![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue3/posts/AudreyDeng-NotMyFault/1.jpg)

The origins of the bubonic plague remain unclear. Depending on one’s point of view, one might say the plague began when the bacterium *Yersinia pestis* first discovered a mammal host, in the body of a rat. Others might say the plague really only started to matter when it began to affect the more important mammals, like humans.

For a while during the 14th century, Genoese sailors were accused of being the plague's catalysts. They were the ones who had sailed their ships far and wide, unwittingly bringing their stowaways—diseased rats—to Europe. The malady spread quickly, seeing its near-complete end in the 18th century. Many sailors died hating themselves for what they had inflicted upon humanity; after all, the world was supposed to end.

Describing a thing’s origin—usually a pleasurable, historically fruitful exercise—becomes, in a plague’s origin story, an exercise fraught with blame. I loathe this. I felt firmly that the origins of the plague had nothing to do with the sailors, who were simply doing their jobs. If anything, it was the fault of the stowaway rodents, who were, in a way, also just doing their jobs of being 14th century rats.

I decided to use my time machine to bring back Pietro, a Genoese sailor, to show him that the bubonic plague had not ended human civilization like people believed it would at the peak of the crisis. After briefly explaining how I built a time machine, I took Pietro to the best place to showcase contemporary human health and vitality. We went to an elementary school. It was the autumn of 2019, the beginning of a new school year. The air was fresh with promise.

**ME:** Well, here we are: my old elementary school. Look at this playground—these kids are all so healthy and full of vitality, don’t you think?

**PIETRO:** What? (Looks around, eyes bulging.) My god, what have I brought upon the world? Listen to the screams of the children! Look at the terror in the frantic motion of their limbs! Their tiny little limbs! They will die within the next twenty seconds, at most—the plague does not take children kindly. Oh god, we have been caught at the worst stage! I must act with haste. I must let their blood or light them on fire.

**ME:** (Seeing the teachers standing nearby I panic and pull Pietro closer to swing sets.) You can’t say that so loudly! And what do you mean? These kids have recess.

**PIETRO:** Have re…recess? They *have* it? Is *recess* some sort of *disease*? Is this another term for my Great Plague? And so, you mean to say the Death has taken *all* these children? (Squints, then points at a young, red-headed boy.) What about that little boy who is running around? Waving his arms so madman-like? (Squints closer, then gasps with horror.) My god, he has all the symptoms! Black spots that cover the skin, sweat that drips down the face, screams that tear apart the ear—dear lord. He shall be dead in three minutes. I must start a fire. (Throws shoes and hat into a pile.)

**ME:** No, Pietro, no! He’s not dying anytime soon! He probably just hit puberty early and got blackheads or something. And he’s obviously sweaty—it’s super-hot outside and he’s running pretty fast. As for the screaming, it’s recess. He’s scared for his life.

**PIETRO:** So…no fire?

**ME:** No.

**PIETRO:** But what of the singing children over there?

(In the distance, six girls sing “Ring around a Rosy.”)

**PIETRO:** “Ashes, ashes, we all…fall…*down?*” We all fall *down?* What is this sick chant? Are they actually trying to *summon* the plague? One…four, five, six girls...my stars, that’s the number of *death!* Are they *witches?* (Yanks off cape and tears off moustache, throwing them into the growing pile.) I need a fire! Sailors! Grab a torch! We have a bonfire that is begging for flame!

**ME:** It’s just a children’s song, Pietro. It’s about a different plague. The song doesn’t do anything.

**PIETRO:** Prove it! I demand you to prove it!

**ME:** I don’t really know how to prove it. I mean, you don’t see anyone getting the plague right now, do you?

**PIETRO:** I do. (Dies.)

This is how I brought the bubonic plague into the modern age. I write to you, my friend, from hiding. When I look out into the city below from the cold mouth of my lonely grotto I can hear the screams of children, mothers and fathers howling, loved ones mourning over their dead, sirens through my city streets, and I weep. I sing songs to myself of my sad tale. But still I cling to hope. I wait. I wait for a time machine to come and take me into a future where someone can tell me that this was
not my fault at all, none of it.

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*Illustration by [Stipan Tadic](https://www.instagram.com/stipan.tadic)*

Not My Fault!

AuthorTitle

###### My Friends

&nbsp;

Abigail is an optometrist.

Brandon is a barista.

Cherise is also an optometrist.

Dakota is from South Dakota.

Ester is an envelope technician.

Franklin is a stagecoach driver (of the previous century).

Gerald prefers Gerry.

Harriet is a horticulturist.

Isaac—Isaac isn’t interested.

Justine is weird.

K. is more than an initial.

Larry served two tours.

Melanie, of Melanie’s Sweet Sixteen Boutique and Dress Shop.

Nadine, originally from Bushwick.

Olaf (with a lisp) is four and a half.

Penelope, of course, and all her suitors.

Quincy! Oh, Quincy!

Roger refurbishes furniture.

Steven is a drummer.

Thalia is French Canadian.

Uma, well who knows?

Virginia is from North Dakota.

Wilhelm II.

Xerxes I.

Yolanda calculates spacetime.

Zane, smoking their cigarette.

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###### What Should We Bring to the Party?

&nbsp;

A bag of at least the smallest of strawberries

wouldn’t even help us now. Wouldn’t begin to

stem the tide of misfortune and woe, the deleterious

effects of total brain fever, a provincial class of devils

here to upset our evening—and worse, to slander our names,

and those of our elders, across the storefronts of this luckless,

moth-ridden town. To the east lies the ocean, plastered over

with marauding bands of jellyfish, blobfish, specter eels,

and various other creatures of the deep. To the west lies

the mountains, or so we guess. Could be the mountains,

or could be the backs of gigantic elephants; or then again,

could be poisonous clouds of brimstone and ash billowing

from the world’s tiniest volcano. You just never know.

Even that wandering wise man, even he didn’t know.

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###### The Vacationers

&nbsp;

“Aloha,” said the

Bolsheviks at the

corner store atop

Donkey Kong Mountain.

“English pitbulls for sale,” yelled the

faraway hang-gliderist.

Garbage trucks, their motors blazing,

halted on the slopes.

If and when the

journeyperson comes

kaleidoscopes nestled smartly in her

luggage bags.

Medieval

nincompoops. Night

owls,

porcelain

Quebec.

Risk averse to

starfish, satellite

TVs, and telepathic guardsmen

under cover of the night.

Virginia is for lovers.

What do you mean by that?

*XOXO!*

Ye of little faith.

Zoology.

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###### The Pleistocene

&nbsp;

Only I know why dogs have wet noses.

Why they trot along the roadside,

oblivious of their credit scores.

&nbsp;

I was wrong to be so drunk at the funeral,

especially before the mayor and her husband—

all the good they’ve done this town.

&nbsp;

Like the glacial world of the Pleistocene.

Yet still, I have no regrets.

&nbsp;

Only I know why dogs bark.

Only I know the difference between a rock dove

and a typical pigeon.

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I kiss you with my wet nose;

I am always snotty.

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###### Real Will

&nbsp;

The real William Shakespeare could never have this much fun.

So here I am all dolled up in my monikers

and reveling in the credit.

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Just imagine the court gossip!

&nbsp;

I give the Queen what she wants—another play about dragons;

she loves watching the monsters wing-beat it to the scene.

Soon a nobleman, a cousin of mine actually,

is getting married; I plan to write something frisky.

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Stratford-upon-Avon is so boring,

yet nobody thinks to look there.

I have another family: a wife and children.

I love them like you’d love a stranger,

like a tea kettle boiling in a dream.

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Life is like a message scribbled on a piece of cheese

and placed upon a mouse trap.

The real William Shakespeare lives there,

cocked, ready for his moment

Five Poems

But I was going to make it as a flowy tailor, a milli pins doing push-ups around me, less me than my shadow, and further less my shadow than my outline, as I rode a sinuous flame through the Kingdom of Double Chins.

So with the sound, an oversound, of singing in the morning, it seemed natural to me to bring down the curtains and take up my mending of the local medicine woman’s coat. Of course I have many jobs in the queue, but if I don’t begin with the one that interests me most, my day will be ruined, and this I don’t have to tell you doesn’t help the quality of my repairs either. And as the owner of this small shop, it’s up to me to begin with whatever repair I esteem is most important, and though it’s hardest to convince myself on this point, I believe this ought to be one of highest possible interest.

