understood. Tony Wheeler was the pig anus calamari—not for me, not this meal.

&nbsp;

It was February and brutal outside. I had to scooter home to Chinatown so I was pissed off. The sky was acting like the cement and I hated using labor-saving devices to travel, but I was still enslaved to a free trial with SCOOTLE; if they found out I was walking during the gratis period I could get arrested. There were some real cretinous fucks at SCOOTLE.

&nbsp;

Mounting my SCOOTLE, I also told myself the failure of the meeting was for the best, but I knew it wasn't. These days I was dead from the neck up everytime I entered an interview and it wasn't a joke anymore—I needed to land something soon.

---

The next morning I was woken up by a shrieking neighbor, wishing life was like this

&nbsp;

![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/2.png)

&nbsp;

or this

&nbsp;

![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/3.png)

&nbsp;

but it was definitely more like this

&nbsp;

![image4](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/4.png)

&nbsp;

How do people do it? Five of my six friends had girlfriends and each of them a job. I was jealous of them all but refused to admit it and instead texted stuff like *how's jail?* and *enjoy your pottery class lol* when they had date nights planned. The last time we all went out, I was asked to go home before midnight because I told Garrett's infernal girlfriend that natural wine was an illusion. She started going to great pains to explain "skin contact" and I had downed just enough poison to say *when's the last time you gave Garrett skin contact* and she understandably lost her shit. Garrett told me to go to bed; I SCOOTLE'd home. Garrett hasn't called me since.

&nbsp;

I sneezed three times, molted my sweaty sheets, and surfaced from my bedroom groggy and wan. My bathroom-kitchen smelled like wedding soup again and I remembered that I ran out of coffee a day earlier. Before I could get my coat on to go buy beans from BEAN, the new spot across the street, my phone rang and it was my mom whom I always answer on the first try. *You won't believe who I saw last night* she said. I asked who and she said *your old hockey buddy Kyle McCracken*, a dude the girls called "Stallion" in high school. The last time I saw him was about a year ago when he dumped himself right next to me at this dive bar where I grew up in Altoona. Kyle was a specimen back in the day, 6'6" and perennially tan from his family's timeshare in the Caymans. His build was busted now from boozing too much, but his face still held the vague charisma and good-cop authority of a vice-principal. Altoona's a small place, the kind of town with jerks that think the state of a lawn reflects the homeowner's spiritual integrity. And if your brothers play hockey you really ought to as well unless you want your dad to kill himself or something. Real predestination crap if you ask me. Anyways, you can't go anywhere in Altoona without running into everybody, so I think I ordered a Leinie's and some beer cheese soup from Tanner, the owner's son, and I remember getting out my book—this depressing memoir by Mary McLane. She spends about 200 pages just disemboweling Butte, Montana, which isn't so bad a place if you know what to look for. There was this one line that really stuck with me, still does, where McLane announces *I have in me the germ of every crime*. I loved that. It's a bit childish but I even wrote it underneath the bill of my Packers hat, and I wear that thing a lot. It smells like ass. For all the callous stuff I say about the goings on back home, our football team can play, I mean really play, and those boys are class acts especially when you consider the athletes we're dealing with across the border, not only west of us but to the south too. Anyways, Kyle had initiated with *Well isn't this a blast from the past* and I wasn't in the mood so I just went ahead and asked if he was still putting tobacco between his toes. You see the whole hockey team used to cut up their feet and put chew in their skates to keep a buzz going on the ice. *I'm actually working at Royal Credit Union, you dickhead* and he meant this to impress me on some level, I recall that really bummed me out, so I had to adjust my tempo. *That's cool, Kyle. Was just giving you shit* I cleared up and took a spoonful of my soup, which is basically just hot, salty Velveeta if you've never tried beer cheese soup before. He said *You would be reading at a bar* and I told him he would be drinking at a bar. *Well I'm off Tuesdays and it's dollar pitchers*. I remember launching into some kind of diatribe about the dignity of affordable living in Wisconsin compared to New York and Kyle started ignoring me, coolly, moving his attention to the front of the bar where a former gymnast had walked in. Her name was Allie Kristen and her knees were as hyperextended as the day we graduated. Fortunately, her pecs had finally turned to tits. I did not like the way gymnasts' joints bent the wrong way, especially in public, it made me sick. They all had these bone diseases with German names by the time they were fourteen or fifteen so you almost felt bad for them. It made my beer cheese soup lose it charm, it's one of four foods that get cold on you quick from my experience. Chai tea lattes, sautéed mushrooms, and scrambled eggs are the other three. I asked for the check, paid, peed, fist bumped Kyle, then Tanner, and left. Allie didn't fist bump me but blew a kiss without puckering, moving only her hand toward her mouth and away again like a *thank you* in sign language. I wasn't too mad because she never was one for major emotions, even her gymnastics coach, whom she loved and had sex with I think, had to slather Vaseline on her teeth to keep her smiling during meets. So that was the last time I saw old Kyle. *Lucky you mom* I replied, and told her I couldn't talk at the moment. *Okay sweetie pie, keep on keeping on...*