Yet it’s rare that I am able to begin working as I wish— interruptions are manifold and much is irreconcilable, like getting a step caught in trains of robes, training robes, else long automatical seatbelts made of bloodhound ears, or the intern, who seeking so desperately to please is always fumbling, and out of the corner of my eye I can sometimes see him deep in a terror about some  future error that will lead him, some day, to the mirror with nonpareils fixed like buttons on his eyes. He will have to suffer, fatally, the disadvantages of both his fears and his desires, since he so amply enjoys their benefits. One such look at the intern and everything in my work becomes saturated— as they say, with blood sweat and tears —so that when I imagine that I'm doing something, following through with some job or another— I do not know that is just a thought I’m steeped in so that a small part of me feels occupied with imagining itself and on accord of which it keeps being there, going along with it. But when the real work happens, I can hardly recognize what is going on, though I am nodding (for many chins) the whole way through as if with a premonition of that moment to come in which I do recognize some form of the giving itself. Then I think, ah, oh, I am doing something miraculous, something which I have not wanted has revealed itself and this is the prize of not being aware of having suspended my discernment; yet all along it has been happening:

There are the mice running up the walls with one of the countess’s satin gloves, always the same one, the same countess who goes “without chins,” that must be chased and captured, and *with equal respect to both parties*, a phrase I cannot balance without all of my concentration, touching glove to chin, yet so often the force of this effort causes the roll of paper that customarily dispenses receipts to be repeatedly adjusted, or alternately replaced if the paper stiffens and refuses to continue or reverses swiftly into the register, where it remains for sometimes the entire day.

The Tailor

Today I poke around your throat
and laugh at jokes you steal.
At night I search for the remote,

amid the couch, our home’s trench coat,
I pat and scrounge, reveal.
Today I choke around your throat

a scarf I found inside my tote.
(Bones, they squeak, then heal.)
At night I search and feel remote,

the more I know, the less I vote
and turn my steering wheel.
Today you spoke around my throat,

hid words I had, hid my gloat.
(Our pillows kiss and squeal.)
That fight and search for our remote

may have sucked my last grace note.
Cross-leggéd, lost checks, loose meals,
some okay coke inside my throat,
*It’s white!* (I lurch for our remote.)

House Poor

Author_SmallLeftAlignedTitle

1 cup Semolina flour

An onion

3 chicken legs

1-2 chicken pussies (depending on size)

3 sprigs of thyme

A pinch of pink salt

Artificial coloring

A pinch of blue salt

Seasonal veggies (meaning carrots)

A bag of cold grapes

Expired Sudafed

1 oz. Cherry tomatoes

The cheapest olive oil known to man, preferably from the Northern Territories

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Start with the wrong kind of flour. Reach into the chicken cavity and feel around. If the chicken starts to swell it’s not dead yet. FaceTime your father for help (with your clean hand). He’s good with this stuff. Your father will show you the next step on your mother, don’t be scared, they’ve been cooking their whole lives. Now that the chicken is dead, prepare the cold grapes. Put the grapes in a medium size bowl and begin removing their skins. (Remember *They Did Surgery On A Grape?*) It’s Halloween and people are on their way to put on blindfolds and feel the grapes. Replace the grapes with the cherry tomatoes. See who can tell the difference. When they remove their blindfolds, ask the shiest guest why they killed someone. They seem like a good kisser, right? Rub some of the artificial coloring on your lips and pucker up. Try to feed them the expired Sudafed, you can put the pink or blue salt on the expired Sudafed depending on the gender presentation of your Shy Guest. If the Shy Guest actually has a cold the expired Sudafed should give them a rare case of ADHD. Make them chop the onion. Tell Shy Guest to make a mean jerk sauce. Whisk until stiff peaks. Did you forget about the carrots? Tell your dead chicken to “spread ‘em,” and stuff the seasonal delights in there, Christmas Eve style (Holiday style). Transfer to a baking tray and cook the chicken at 250 degrees for twelve minutes. Shy Guest should be napping during this refractory period. Pour the cheapest olive oil known to man into a sauce dish and add the sprigs of thyme, allowing the herbs to release flavor during Shy Guest’s much needed Zzz’s. Drizzle oil on the finished chicken and tell Shy Guest to wake the fuck up. Rango star Johnny Depp in the news? Jack Harlow’s KFC meal? Kourtney K’s pasta portions? What are you talking about? It’s 200 AD, RECLINER ISSUE 3 is ready.

A Recipe From Your Intern and Editors

Don't let the owner of the organ grinder store up his music to encapsulate you out of it. That would be a strange occupation, to propagate a hurdy-gurdy crank revolving through shadow, strange though common enough. The way to fun looks difficult, like a tennis court on a mountain top, and where the distinction fell was not around a preliminary issue where practically anything happens, no, no minor one. Such leverage points look useable like a timeshare in country the city's leaching to, or at least the nearby towns. I had my own spin to put on the mutation of notes, in the sense that they melt into adjacencies of rain, visual obstructions, not to mention its being night for a while. What package delivery men can and can't see comprises society and its opposite, which so far lacks a better name. Ignorance and secrecy meant a lot to the person across the street flashing morse code with a penlight through droplets about the four-digit code to an entryway. Even now the picture darkens out of sight almost. A notification on your phone brings me no joy, as another from elsewhere always comes to take its place. How do they do that? How do they not recognize the nature of the case, this room belonging to a person who equates it with their normal job?

 
I like how everything reflects itself,
how the email reflects the global CEO.
People, their motives differ. In Albany,
certain locals in a cafe rejected Keith's
spiel about the Dalai Lama, whatnot,
and you wonder if he used photographs of them
for recruiting purposes, as social proof.
Earlier photos re: Consumer's Buyline show
him far from the guru, but as a baggy suit
of 90's money schemes. That Bronfman cash came in
after CBI collapsed. Turn a new leaf, meet
Nancy Salzman, Mark Vincente. Catherine Oxenberg's home
burned down in 2018. We all
get experimented on, or dodge the hook, or get hooked
to a fantasy that burns away years, and
to hear a lie enough is to live inside it
until only a main beam suddenly giving way
can disabuse your flowchart to success
onstage in a rented convention hall.

I wanted then the real, in hallways fairly ancient
but it was buried past a corner
within an alcove edged by reflections
and maybe a ways off, due north to silence.
Not really did I make it far
in those intramurals
barely unwrapping a lozenge before terms closed.
It was some in their cubbies,
defining a way of repeating for onlookers
who can no longer see, and anyhow you spun it
it had to be a peacemaker, the state comprised
of contracts sown into flesh, invisible
but rife with significance, and meanwhile we
have grown into our pastimes.

Rainwater's pooled. Brown leaves below
are more distinct and colorful
than those above.
Why the sun is so is clear
enough. The Sackler family can't destroy it,
human yearnings can't entice it
to pursuits that conjure its destruction.
Most radiant it is when hurricanes
have lately gone, whose work exults in statements
lifted to the edge of leaves,
you ancient thing.

 

So anything can happen. They say the moon is a mirror of the earth reaching us millennia after the fact, with clouds sputtered luridly at the margins? This was your reward, you were saying, to have a place for mind, always clearing or preparing to clear one, always securing the need this implies. It’s humid beneath such shade as the trees project. A mushroom can grow unseen for a long time, and perhaps it’s safe that way, to emerge between the flimsy blades as well provided for. When the boot kicks you in the teeth you have the means, as it were, to regenerate them as such. Our teeth are permanent today, and though no quality is more respected, a well-kept adaptability may deserve more than has been granted it. It belongs to youth and immaturity, or would if that term lacked a telling derision. This time the sky has changed to the color of sand, a cover dispersed or made clear to a blue gauze by dun shreds and hints. Probably to keep looking. The cloud is almost as a nectarine, its shape crazed and senseless. The vigor behind its changes I feel most when it tips to darkening, which is rapid. The color nearly vanishes, then it does. The sky is as it was before, only dark instead of white. Once more it is impenetrable, shielding, holding, silent.

 

They aren't exactly hauling bodies, but the corner disco isn't exactly secure. Finally there isn't much to do besides what draws the fleet of dayboats, who get the best of it, a few staying on, to keep what they had found.

 
It's curious how the fear market is renewed,
a parade of images bubbled up by technicians
each night, each day, collected from materials
of offhand or pointed sources. A sourcing sea.
I like pretending I don't live in a Pravda-grade clownshow.
My friends are establishing contact below the ice
with fairies and goblins under the earth there.
They're establishing communication with rocks,
and office supplies ("too bad"). Pretty much
they find a puddle to stir creatures out of,
and for this some have gone to the Tropics.
I keep retrieving you, and keep falling,
and keep wondering how nature did it,
how it made a day like today,
one I suddenly hope not to be without.

The giant head is eating metal balls which must be planets,
of violet storms seen by approximating lenses.
And the big moon is crescent, smiling
wearing sunglasses and playing piano
with a saxophone in the wings, as the curtain
of black liquid reaches our lips. In this way
they bear the status of celebrities who assume
a transferable symbolism detached from personal history
of any intimate sort, using that word in
a broadest sense to include
the intimacy of a shopper and salesclerk
in for example the Time Warner Center, browsing
Cole Haan sneakers, a relation that for some has become impossible.

 

In Albany, no one may have died, Allison Mack in charge. Perhaps ambiguously, or by the shortest causal chain that can be diagramed. Having flailed around such a place, there was only to affirm our convictions as the case warranted. A contradiction in criminality about wanting to reveal themselves.

 
Banned from starting another company of the sort,
what was there to do but pivot into what
might cynically be called the service industry?
Certain fundamentals applied. It almost seemed
it had to be this way, as pathologies uncover an outlet,
weaving a few key pieces for a nexus. It's curious, though,
the wish to earn by way of others through still
others, as though turned on by building on more
than what direct reports could sustain. Typically
this owes to the exponential power of numbers,
but here was something of that desire for hiddenness
and its opposite that one senses
in his notion of branding people while convincing them
it was their choice, with a design that was called a landscape
yet unmistakably showed his own initials.

 

Beneath the earth, opens Google Numbers. Baggage appears a little unattended. But it's not for me, corner of glass bricks and spraypaint that's darkening in spots by an awning. I can't extract what I've received racing along but it's okay at last when spots close. It's up to us to assign a benediction for the bluest among those violet ones. I've pledged allegiance to an old version of this song and now require counsel. Exposed roots reach wherever surveyors lug equipment that doesn't quite add up, mostly to the alley. A salesforce knows a Gantt chart to track tenants. They should probably smooth over a surface more but anyway we'll wait. At times it seems it's not even about the money. All this lay in our town, as noted, with waitful look. I watched planes take off that day, then found a magazine whose outlook spoke a little down to me. Perhaps the fault was shared, I pondered, closing it to look for something real in knots of trees. When illusions fade is entertaining. Someone's riffling through, making connections. Don’t unstitch their leather seat since redoing it always makes a difference. Implements in an unpainted shed, pitchfork, leafblower, spade. I keep forgetting my rules, wandering through the semi-open yard, no longer looking for air but something more earthy, to see ships off. Still, data moves in the inlet or the hotel, with baseboard of defunct Ethernet soon to be erased by a tape measure's scream. To like a place anonymous outside its neighborhood is good, with idiosyncrasies of use and point of view. It could be any region.

Multi-Level Marketing

That it is great poetry
is as published as it’s written
when I’m the editor to write off
how it’s great to stake decisions
hedging that poetry poorly asks
to pose the stakes so low it reclines
under it to pass as publication
that poetry is just as great a decision
I’m free to pose in myself
as writing published poetry.

POETRY 6

I am the horse that hallucinates time.

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5:40 am. My alarm bell rings for the fifth time. I am

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a child or am child-shaped. I am different from he

&nbsp;

who ambled from the shell of an unnamed Pan Am flight

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If I am anything I am a musical amalgamator, grateful too

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am I for unnamed librarians, scholars, & webmasters

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I reflect on how morose I actually am over a tub of ice cream

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& a Tyler Perry movie. I may not be there yet, but am

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closer than I was yesterday. I am so steamed

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open. The main thing about Sunday is where am I going to eat just

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the way I am. Look at me, hoodoouthinkur: Only a little over two

&nbsp;

months then I am done with you. I am so pumped. Ice cream cones

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& rainbow teardrops. People live in the streets. I am nothing

&nbsp;

compared to them. I believe that life is a prize but to live I am in

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love with automated spam bloggers, am devastatingly depressed by

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my child riding the bus & sleeting hardcore. I am quite possibly the

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happiest girl on this planet. I am done with driver’s ed now

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I am in a quantum car. I don't know where I

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am going, but I’m getting there really fast.

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But why am I actually focusing on things that matter I used to

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think glee was cheesy, & here i am watching it: I have a crush

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on u but cant say who i am lol

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Chapters 7 & 8 have been written. I've even edited 7 & am

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just waiting on final touches. I lost 0 followers cause I am

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awesome, who am I to say I am

&nbsp;

what I am, I feel what I feel, please don't ask me to change

&nbsp;

that? So if you’re asking me I am confused. I am

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tomorrow asking harder questions. Know the names of your

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bones. Is anyone as excited to see them as I am? I am not

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a vegetarian because I love animals. I am a vegetarian because I

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hate ham. Harm him. She's going to think I'm bitching out

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at her. Well I kinda am but what else am I supposed to say?

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Congratufuckinglations? But anyways I am currently in pain

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I used to tiptoe on Hell's boundaries but I am now a strong comma

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user. I am so excited & I am awake, but if someone I know for real

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starts following me I get all uptight about what I am posting

&nbsp;

why am I awake after dozing off before 10pm &ast;sigh&ast; let’s try this sleep

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10pm &ast;sigh&ast; let's try this sleep thing again shall we I am the champion at

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wordfeud. How & why am I drinking Goose Juice right now? One thing I

&nbsp;

am looking forward to: gonna buy the cutest flip flops ever!! tho, Fuck

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am I gonna do how am I supposed to know I’m only 15 lol! Guess who

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am I?^^ I said, yes, true, I always

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think I am 10 years younger than I am.

###### LE WEEKEND

&nbsp;

In a Friday

Trying not to let go of it

I lay down on the altar

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If I could wake up

From this dream

Not eat today

Not feed the cats

Not go to Lowe’s

I thought I might give

Birth to a calla

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Friday Friday Friday

My heart cried

Holding on like a cat

To a string of sun

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I lay Friday down

Brush her hair

Hold her purring in my arms

Still she dies

The week dies

The year dies

And I lay reading


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Bolt up from the striped day bed

Doctors shout from the other room

It’s going to be a calla!

But it’s not mine

It has your nose your eyes


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###### EGGS

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I woke up in tokyo

The sun white as an egg

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Outside my window in the tree

My ancestor warmed my egg

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His white robes fluttering

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I opened the paper door

And left the hotel

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When I passed he dropped

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Yen in clean bills

All around my head

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I stopped and neatly placed them

In my wallet thinking

What a wonderful dream

&nbsp;

I had lined my eyes with black

Filled my mouth with red

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Like a monk putting on his saffron robes

I slipped into the mask of a woman

&nbsp;

Walking down a stone path

I met someone who looked like me

&nbsp;

This happens in asia

I smiled wryly and carried on

&nbsp;

Shopping I lost my wallet

In one of the alleys

&nbsp;

Unable to buy anything all pleasure lost

I returned to my hotel

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In the mirror there was another mirror

In which there was another hotel

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The kind someone howls and thuds against

The kind of hotel you go to die

&nbsp;

In this mirror I watched myself

Dance naked

My black hair flowing to my ankles

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Wet black fur glistening like a dream

That cannot forget itself

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Thin and weak as seafoam

Clinging

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Soon three more women joined in

Black hair black eyes red mouths

Naked I had lost my identity

&nbsp;

I could not spot the one for whom

I bought

Candles chet baker and little blue and white dishes

&nbsp;

We ate each other up

In a race to exist

&nbsp;

Chewing I looked up and saw everyone

Was watching

Everyone was there

&nbsp;

Dressing hastily I pulled shut

the paper door

But still

&nbsp;

Everyone was there

Everyone was watching

Two Poems

1.

“Funny day,” Dickie Sablich says, looking up, climbing in his mother’s car. It’s a beautiful day, bright blue in Duluth, where autumn comes early to light up the bluffs in a deciduous panic. His hand sticks in a mysterious congelate as he pulls himself onto the vinyl seat.

“What do you mean?” his mother asks. She licks a finger and rubs at a stain on Dickie’s shirt.

“I mean the air’s yellow,” he says, closing the door, wiping congelate-stains on his shorts.

“I don’t understand.”

They’re cozy in the car’s little cabin now, just the two of them. Ignition switched on, in reverse down the steep driveway, Ella Fitzgerald on the radio.

“You can see the air and normally you can’t see the air but you can because it’s yellow,” he says.

Dickie’s mother stares at the sky, stooping over the steering wheel, accidentally running a stop sign.