&nbsp;

It was past noon. My apartment hovered above a store called The Golden Shower that sold bathroom appliances and I had to walk through the place every time I left the house. The proprietor, Ken, wore a chubby face with an excellent sense of humor and always said stuff like *The king emerge!* when I walked past him in the mornings. I liked Ken, he knew a lot about porcelain and shower heads and that kind of toilet and sink thing. My dad never taught me any of that.

&nbsp;

Outside the wind was coming off the East River making it about another twenty degrees colder than the existing zero. I hustled over to BEAN and was pleased to see the news on, a rare pleasure as domestic usage of cable had been banned last August. Manhattanites were strong-armed into patronizing businesses to watch cable news; streaming services now only hosted one network with godawful pundits, "Lizz n' Justin," these totally zestless losers whom I privately referred to as "Jizz n Lustin" or, more abstractly, "Jizz Eruption." On the television, the current BM was discussing his most recent plan for New York, Make the West Village Sexy Again, which would force NYU to accept only the children of actors and models. The screen flashed

&nbsp;

"The West Village used to be sexy and now it's no fun. Not a single g-string in sight. No frills, no seduction, just BORING. Changing things after a perfect conversation with the reasonable NYU dean."

&nbsp;

and then

&nbsp;

**STUDENT INTERVIEW: SON OF BOBBY CANNAVALE MAKES STATEMENT**

"The area around NYU was expensive in a cool way when I was growing up, but now things have gotten expensive in a bad way, not hot at all. I can't explain it, but I want to see more of my parents' friends' kids and fewer randos when I go to the library to drink. Thank you to our BM for understanding this."

&nbsp;

Cannavale's son was incredibly handsome which made what he was saying kind of digestible. It probably would be nice to blackout and read *Heart of Darkness* with good-looking classmates. NYU was kind of shit anyways so I decided I didn't care. Let the celebrity children be. I picked up my beans and made a pact with myself as I crossed the street: only one game of Fortnite before applying to more jobs.

&nbsp;

Upstairs, I got situated with my PC and fresh-brewed joe. The apartment now smelled like wedding soup and coffee, which was discretely more disgusting than it smelled before. It didn't matter; no one came up here anymore except for myself and sometimes Ken to recommend movies. I hadn't slept with anyone in about a year, not since my ex left me for someone in Critical Chain Project Management at SCOOTLE. *Those are just words strung together* I had told her as she picked up the last of her things. *You're a monster* she responded, *enjoy your games*.

&nbsp;

I was settling into some building warm-ups when an email notification lit up the corner of my monitor: *New Message, Benji Hartman*. It took me a second to place the name. I repeated it out loud and ere long recalled it was the guy I had interviewed with weeks ago for the Editor-in-Chief position at the *Fearless Flyer*, Trader Joe's circular. I hadn't completely bombed that meeting, Benji was also from the Midwest so we were able to connect over the Minneapolis hardcore scene, but I never heard anything back. I paused my game and opened the message.