“I think I see what you mean,” she says, and she does, think that.

Dickie looks at his mother.

“Maybe it’s the yellow fellow,” he says.

“What is? Who’s that?”

“I don’t know. The guy who makes the air yellow!” Dickie says, and then laughs, hard. His mother looks at him, confused, and then she laughs too, grateful for the unexpected gifts from Dick’s world, its inexplicable humors. They are both laughing hard now and again she gives thanks for this moment, which causes the feeling to deepen and leak gently out from her eyes.

It is not yet 8 o’clock.

This is grace, she thinks. God’s good graces.

They arrive at Dickie’s school, a convent and cathedral. They say goodbye and she asks him if he has all his things and he says yes but he doesn’t. Ella Fitzgerald comes on again, that’s twice in a row, and she says tomato, tomato, then Dickie orders oysters, his mother cancels ‘ursters,’ and when the song is done, he walks into school, a little late.

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&nbsp;

2.



Dickie dawdles into class and the nun threatens him with a ruler. He rushes over to the desk he shares with Mary Murphy. Mary looks nice in her clean-pressed uniform and the tangles of her long brown hair. He puts down his backpack and takes out his pencils, and smiles shyly at her. She smiles back and says hi, and he says hi, and she leans over to whisper I missed you.

Dickie is confident that when he inevitably falls prey to a sister’s wrath (again), Mary’s presence will protect him, at least partially. Mary once kicked Sister Freda. Mary was being punished for talking back, having her knuckles rapped, and she just up and kicked Sister Freda. Then the nun moved to retaliate in more serious censure, her ruler brandished high, and so Mary just up and kicked her again. The sister was startled, though she’d never admit it. ‘Everyone calm down now,’ S.F. had snapped, spinning her retreat as a truce.

It is the nuns who call Mary ‘Scary.’

“Numbers, everyone,” Sister Freda calls, and the class removes their arithmetic journals. Dickie has of course left his smooth green notebook somewhere in the clutter at home, and Mary gives him a piece of paper without him having to ask. Dickie begins drawing her a dog. “Let’s do the times tables for seven,” Freda says.

This is a fantastic development. Dickie knows seven from one to eleven, and a touch of funktionslust blooms as he writes three’s twenty-one. He gets to six or so and then hopes Mary might need his help, but alas, she is progressing well. He gets to seven’s seven, a shining forty-nine, and then his interest wanes, the cheap thrill souring into rote execution. The wide windows call to him, broad panels of blue cut right into the room and fill with colors, motions, hope for the unexpected.

And there is something unexpected. He can still see the air. He forgot about that. He wants to keep looking. He looks back to the room to gauge how much time he has. He sees bent heads over neat-columned desks and Sister Freda reading a novel. This is good. He looks at Mary’s paper and she’s at seven’s seven so he’d better just try to finish before returning to the window, and he does, up to eleven anyway and who cares about twelve.

Now he may return to his window, but he can’t remember what he was looking at. He tries to remember but becomes frustrated, a redness, a heat. Then Mary pokes him, and he forgets the frustration, too.

He looks to her. She points to her paper, where 7 x 9 levels a blank threat. Dick is thrilled. He shows six fingers, then three, and she scribbles. Their silent alliance reigns. Dick and Mary have made vows to wed as soon as they are able. They know none of the variables on which this is contingent except their own volition. This, more than any petty nuance, suffices.

Now Freda has closed her book.

“Alright then, let’s see how we all did,” Freda says, and moves for the chalkboard. She begins to write out the equations.

“Who knows seven times one?”

“Seven!” the class shouts.

“Yes okay that’s the easy one and next time I want hands up. Seven times two?” she asks. Freda sees Mary has raised her hand, and plans to ignore it. But as it happens, she doesn’t have the chance. Today, seven times two does not matter, because the siren is going off. There is panic and chitter. Everyone knows they are supposed to duck and cover, but nobody does. Sister Freda says stay calm, with her flat Scandinavian a’s. The students settle down, but Dickie is watching her, and she looks surprised.

“Now everyone knows that we treat drills the same as the real thing,” Freda says, “ so I want all of you under those desks. Go on. Hands over your heads,” she says. And so Scary Mary Murphy and the bastard Dickie Sablich now crawl beneath their desk, and they look at each other, curled tight in little balls.

They cannot believe their proximity, their privacy, their luck.

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3.



An hour has now passed. Sister Freda allows no one to use the bathroom, and Jake Olsson has peed his pants. Everyone is still covered but no one is ducking anymore; games are being played, at first to Freda’s chagrin, and now to her desperate insistence.

Ten minutes after the sirens went off the principal appeared at the small-windowed classroom door; he knocked twice, made eye contact with Sister Freda, and motioned for her to get down, fast, with a sharp point of his finger. She did so immediately, then barked out for silence.

Another ten minutes later, silence was ruptured by a fart, then broken again by laughter. The quiet gradually grew into talking, and singsong sharing, and the spastic games of children. Then when Ellis Ostman started crying from an anonymously inflicted indian burn, Sister Freda stood up, yelled two unintelligible words, and then held herself by the elbows, her head hung. She apologized, right there, for yelling. Sister Freda had never apologized before. She told them all to talk quietly, and asked them to be kind to each other. Then she repeated it. She asked all of them to please be kind to each other, and then went back under her desk.

At this point, Mary and Dick were in nearly paroxysmic joy. Beneath their shared desk was a private realm, where they existed only for each other, governed only by the laws they created. Sister Freda could not see them. They did not care for the opinions of their peers.

During the first five minutes of fetal hiding they’d scooted closer to each other so that their legs touched, and then as boredom and discomfort set in and the room began to uncurl, they took each other’s hands; Dickie’s clammy, Mary’s calm. At one point Olaf Gunnarson had felt the need to make a supposedly insulting remark about their affection, a rhyme malleable enough to include their names and insert their personages into a tree, where they then supposedly performed various would-be lewd acts. This was quickly silenced by Mary, who shaped her hand into a claw and shook it with ambiguous intention.

Now, sitting in the latent blue glow of the windows, the two of them were developing the language they would speak when they married, a private language that only they could understand, a language necessitated by their private kingdom which would be a big house in the forest but not too big, way out past even the gitchi-gami club and also right up against Superior where they could watch the water change colors and see the rain and the tanker ships and Mary could yell at the storms because that’s what she wanted to do.

They are adding flesh to their vocabulary when the man comes back to the window. He knocks twice and looks for Sister Freda. She stands up, he makes an ambiguous gesture, then tells her to get down, fast, with a sharp thrust of the finger, but she freezes. She stares at him. He points down again, and then, exasperated, runs on. She begins to speak, *Ave Maria*, she says, and then stops and asks the kids to say it with her. *Ave Maria, gratia plena*, she says, but not much of the class joins in until she screams briefly and asks them to say it along with her and then apologizes and starts from the beginning, *Ave Maria*, she says, and Dickie turns to Mary to say let’s get married now, we don’t have to tell anyone. Mary’s pupils dilate.

“They’ll never know,” Mary says, and squeals.

“They don’t have to.”

“Nuh uh.”

“Okay. All you have to do is say, ‘I do.’”

“Okay–‘I do.’”

“And now I have to say it too–‘I do.’”

They both wait.

“Now we have to kiss,” Mary says, but she just looks at him.

She’s frozen, overwhelmed by the moment. She is frightened by it, Dickie sees. So is he. Sister Freda’s cyclic in her praying, *Ave Maria*. *Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae*, says the class. The bastard Dickie Sablich stares at Mary Murphy. In front of him, there opens a space, a small tear in the world, through which everything appears clear. He can see it very plainly. He gets to kiss Mary Murphy, now. All his fear leaves him, and in its place there is only opportunity, and the barest recognition of this chance. He has no language to comprehend any of this, but still, he understands that a rare gift is now delivered, to him. This is his time to kiss Mary Murphy, here, in this small tear in the world.

He is grateful.

The Nuptials of ‘Scary’ Mary Murphy and the Bastard Dickie Sablich

I like Kate A. because right away she told me how much her period blood stinks.

I like Kate B. because of how elegantly she pins up her hair. Like she just hopped off a bicycle in Lisbon.

I like the first Kate S. because of a series of events that rendered us both essentially fatherless while still having a father figure endomiciled. Also she lies all of the time. I couldn’t avoid them, so decided to love her for the lies.

Kate C. gave me the notebook in which I'm writing this.

There are two more: Kate M., Kate P.

Kate M. has spindly fingers, is my soul’s mate, and calls me dude.

Kate P. and I haven't spoken for three years but she has the same birthday as the first Kate S. and Kate C., and she ate her placenta twice. If there is a party, Kate P. is the person to sit next to, even if, especially, she does not feel like talking.

The second Kate S. is hard to like and easy to love and no one can give the finger like she can, and though she thinks she is unforgiving, loyalty is perhaps her biggest fault.

When I was having an affair, my mother saw me with him in a coffee shop and said nothing. The next day she said, "He has a kind face"—a face she could not have seen from any angle but my own lap because of his hat. It's not that she lied about seeing his face. It's that she saw his ridiculous hat. I broke it off.

Kate A. is married to the first person she ever slept with and still begs for sex at lunchtimes. He acquiesces only every other day.

Kate B. is more of an ancillary acquaintance. She has hairy, genteel ankles, and I've always imagined that she has a very small vagina. Charmed, I'm sure. That is what I would say to it if I ever got a look. I'd wear a Mamie Eisenhower hat and tip it ever so slightly in acknowledgment of its narrow introitus.

Mine, by the way, is "not the biggest" that my most recent partner had ever seen, and he's seen quite a number to be sure. So, it's not that small. But not the biggest in RI, CA, England, and several youth hostels in Athens in the 90s.

Though he might have meant the lips and not the tunnel, the latter of which, they say, is roughly the size of your mother's. I bring this up because something is stuck inside my own mother's, and oh, it's the Kates and me.

My mother said to me once— she said this to me in her car at a stoplight near a college campus as we both watched a handsome man with a messenger bag cross a parking lot—"You know, if you wanted to date somebody who was Black, I think that would be fantastic."

Since that day, here are the thoughts I've accumulated on her statement:

1. Well, that was her way of being liberal.
2. My mother and I are both dangerously naive.
3. Dangerous to other people.
4. This is one of only two pieces of relationship advice that I can remember her giving me, and it's not really advice.
5. The other one was to move a couch with someone before committing to them.
6. But the occasion to move a couch up three flights with someone does not usually present itself until after the question of cohabitation. At which point it feels too late.

As I write this, leaning against her cervix with the notebook balanced on my knees, I have been stuck inside my mother's vagina with the Kates for going on ten years.

We were hanging out in my driveway one night. Me, Kate C., and the second Kate S. Talking. How did we get where we are, these lives we're waistdeep in now, etc.

There's the idea of love being a kind of perseverance.
There's the sunk cost fallacy.
They do say routine is freeing. Eat the same foods daily to save your decision-making energy for the grander things.
Or, it was something to do with our mothers. Who were asleep at that hour.

Mine happened to be sleeping nearby. She was in state. As in, she was the only one of our mothers asleep that night in Rhode Island. Embalmed in her hand lotions. We went to pay our respects.

We had been sitting in camping chairs I'd dug out from the garage, next to a box of 150 headlamps from a spelunking project my ex had done. We’d had some wine and the headlamps were right there, with my mother's sleeping body easily accessible, and so in we went.

I love my friends very much and now that they have been lost with me for so long in my mother's vagina—

I don't know how to finish that sentence!

Things got serious almost right away that first night. What are we looking for, I asked, even though it was my mother and thus my life. Kate C. was quiet. She knows everything but doesn't have to let you know it. The second Kate S. said: "We're looking for what your problem is."

What is my problem?

Or, as Kate M. says to me, "Dude, what's your deal?"

What &ast;is&ast; my deal? I'm inside my mother's vagina, the walls of which are reminiscent of a milkweed pod. Delicate-seeming, smooth. Straw-colored. She always smells like Jergens lotion but in here she smells like a September field.

I remember her brushing her teeth one night when I was nine. She was a nurse then, and she had nurse's hands: clean, lotioned, skilled. Though it has been decades since I've touched her hands.

She is very private.  After that one time, I can't say that I ever witnessed her hair- or teeth- brushing again. She will not take off her shoes unless she is alone. The bathroom door is always locked. Rare it is that she will eat in front of us.

We decided to split up. Me to the Patent Office. Kate S. to the riverbank. Kate C. to the Department of Records—for a poet, she has a beautiful practicality. Kate S. mistrusts the official word on things, thus the riverbank. My thinking with the Patent Office was that perhaps my problem, when created in or by my mother, had been registered.

There at the Patent Office was a long desk and behind it the doors to four large reading rooms and three small antechambers. My mother had had four live births. And three miscarriages. It was clear her Patent Office was organized around her uterine activity. I am not sure this fact is an argument for or against children. I possess a rippling mistrust of all conclusive statements, and this is my greatest quality.

The Patent Office reading room dedicated to me was not as big as I had anticipated. I am the eldest child, after all.

"Therapy," the second Kate S. said, peering in from behind me. "You probably dismantled a lot of your mother's inventions in therapy." She reported that the riverbed was dry. As expected.  My mother had likely been in menopause for several years. Then she (the second Kate S. loves discoveries) said:

-Hey! what are these three little rooms?

-Miscarriages.

-I want to go in one of *these*. Back soon. You keep looking for your problem.

I was 19 at the time of my mother's most recent miscarriage, so she must have been 40. It was late. I was coming home from dogged sex on a golf course with a boyfriend. She was in the bathroom and not coming out. She never stayed in the bathroom if anyone else wanted it, which is the kind of mastery she has over her bodily functions. I don't remember her ever releasing intestinal gases. (Because my mother has never said the word "burp," never mind undertaken the action, I must say "release intestinal gases" here in lieu of "fart.") I don't know how, but I knew it was a miscarriage.

If in September you have occasion to pass through a meadow and smell the straw and dry sweetness, and you lie down on your side and watch the yellow color spreading, you will know what it was like that first week as the Kates and I languished in the offices of my mother's vagina...

I spent days in the Patent Office reading room dedicated to me. All sorts of inventions had been registered. Not much genetic, lots behavioral. For instance, my mother had patented, in my name, a refusal to share my domestic preferences with any roommate or partner. I do not think my first husband ever knew of my terror of non-stick cooking surfaces. We used his parents' old Teflon frying pan to make omelets. The PFAS accumulating in my bloodstream were not any business of his.

My problem is what? Sometimes I'd see Kate C., her arms full of manila folders from the Department of Records. She'd arch an eyebrow at me and be on her way.

(I love how Kate C. keeps her counsel. Once, she didn't say something, and didn't say it so intensely and for so long that I finally had to hear her say it in a dream.)

And then the other Kates started showing up, one by one. The first January, there was a deep and drifted snow inside my mother’s vagina. She’s always loved winter. And I saw Kate B. elegant as ever go snowshoeing by. (She has the type of beauty and bearing that has never been valued by my mother.)

The first Kate S., my oldest friend, was harvesting my mother's desiccated eggs. She picked a few off my coat, which had adhered to it like burrs. Then she put them in a bucket and continued on.

Kate A., blithely not looking for my problem, was training for a triathalon, up and down the vaginal walls with crampons. I was sure that the crampons must be causing my mother a not insignificant amount of pain, but I said nothing. My mother wouldn't have wanted me to.

Kate M. wrote letters to me from the vaginal vestibule, where she had taken up the lookout. Kate P. kept her company, drinking and toasting her problem and, when I visited them, mine. Kate P. asked me whether Kate B. was attached. I looked down at my ankles, which are thick and hairless. Like my mother’s.

We'd gotten in but couldn't get out. I'm so sorry, guys! I have apologized at length. How tedious for my friends to be stuck in my mother's vagina. We should have gone in your mother's, I always say to Kate C., suspecting we would have been in and out in a number of hours, headlamps stowed, hands washed, done.

Though maybe not. Vaginas are like the cup Darwin filled with three spoonfuls of mud and then covered until eventually 537 different plant species grew. He was surprised but hey, only the obvious is amazing, and the conditions for life, if you have them in you, as the Kates and I do—well it was foolish not to anticipate that my mother's vagina would be deep and diffuse and contain so many meticulously filed records.

It also housed joys, which can be boring to report on. Or rather, if you report a joy accurately and well, you destroy it. How could I do that to my mother?

But they all came around to the idea before I did, the Kates: something has to be destroyed in order to be created. (I suspect the Kates are all getting together without me sometimes. And that beautiful tattooed woman Kathy whose last name I don't know. And my cousin Katie. They’re here too.)