&nbsp;

*Dear \[redacted\],*

&nbsp;

*I'm so sorry for the delay. There was an outbreak of salmonella caused by our Organic Coleslaw Kit that did not leave us in a good position the last couple weeks. I don't want to lie to you, our first choice candidate, a real enterprising writer and strict thinker named Teddy, bailed. So you are our second choice. Don't focus on that. I think you could be great.*

&nbsp;

*Can you come by our LES location this afternoon around 3 pm to get the ball rolling? The Fearless Flyer needs a new image, can you be that person?*

&nbsp;

*As warm as can be,*

&nbsp;

*Benji*

&nbsp;

*Vision Consultant*

*The Fearless Flyer*

*Benjihartmanvibes.com*

&nbsp;

I was shocked, offended, confused, curious, and replied that I could be there at 3:00.

---

I rolled up to Trader's a few hours later, maddened by my journey's psychological toll. Every fifth ride with SCOOTLE, you were required to listen to a trip-long promotion for their pioneering ergonomic stance, throughout which the app strobed this soul-stirring image

&nbsp;

![image5](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/5.png)

&nbsp;

across your helmet's plastic shield. It was impossible to determine how many accidents this had generated, SCOOTLE is excellent at burying bodies. I alone had killed two pigeons because of that Quasimodo and her optical insurgencies. I dismounted and looked down at my shitty henley, its dizzying pattern of vaguely Navajo signifiers, and wondered how I chose such a thing, how I chose anything. I began to question my motives for taking this job at all. The *Fearless Flyer* was an elevated coupon book with recipe suggestions done in the tradition of home-ec instruction, the core principles being ease, efficiency, and grace. A year ago I was writing shit I actually knew about for SHAWKER and talking about marriage with my ex. SHAWKER got absorbed by the BM's son's friend's uncle and his media conglomerate last April and my ex could be dead for all I knew. I had to keep my cynicism at bay, I didn't want to pull another Wheeler. No Cousteau quotes, no bullshit. I zipped up my fly and entered the store.

&nbsp;

When I got off the elevator, I quickly realized I didn't know exactly where I was going. Benji and I had met our first time at BEAN. I crept up to the customer service zone, manned by three Hawaiian shirted helpers, and asked where the *Fearless Flyer* office was. *We SO get your confusion* the tallest of the three said, *It's in the basement*. I joked that they looked ready for a Jimmy Buffet concert, but the jab was somehow too adjacent. *How do you figure!* the youngest employee practically screamed, her septum piercing doing a complete 360°. These people were nuts. How could you wear a Hawaiian shirt every day yet not know about Parrotheads? The tall helper insisted on accompanying me downstairs and I was too out of my element to argue.

&nbsp;

The *Fearless Flyer* headquarters turned out to be one windowless room reminiscent of the offices assigned to nascent, but obviously sinister investigations on TV shows about the FBI. Three desks were arranged in the center of the room, a hackneyed rendition of the coworking pod, and one dumpster loomed in the far corner. Benji got up from his desk and strode toward me, while the other staff member, presumably one of my writers-to-be, remained pecking at her computer. *How do you do good sir!* Benji asked, approaching me hand outstretched, raising his eyebrows up-and-down in a remarkably imprecise impersonation of some sort of old-timey actor. His hair was piled on top of his head, gauges poking out on either side, and I thought to myself that he was a pretty handsome guy despite the insane vibe. He apologized for the offices and we flipped through the basic geography of the space, the expectations of the position, and the Trader Joe's way of life. Having done editorial work in the past, there was little need to dig too deep into logistics, and so we spent most of the afternoon talking about my new ideas for the publication. He seemed open to shaking up the branded content and recipes with more essayistic food writing, and I was relieved to find that he was someone who could be persuaded easily by a thoughtful proposal. Less settling was the third employee who hadn't yet been introduced. She hardly moved and used her long, black hair to create a parasol around herself and her screen, furtive and cooky, Allison Reynolds style.