My mother singing "Edelweiss" with a child in a rocking chair—a vision I saw through a window in the Death Certificate Office before it smashed closed. Window after window in this office is smashing closed. This, I venture, is mainly for effect. A series of dramatic smashing closures is not what the loosening of the parent-child bond feels like. Only dying lilacs affect me in real time. Also, my mother is always very busy. "We are sometimes at our most resourceful when we are putting things out of our minds." I read that in this month's *NYRB*. The subscription has caught up with me here.

There is the lovely September meadow feeling of the main tunnel. And then these antiseptic offices. The Death Certificate Office crammed with dry, yellow papers.

My grandmother's last minutes choking for air... My mother held her hand and was sure that medical technology would prevail and thus turned her mind to her 7:30 a.m. work meeting. I know what my mother's thoughts were that morning of my grandmother’s death but I don't know her well enough to be able to answer:  where has she filed this scene?

In an effort to communicate to me that pubic hair was "normal" and not to be shaved, my mother once told me, while folding laundry in the basement beside the slop sink, about her friend "Virginia.” Poor razor-happy Virginia, who suffered the consequences. Virginia!  The first Kate S. and I had laughed and laughed. Her faults be as they may, my mother has an excellent instinct about communication. Hide the message.

I love my friends so much. I have always dreamt of becoming orphaned and having to make a family from the Kates. Or keep my mother alive but far away. Maroon me on Rapa Nui and her on an ice floe in the Northwest Passage. Or fine, she can stay right here but has to tone down loving me so much.

"I don't think there is a woman in this world who doesn't know on the cellular level that her mother has to be dead in order for her to live. IDK. Maybe not. I'm putting ‘live’ in quotation marks, you get me dude?" This is what I wrote recently in a letter to Kate M., who will read it perched at the vestibular cleft, and who will hopefully, meaning full of hope, write back.

Here in my mother's vagina, the Skene's glands—glands named after a Victorian gynecologist who peered into the vaginas of women whom I do not imagine wanted or assented to the attention, but first "discovered" by Regnier de Graaf when he gazed into the vaginas of aroused rabbits—are dry.  They have remained dry through the 183 bouts of intercourse that my mother has had these ten years. I have a friend, Kathleen—every single detail in this story is true—who does female genitalia education. I never did the mirror class with her, but I liked hearing the history.

None of the Kates or I has ever been inside a vagina save for our births, and only Kate P. has regularly had her tongue in one. "Remarkably supple," Kate A. said of my mother's vaginal wall, laughing. She has been laughing a lot in here, though this, on the whole, feels to be a serious matter.

I like when people laugh during and at serious circumstances—a deep-in-the-tunnel recognition of how incongruous and out of tune things always are. Though from what?

The questions that brought me to my mother’s vagina have not mellowed with age.  And the answers remain as rare as the seeds of the fairy lantern, a flower that has been on my mind a lot since the last of the headlamps sputtered out.

I have stopped apologizing and now take a weird pride in the fact that my mother's vagina is roomy enough to accommodate all of these Kates and me.  Too, it is still flexible enough to allow the weight of two or more Kates against a portion of its wall to create a kind of cozy indent. There is that Herodotus line, something to the effect of: “From the beginning I didn't write straight on about the big things but went for the supplementary story.” And that is the conversation that many of the Kates and I had been having for years even before we entered the vagina: What does *complete* mean?

My mother once ran for Congress and lost. In her vagina’s Death Certificate Office there is a folder with six certificates on that episode. After her second wedding, on a honeymoon in Eastern Europe, she called her kids, who slid down her parents' banister and begged to get off the phone. I have spent months on the certificates from this episode, which, unlike the Congressional defeat, span several shelves. Though there is also the possibility, occurring to me only recently, that the records here have been arranged and curated purely for my benefit, and that the true deaths housed in my mother remain a secret.

As I mentioned, she has had penetrative sex 183 times in these ten years. We retreat to the cervix when this happens. The most recent time, Kate P. tried to rally the group: "Let's all grab on to the tip when it gets close, and when it pulls out, we get out with it."

We sat in respectful silence after that suggestion, but rescue via penis was never an option.

In all this time, my mother has not masturbated. Do not take this to mean she is against climax. Rather, knowing my mother, I'd say that her refusal to masturbate is the strongest piece of evidence I have that she values and believes in it.

The feeling of not being able to feel has been the prevailing state of my life. What if all of this research is a distraction? Information as numbing agent... I should sit alone in my mother’s vagina, hands empty, and listen to the sounds of her gastric acid and to the valves of her heart muscle.

But, too, I can see that this yearning for emptiness is just another stage in the search.

My mother is a shy person and has yet to acknowledge that the Kates and I are here.

The most harmonious furniture-moving relationship of my life has been with my mother. Move a couch three flights up with her and you will forgive her everything. If there were anything to forgive.

The second Kate S. thinks there is. Things to forgive, that is. Kate C. is, as usual, circumspect. When this is all over I will text her.

Have I ever seen my mother laugh? I can't be sure.  Like the first Kate S., she is a gifted and committed liar.

But it’s I who wants to do the lying. And I don’t want to be subordinate to the subject. Then again, I don’t want to write “on” her, stomping all over her with my Doc Martens while she sleeps. I am therefore in what seems to be the only morally defensible position. Inside. Now how to get out? The Kates and I have decided to synchronize the pushing of our fingers into my mother's Grafenberg spot. The plan is to keep pushing, come what may.

My Mother's Vagina

![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue3/posts/RyanPetersen-Twitch/1.jpeg)

The priestess fell to the floor and choked in a fit of static. *There is another prison…a shadow prison…built within the ruins. Go there, my pilgrim.* The neural connection short-circuited. Her body tensed upwards and disintegrated into a thousand micro-spheres.


“Another nanobot cluster down the drain,” said Mateo. A running theme throughout the game was the inorganic world attempting to replicate the human form. Collectivist clouds of lesser robots came together, so that they could pose as a single, cellular being. Within the in-game universe, these characters often met a tragic end. A body without organs was a difficult thing to sustain.

*And she said nothing about the golden figure,* I typed. *Untrustworthy?*

I watched my message enter the chat. Mateo looked up at the camera and pointed his finger in affirmation. “When you’re right you’re right Crono.”

Crono, my username—the sensation of being seen gave me a jolt of libidinal energy. And then a pang of worry. I began to question what I was doing. Me on my computer, watching a kid who plays video games on his own computer. Why didn’t I just play the game myself? Because there were layers to the streaming experience, that's what I told myself.  It was the complexity that compelled me.

I knew I was attracted to Mateo. He was beautiful, and I tried to take in as much of his face as possible. My eyes gravitated toward his lips. Plump pouty things that were always wet with a slight glaze of saliva. Or was it a gloss? I found it hard to believe he’d wear makeup. And yet his lips appeared so unreal at times, as if his cam footage itself were processed through a beauty filter. Or a deepfake app. I imagined what it would be like to kiss him. Soft fruit pressed against my philtrum. The weight of his tongue in my mouth. An earthen taste to his spit, like water from a deep well.

But if I allowed myself to peel back this surface-level attraction, I found there to be a deeper appeal hidden beneath, one inherent to the streamer setup. I entered into a theoretical framework, one in which I saw Mateo as my own player avatar, within a separate game. A diagram was sketched out in my head.

> *Fig. 1* was me: I was at my keyboard. I held sway over Mateo through the chat.
>
> *Fig. 2* was Mateo, streamed onto my computer screen: he held his own controller. Mateo played as the avatar in the game.
>
> *Fig. 3* was the unnamed avatar: he looked down a shadowed corridor. A derelict spaceship lay ahead of him.

This mental diagram clearly illustrated a field of play much larger than it appeared at first glance, with at least three degrees of possible remove (*Fig. 1-3*). Through the chat interactions, I controlled Mateo. Or rather, there was group control, along with the other users in the chat. Mateo excavated the open world of the game. And in turn we excavated Mateo.

There were several personal details one could glean from Mateo’s streams, if close attention was paid. He was of Puerto Rican descent. He lived in Southern California, but I remained unsure of where exactly. A few location tags on his Instagram pointed to Chino Hills. That would place him only about forty-five miles from my parents’ house. Mateo lived with his mother in a small condo. He was the youngest child of three. His two older brothers moved out a few years ago. He had just turned eighteen. He was an Aries. He dropped out of high school last year. He was studying for his GED. He worked part-time at Starbucks. His best friend was a girl named Madison. He made no reference to dating. No stated preference for boys or girls. He was six-foot-one. He had a map of the world pinned to his bedroom wall. His favorite drink was Glacier Freeze Gatorade, from which he took large swigs during his streams.

I signed up to be a Tier-Three Subscriber for his channel, costing me about twenty-five dollars a month. The perks included a monthly private stream and privileged chats. This was the reason why my comments always rose to the top, above the non-subscriber riff-raff. A private stream for premium subscribers was scheduled and rescheduled a few times since I had signed up. Mateo canceled the most recent one the day of, a few hours before it was scheduled to start. He cited a family emergency. I didn’t mind; I knew the private stream would happen at some point. The contours of his personal life would slowly come into focus. I carved the stray details he offered me into a mental high-relief.

Mateo’s avatar walked through a large torture chamber. Tubular devices made of green chrome were laid out in a tight grid, like terracotta soldiers. Skeletal remains protruded from one of the coiled appendages. I imagined the machines sucking the life out of prisoners. But there was no given lore to explain how they had once been used. No obvious practicality as instruments of torture. There was a lull in the game. Mateo had gone quiet. The chat fell off. An opening for true connection presented itself. I began to type.

*Have you ever heard of those empty property developments in China? The Chinese ghost cities? This level reminds me of them.*

“No, I don't think I have. What are they?” He scratched at the razor bumps underneath his chin.

*Giant urban projects erected at the edge of the Gobi desert,* I typed. *Built in the hopes that the country’s economic growth would soon reach Inner Mongolia. Residential buildings left empty, a construct-now-and-find-the-residents-later approach. They were the mirror image of the game’s abandoned cityscapes. An urban environment that existed in-waiting. Shopping centers and plazas untouched, save for the powdering of the desert sand, their utility left in waiting. A temple made for a god without followers.*

“Ok wow.” Mateo's eyes darted over the screen as he read. I could make out my chat log reflected in the glow of his iris. “Spooky vibes. China’s kinda wild, huh?”

I nodded along in agreement, as though he could see me. China *was* kinda wild. I had read an article earlier that morning about an iPhone factory worker who jumped from his employee compound roof, only to get his head caught in the suicide prevention netting. He stayed there for hours, still alive but his neck fully broken. Middle management couldn’t figure out the best way to cut him down. The factory continued its operations that day, without pause. A true horror story. And yet—my desire to visit the country remained strong.

I saw myself boarding a high-speed train, an express liner to the remote ghost city. There was a phantom companion at my side, a shadow puppet with no discerning features. I wore a bucket hat and tiny-frame sunglasses. We arrived to find the city in the midst of a dust storm, half-finished towers swaying in the wind. We walked through a large shopping mall. Every store was empty. The elaborate water fixture had gone green with algae. I asked my faceless partner to take a picture of me, in front of the cinema multiplex. I made a peace sign with my right hand. The phone flashed. I looked at the picture and studied its composition. My slight figure, surrounded by a landscape of overwhelming pathos. I saw that the space’s hidden potential had finally been realized: a staging ground for compelling content. At the edge of the world an aesthetic oasis springs forth. A bounty of potential images, all imbued with an elegiac aura.

“You know, it's funny that you mention those ghost cities.” My ears perked up. I reemerged from my dissociative state. He’d been thinking over what I’d just said in the chat. He was giving me a considered response. “I’ve always pictured all of my work shifts as little bricks being added to a giant skyscraper. But it's just like you said. The building is for a city that nobody lives in yet. Big luxury apartments that are all empty. Sorry, I don’t know if I’m making any sense with this.”

I typed out *you are*, despite not understanding his leap in logic. How did the hours at his dead-end job become the building material for an unpopulated housing project? Did I miss some connective tissue? Then again, I’d never held down a nine-to-five. Maybe I just couldn’t relate.

“What I mean,” he continued, “is that things don’t really matter much, outside of your job. And then your job, it turns out, doesn’t matter much either. So the only thing I’ve found that really matters, for me anyways, is gaming. Because even when I’m not playing a game, I’m still in the mental mode of *not-playing*, like I’m thinking constantly about when I will get to play the game next. Love and friends and money, those are all great, I get it. But they can also start to bore you. Gaming stands outside of that. Outside of the boredom. There’s the world of gaming in here.” He pointed to the screen. “And there’s the world of boredom out there.” He pointed to his bedroom window. “My personal heaven and hell. Staying in the game for as long as possible—that’s my key to survival. Everything outside of the game is just no longer useful. Or whatever use it may have had, like back in my parents’ day, that's over you know? Like out there…that’s the real ghost city…” Mateo trailed off. He clicked on the trigger buttons on his controller. The reanimated corpse of an executioner approached him with a giant axe.

I replayed his monologue a few times over in my mind, extracting a sense of satisfaction from every word. An intuitive conclusion from Mateo, derived through my direct involvement. The proverbial joystick pulsed within my hand. And the dichotomy of our interpretations—that contrast had some real torque. I wanted to travel to the ghost settlements as a gonzo tourist. Mateo saw himself already a resident, longing for escape. There was a dialectic there, one that could propel us forward into new configurations. Sexual and intellectual stimuli synthesized into the sublime.

Mateo was decapitated. The executioner held his head by the helmet and thrust it down a stairwell. A LOST TRANSMISSION banner scrolled across the screen. *The excavation ends here. NEW GAME?*

“Godammit,” said Mateo. It had been a particularly long run. Almost four continuous hours and all without a bathroom break. He usually didn’t survive that long. “So what’re you guys thinking?” The Glacier Freeze sloshed in the back of his throat. “ I could go one more round. Or I can call it a night. Let’s get a yes or no poll going in the chat.”

I looked at the time. 2:00 AM. I felt a strong pull to get to bed so that I’d wake up at a decent time. The days had begun to lose their shape, I was sleeping-in more and more. Signing off was the sensible option. But just before my exit from the browser window, I stopped myself. What exactly did I have to wake up in the morning for? Tomorrow held no obligation. The morning and afternoon exhibited no discernable difference to me. Not anymore. What value did “fully-formed days” hold within a shapeless life? The only thing left to lose was time with Mateo. I re-entered the chat.

*Yes. Let’s give it another go.*

Mateo laughed. “Don’t know why I even do these polls. You always tell me to keep going.”

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

*Illustration by [Daniel Levya](https://www.instagram.com/wordofcommand)*

Twitch

###### 1. Tom Cruise is playing himself

Right: Tom Cruise always plays himself. He has been playing himself since *All the Right Moves, *a movie about how his character has them. Every so often, Cruise plays himself in ways that strike a chord or scrape the zeitgeist or result in Oscar nominations: the ass-wiggling ingénue of *Risky Business; *the beautifully rumpled white-collar striver of *Jerry Maguire; *the bewildered, speculative cuck of *Eyes Wide Shut. *In *Edge of Tomorrow, *he plays a guy who’s so determined to get his intergalactic mission right that he keeps killing himself, over and over again—the performance of a lifetime, and maybe the ultimate Cruise-ian allegory, except of course for the *Top Gun *duology. No Cruise character feels more like self-performance—and self-revelation—than Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, who in 1986 was in the exact same position as the guy playing him—an ascendant, Nautilized hotshot turning figure-eights in the sky above the rest of us. Maverick remains tethered to his actor twenty-five years later, a figure simultaneously commanding respect, deference, and a bit of bemusement at his steadfast refusal to change—with the times, to act his age, etc. The basic message of *Top Gun: Maverick *is the same as *Interview With the Vampire, *which is that Tom Cruise is eternal, but now we don’t need makeup, special effects, or supernatural pretense.

&nbsp;

###### 2. Tom Cruise is a great actor

Tom Cruise is not a great actor in the sense that he can “disappear into a role”—a critical cliché that doesn’t really apply to too many actors, especially not recognizable ones of above-the-title stature. (I’m hard pressed to think of one, anyway.) Rather, in conversation with my first point about Tom Cruise always playing Tom Cruise, I’d say that greatness here is more a matter of always keeping himself visible, which in turn contextualizes the roles in surprising and emotive ways. In one of the best scenes in *Top Gun: Maverick, *Pete goes to an Air Force bar and tenderly observes a gaggle of hardbodied younglings clowning around the way he did in his own cocksure youth; the formula works because we can’t divorce the character’s mix of yearning, envy, and melancholy from what I imagine to be Cruise’s own as he stares down his sixtieth birthday. Cruise isn’t really historically a Method actor, and he doesn’t talk about sense memories or Stanislavski or technique. It may be that the similarly self-mesmerizing precepts of Scientology do the same trick for him. Some of his best performances have been for obviously great directors, like Stanley Kubrick, but Joseph Kosinski isn’t Stanley Kubrick and Cruise is still great in *Top Gun: Maverick. *Credit where it’s due.