&nbsp;

Apart from her, the most urgent snag was Benji's impending absence the following day. *You have literally one day to get the February issue done* he admitted anxiously. He was leaving early that very evening for a silent day retreat in Montreal. *I need this, I trust you* he lobbed rather prematurely. It was true, I could handle the administrative side, each issue of the flyer used the same template, and all of the promotional pieces had already been written and uploaded. I had two slots to fill, but Benji wouldn't be available for final approval. The issue had to be sent to print by the end of the next day, and the words would be on flyers, ready for distribution, the morning after that. *Kind of thrilling, no?* I obligatorily agreed that a tight turnaround could be a rush, and Benji beamed with performative faith. *I'm off!* On his way out, he turned momentarily, walking backwards, flushed with the shame of someone with something better to do. *I never introduced you to Megan! Megan, come! You'll have to do it yourselves, I'm sorry* he feigned and got on the elevator. *And don't forget your Hawaiian shirt!*

&nbsp;

Megan rose from her desk slowly, exaggeratedly, and I saw that I'd misjudged her look entirely. Under the skirt that hid her bottom half when seated, were comely, excessively pale legs atop a pair of metallic Pleasers. She wore a rose-patterned button down, a daring interrogation of the Hawaiin shirt genre, with a tightly pulled, black bustier peeking out beneath. Her every feature was caricatured; I felt my gaze darting between them, unable to choose the centerpiece. Drawing closer she rolled her eyes, offering a French manicure to...shake? Kiss? I was hurtling toward a weird remark when she saved the day. *Benji is such a tool sometimes. I'm Megan*. I gathered my boyish thoughts, my braindead impulses, and strung together a pleasant version of myself to submit.

&nbsp;

It was nearly time to go. Before we parted ways, Megan told me she was recently struck by a sign on a telephone pole in her neighborhood, showing me this photograph of it

&nbsp;

![image6](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/6.png)

&nbsp;

to which I responded *That's an interesting theory*. I asked her what she made of it. *It's not a theory* she replied, *You should trust me*.

&nbsp;

I told her I did and that I'd see her tomorrow.

---

The next morning, I flew around the house trying to piece together something reasonable to wear. It was useless. I concluded that I owned nothing, a sentiment I remember my ex repeating every weekend before we attended dinners and parties. Luckily, I could focus on the bottom-half, as my Hawaiian shirt had arrived that morning courtesy of SCOOTLE's overnight delivery service. The teen that fulfilled my order was yawning when I opened my door. I handed him a five-dollar bill and he told me it was against SCOOTLE contract to collect tips. *So wack* I offered in its place.

&nbsp;

Descending into the *Fearless Flyer* basement, I mulled over Benji's truancy, wondered why he saw me fit to hold the reality of this world in my hands. The day had invented a plan for me but I was not yet willing to accept it. I felt acutely then that a study had been designed for me to blindly enter as variable: as capuchin, prisoner. It was better to be aware of the test than not, I concluded, accumulating some semblance of oversight by way of paranoia. Elevators had this effect on me. I got off and walked to my desk.

&nbsp;

Megan had beat me to the office. Sitting in a flattering ankle cross, she seemed to be enjoying herself too much on the computer to be working on anything *Flyer*-related. She let out a big snort, took a swig of coffee, and I asked what was so funny—a stupid in. *Okay narc* she joked, thumbing a tray of Trader Joe's milk rolls with newly painted nails, now Ferrari red and filed into points. The rolls looked like yellow-fever victims spoiling under the prods of a sadistic new nurse. I swatted her hand to stop. *Don't play with your food*. The familiarity I intuited in her name-calling was making me bold. She pulled back her hand. *Bossy* she said with a wink, throwing her hair into a loose bun. I had read in some pick-up artist book, a joke, sort of, that women fiddling with their hair signaled emotional vulnerability. Following Tucker Max, it was time to neg Megan, to criticize her strategically, but something about her cracked this model. Her forceful expressions, amplified by cartoonish dermal fillers, suggested a will too pliant to insult into affection. I wasn't good at it anyways.

&nbsp;

By early afternoon I had finished writing the first of the two submissions for the February *Flyer*. I landed on an op-ed about Valentine's Day and its austere cuisine, the nearly punitive nature of its non-indulgent indulgence. I argued that candy hearts were at best tortured Altoids, and chocolate boxes a dangerous guessing game of gooey entrails. I wondered on the page who could possibly be enjoying these unpalatable candies, and proposed that the holiday's culinary tradition undergo a radical transformation. I asked Megan to proofread it.

&nbsp;

*I like it* she said after a round of line edits. I could tell she was holding something back. *No seriously, it's nice* she doubled down. I pressed for an honest reaction. *It's just* she hesitated, *don't you think people are sick of reading about food?* I agreed, but didn't think Trader Joe's *Fearless Flyer* was necessarily the right content platform to disrupt. *Think about it,* she continued, *the* Flyer *is one of the last physical publications in New York, sure it's lame as shit, but I, I don't know. I have so many ideas for this stupid place*. I wanted to hear about them; I suggested lunch. *Sure* she agreed, *there's an Italian spot down the block*. I followed her lead out the basement's emergency exit and into the bright, bitter day.

&nbsp;

We took a three hour lunch. It was completely inappropriate. Megan spoke fluent Italian, a language she taught herself in order to read *The Name of the Rose* in its native tongue, and ordered three main courses for us to share: gnocchi with clams, spinach and ricotta ravioli, and a caper capellini. She believed deeply in the intertextuality of all words and references and stories, and said so crazily between spoonfuls of sauce and sips of soda. I told her I understood, had also read Eco and Borges, that I loved those guys, but she said *reading them in English is pointless*, so I hung back, yielding to her vocalized reverie. She told me about her poetry, a practice she had gotten into after experiencing a certain psychic death, I guess, from concurrently seeing so many wealthy men—guys who happily bankrolled her in return for what sounded like very little effort. She had worked part-time at the *Flyer* throughout to maintain a writing credit on her resumé. Her big idea for Trader Joe's was a kink section called Trader Hoes. *It could be massive* she insisted, *look at all the freaks in line at that place on any given afternoon, look at the fucking staff*. I couldn't argue. There was definitely a squirrelly aura to the Trader Joe's consumer. Maybe she was onto something. I asked if she'd show me some poems and she got out her bedazzled iPhone, pulled up the Notes app, nails clicking appealingly, and handed it over. I scrolled through a few pieces, lurid but undeniably eye-catching, and told her she should email me the one called *THIGHBROW*. I didn't want to fawn. *It has a strong motor* I cleared up, immediately embarrassed by my long gone knack for workshop language. *Oh no shit! I recently performed that one at a stripclub in Midtown.* She took her phone back and sent the poem to my work email.

&nbsp;

It was dark out when we left the restaurant. Stopped at a light and looking at traffic, I felt the night sky to be awake in its own way, lines of cars seeming to dodge its advance rather than the other, usual way around. I told Megan that I never felt the Butterfly Effect anywhere so acutely as in New York, where the mistake of a person miles away could haunt the trajectory of your entire day. *Oh sick, you smoke weed?* she joked in response.

&nbsp;

Arriving back at our pods, I told her I appreciated her edits and that she could take off an hour early if she'd like, I could handle the final slot on my own. She thanked me. *I'm off on Fridays, let me know how things go with Benji tomorrow*. She handed me her number and asked what neighborhood I lived in. I told her my apartment was across from BEAN in Chinatown. *Cool* she virtually breathed, *Hope to see you around this weekend*. I contained my delirium.

&nbsp;

Beating with adrenaline, a pressure I noticed in that moment had become alien to my soft, shitty body, I pulled up the *Fearless Flyer* template, uploaded Megan's poem and pressed send. I repeated to myself: *You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star*. Nietzche said that I think.

---

Friday morning I walked into the store, not quite triumphant but not altogether humiliated: a small feat for me on any given day. Through the windows outside, I had seen a crowd gathering by the registers. It felt good to know that the commotion might have something to do with me.

&nbsp;

*May I read what our good man, he who has just graced us ten minutes late with his presence, thought might be appropriate to put in the *Fearless Flyer*? No no, not *Playboy*, not *Maxim*, but our *Fearless Flyer*: a family publication, a wholesome publication* Benji roared from the helm of his ship, if you will, surrounded by the unswerving crew and dependable mates that constituted the store's colorful staff, gesticulating wildly, summoning the strength he'd need to share Megan's poem aloud. He opened up the paper with unthinkable gravitas, as though leading chautauqua, and drew a deep breath: *Thighbrow*...

&nbsp;

**THIGHBROW**
Megan Michelle Mitchell

&nbsp;

Burrow in them, curl not, your brow and mine
Tangle me up again
  	                              "get me a comb caddy"

&nbsp;

I don't want to grow up
                                 I just want your $$$ daddy

&nbsp;

Keep it real with me, Chief, are you Sad
Can we, I mean me, be here
	        This apartment makes me
	        Want to die
	        Who did this?
  	                                     Where's your Miss?

&nbsp;

I don't want money I want ________
		                 I lied

&nbsp;

Emulsify the fillers, don't mind just bill ‘em
Intermix and coalesce, dot dot, kiss kiss

&nbsp;

Squirt
	        Water	Pee?                   Or jizz
:(

&nbsp;

Hello, I'm dancing up here
Ballet flats weren't in the cards
		               SCORPIO ARIES SAG
	            Where's your fuckin BADGE

&nbsp;

Always kiss me goodnight

&nbsp;

You get Sunday Scaries
	       I get Friday Fright

&nbsp;

I thought it was pretty good. A couple people clapped. I looked up at Benji, shrugged my shoulders, and started to laugh. His glare said *I trusted you*, but his audience-driven charade necessitated a bloated final scene, a "To be, or not to be." Taking center stage once again, Benji activated every inch of his figure to mime zipping his lips and throwing away the key, followed by two rounds of an umpire's "HE'S SAFE" gesture, landing finally, brilliantly, with a stiff arm and trembling pointer finger directed at the store's sliding glass doors.

&nbsp;

I was too ambivalent to retaliate and waited until I got outside to toss my Hawaiian shirt in a garbage can.

---

It was fittingly my final day of the free trial with SCOOTLE. As I parked across from my house, my phone prompted me to leave a mandatory review. *SCOOTLE is freedom* I wrote, *Four Stars and Feeling Nubile*.

&nbsp;

Feeling somewhat dissociated rather, I walked towards home replaying Benji's expansive soliloquy. As I got closer, I saw a tall girl vaping outside. Dressed in a leather skirt and blood red corset, I couldn't believe it: it was Megan. Eyes twinkling knowingly, she had seen the issue. It was all for Megan. She apologized for her pussing lip injection and I said she was perfect. I grabbed her hand, led her through The Golden Shower, and up to my apartment. For the first time in years I felt like myself, like someone with a living sex drive, with untaught predilections and needs. A rare midwinter sun shot through cracks in my walls making Megan look like a deity and I didn't even apologize for my mattress on the ground. As I eased her onto my bed she looked up at me with total candor, an unabashed and earnest abandon like that of an orthodontist praising you for completing simple instructions. *You were fearless for publishing me* she whispered, *my fearless flyer*.

&nbsp;

*We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking* I quoted with a smirk as I entered her. She smiled: *I love Cousteau*.

Fearless

Lovelock says science is never certain or exact.
The best we can ever do is express our knowledge
in terms of probability. We’re probably fucked,

but preciser unpleasantries often serve to distract
us from the fact of it: utility bills, inadequate storage.
Lovelock says science is never certain or exact,

but only pretends to be, like I’ll pretend to connect
deeply with people to nudge risk of personal damage
from the realm of probability. It’s probably fucked

up, but I like it: in the evening air, we construct
our panic room made of fellow feeling, a shark cage
love locks. Say science is never certain or exact,

and Science says: *Baby, I don’t have to be. Cause and effect*
*alone can’t account for what sick things emerge*
*from the goo of probability. You’re too beyond fucked*

*at this point to reverse it, but get one thing correct:*
*I couldn’t have done it without you, or your language.*
Lovelock says science is never certain or exact,
but like the rat in its laboratory, we’re at where we’re at.

Novacene

Cricketsong firmly established—one *hzzzh*
    high thick thick high fence.
    Now I hear inside it 8–10 pulses per second,
    high low points of different singers' songs
    intersecting in acidic thrum.
    Some are silent, foraging or breeding
    in my ears     a version of forever.
 

nothing   here is moving
    Stop in the path.
    Sun strikes
    a log through trees.
    Bird: Great news. Great great great—
    Approach page scared
    Pileated woodpecker
    drumming on a dead ash tree.
 

We don’t follow the law of conservation of angular momentum because it’s a law,
    we follow it because we can’t help it
    and we don’t not murder because murder is against the law
    we, we, we, we, we
    murder anyway, we do what we think we have to
    embezzle tort trump property lump.
    I’m my bitch, I’m my
    bitch! I’ll have
    feedback to you ASAP.
 

Wherever I stop, the closest cricket also stops. I am a threat.
    Crouching in tall grass to spot them, in amongst them, still
    can’t see them (see other bugs—wasps spiders flies beetles).
    The sound changes as I turn my head—
    diffuse and angular ringing buzz
    spills over horizon-dam
    surrounding town
 

Stay silent till you know you’re safe, crickets
    till you know the others are safe
 

of course   but whenever possible please be calling to your others

&nbsp;  

&nbsp;  

&nbsp;  

&nbsp;  

&nbsp;

###### **Dried clover flower**  
&nbsp;

Dried clover-flower on its stalk
    green center, white-rimmed, thin
    brown wrinkled petals starring out,
    brown hooks pointing in different directions
    at the crimped thin end of each petal.
    A record of expansion.
    Expansion is star-shaped
    if one’s reach is not obstructed.
    Shape of firework, classic
    articulated bloom,
    "operates according to a logic of"
    Spread arms, lie back on grass
 

Went to school in the tree
    I like to xylem and phloem till we
    push a seed out the stem.
    That’s gross.
    Seed gets a message, pollination, "time
    to become a billion
    bigger than you are"
    big bang happens daily.
    Xylem and phloem
    Jailem and drownem
    Kingdom and file 'em
 

Fell asleep. Geese crossed pond. Monde.
    My feet sweating in boots.
    Sun lower, wind rising.
    A gesture, grass upside-down.
    I gesture of
    Dead, tree head in the water
 

Well I don't want any more to get    in translucent
    pond past wet.
 

Red poppies holding the light, someone’s yard.
 

Late cricket shoots light-hyphens from a space-gun
    and the victim day is permanently charged.
 

I’ve had an excellent walk
    Sudden urge to get married
    to the day.
    Get married to my life
    and have a lifely life
    whose isn’t any else I own.
 

Try with and without an us.
    Without an anus
    mouth’s no help.
    But a mouth is helpful.
    Kiss the anus too.
 

December, marching
    to keep warm, heading back.
    I swear I hear crickets,
    dim silvery ringing
    —"snowy crickets"?
    continuous overtone
    fry of
    neural activity/
    blood traffic?
    message
    echoes land-shape.
 

The bitch sleep still curled up in child's pose
    other side electrified fence
 

Mom’s getting a defibrillator
    pen out of juice
    trees no leaves yet
    clumpy gray sky
    upside-down trees in runoff pond
    calm doublings. Sitting on log,
    boots in swamp. Of course
    the leaves in melt puddle
    beech leaves, oak, are soft-silted,
 

funged over, mossed, can’t see
    edges, unshapes
    I could name
    arendt-bloat, farleigh,
    soft-boat, softclaws, mud galaxy,
    smoking clot, feinted burrow. Not
    going to look the same tomorrow.
 

                                                              Pond close to the road gray-green
                                              and the upside-down trees sharp. Hear
    HVAC   cars
              ~exhaust~

                                  the culvert—
                                                          Stream through it.
    

We don’t follow the law of conservation of angular momentum because it’s a law,

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