&nbsp;

###### 3. Joseph Kosinski is a good director even if he’s not Stanley Kubrick

Tom Cruise keeps directors as pets these days. For the *Mission: Impossible *series—all good to great movies, and examples par excellence of how Cruise has finessed his obvious suicidal ideation into an on-the-job ethos and an onscreen alter ego—he’s employed the one-time Oscar winner Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie also did *Jack Reacher, *which was less successful at fusing star and character together because as anyone who’s read the Jack Reacher books knows, Jack Reacher is, in a fashion, relaxed; he’s a hulking, nomadic killing machine but he’s comfortable in his own skin and doesn’t need to be liked. Tom Cruise is not relaxed and needs to be liked like Tracy Flick did in *Election *(he could have played Tracey Flick to great acclaim). McQuarrie, who is not a particularly gifted director, knows his job, which is to hone, refine, and benignly weaponize the ruling tensions of his friend’s self-image. He has figured it out, and his reward will be generational wealth for himself and his family. Joseph Kosinski is more of a pure action director than McQuarrie, and because he isn’t the steward of a single running character like Ethan Hunt, but rather the facilitator of a more free-floating Cruise persona, he has a bit more freedom to show off his chops. His *Tron *remake, which did not feature Cruise, was a sleek, beautifully designed exercise in legacy aesthetics that re-created the original film’s imagery (and characters) while pulsating with serene confidence. *Oblivion, *starring Cruise as humanity’s last hope against alien invaders and their high-tech drones, elegantly incorporated color schemes and hardware from *2001: A Space Odyssey *as if giving its headliner another, posthumous opportunity to work with Kubrick. *Top Gun: Maverick *is filled with nods to the “warnographic” style of the late Tony Scott, but its clean, precise physical and aeronautical blocking is recognizably Kosinski’s, and so are its coolly adoring, contractually obligated Cruise close-ups. Admittedly, it has not been a great year for new American movies, but if I were voting for the Oscars right now, Kosinski would get Best Director.

&nbsp;

###### 4. Miles Teller is actually pretty good

The first time I actively enjoyed Miles Teller was in Nicolas Winding Refn’s insane, hypnagogic Amazon Prime crime series *Too Old to Die Young, *where he played a sullen, possibly fascistic LAPD officer who comes to a spectacularly brutal end. *Top Gun: Maverick *is the second time that I have actively enjoyed Teller, who plays the son of the late, lamented Goose from the original *Top Gun. *Having never had any reason to think about whether or not Teller resembles Anthony Edwards, I did not see the brilliance of this casting coming, but while Teller is physically very different than the erstwhile Dr. Mark Green—a thick-lipped, broad-shouldered, dead-eyed hulk—the combination of Navy whites and a beautifully considered mustache complete a seamless illusion. The relationship between Maverick and Rooster (the perfect callsign for Goose’s son) recalls the displaced paternal pathos play of *Creed, *which is the movie *Top Gun: Maverick *most resembles, even more than the original *Top Gun, *which, being a slick, superficial piece of opportunism conceived and financed by coke fiends, had no emotional component to speak of, and certainly no metaphysical dimension. The metaphysical dimensions of *Creed *and *Top Gun: Maverick *pertain to the conjoined durability and fragility of American institutions, icons and intellectual property. When Goose dies in *Top Gun, *it’s a plot point; when Maverick saves Rooster’s life in *Top Gun: Maverick *it’s mythic retribution, as well as a hint that Miles Teller can’t replace Cruise so much as be his hand-picked wingman. The fact that these events are completely obvious and mechanical somehow only heightens their effect. It helps also that, as I said, Teller is very good in the part, and if we’re being honest, he was the one who made me cry.

&nbsp;

###### 5. Jennifer Connelly is very good

The character that Jennifer Connelly plays in *Top Gun: Maverick *is probably the funniest thing about the movie, insofar as she’s been manufactured to give Pete an age-appropriate, long-suffering romantic partner who *feels *like a carryover from Scott’s movie but isn’t. Because Kelly McGillis is now 60 and has aged like a normal person, there was no chance of her returning; Connelly, who at 51 is virtually indistinguishable from her younger self, matches perfectly with Cruise as a resident of the flesh-and-blood uncanny valley and is also a gifted, resourceful light comedienne who can parry and deflect his innate ridiculousness. Her Penny is your average, flawlessly preserved American small business owner, smilingly presiding over the aforementioned Air Force bar and its revolving door constituency of wannabe flying aces. When Pete shows up at the bar, there is a five-minute dialogue scene in which it’s revealed—with the same flat, expository affect as stereo instructions—that Penny has been the great love of his life since precisely the moment *Top Gun *ended, and they’ve had all kinds of exchanges and experiences over the years, and she has a teenage daughter who dotes on him, and it’s only a matter of time before he has to choose between what’s left of his career and a life piloting yachts and picking up tabs with her. As the movie goes on, she proves that she’s worth it by always being in the right place at the right time, which is about twenty yards from Pete, in flattering beachwear, bearing sympathetic witness to every phase of his self-actualization, including, of course, shirtless touch football on the beach. This all works in the same way that almost all of *Top Gun: Maverick *works, which is via a grateful suspension of disbelief that, inasmuch as it’s possible to earn such a thing, is earned by the skill and professionalism of all involved.

&nbsp;

###### 6. It’s better that we don’t see Tom Cruise have sex

Many reviewers and social media commentators have singled out the scene—or rather, the lack of a scene—in which Pete and Penny rekindle their love affair. Pete drives Penny home on the back of his motorcycle; she walks into her perfect little cluttered beachside house and pointedly leaves the door open; he follows her in; and then Kosinski cross-fades into an ostensibly post-coital shot of the two of them laughing and talking (silently) in bed. It’s hilariously chaste, but it’s ok because Cruise is so supremely narcissistic at this point that watching him have sex would be difficult, like looking directly into the sun. Kubrick understood this in *Eyes Wide Shut, *which is at its core a comedy about Tom Cruise *not *having sex, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes due to his own cowardice, and always in a perpetual rhythm of *coitus interruptus *that only humourless, Paulette-style critics could fail to laugh at (which explains the film’s lousy reception in 1999, when humourless, Paulette-style critics had most of the staff jobs in American media). Note also that in *Eyes Wide Shut, *Cruise is plagued by mental visions of Nicole Kidman—who, as if you need reminding, was not only his onscreen wife but his *actual *wife, once again cinching the idea that he was playing himself—fucking a guy in Maverick-style military dress whites. I am fairly certain that this, like every other funny thing in *Eyes Wide Shut, *was intentional.

&nbsp;

###### 7. John Hamm is a TV actor

Speaking of intentional: the CO who most wants to bust Maverick’s ass is played by Jon Hamm, who became famous too late in his career to be the next Tom Cruise and is also widely considered to be a “better”—or more “nuanced”—actor than Cruise owing to the Emmys he won for *Mad Men *(a show I have not watched all the way through). Whenever I see Hamm in movies, I see, fairly or not, the Face of Prestige Television (which was not true of James Gandolfini, a great actor regardless of medium), and so his scenes with Cruise are rife with subtext. Other people have analyzed *Top Gun: Maverick *as an allegory in which Pete Mitchell is not only the only guy who can fly Mach 10, train a team of pilots to blow up an Enemy uranium stronghold, and tame Jennifer Connelly, but he’s also a symbolic figure holding the line against the dronification of warfare, which is to say, the dronification of moviemaking itself. When he stares down Ed Harris, it’s a reference to the latter’s performance as John Glenn in *The Right Stuff; *when he stares down John Hamm, however, he’s defending the honor of old-fashioned, self-contained, money-at-the-concession-stand movies—which Tom Cruise loves—against the luxurious, insidious passivity of serialized, longform, visually drab Prestige Television. Eventually, Hamm’s character sees the light, but he’s not one of the film’s many heroes; he’s an avatar of an inferior entertainment-delivery device who gets put in his place; Tom Cruise, who supposedly goes to every new release in disguise in order to sample the wares, doesn’t even own a TV. This is what gives him his edge.

&nbsp;

###### 8. Giorgio Moroder > Lady Gaga

I cannot hum “Take My Hand,” Gaga’s torpid, strangely hookless contribution to the *Top Gun: Maverick *soundtrack. The Instagram photos of Gaga with “big fan” Tom Cruise are of course remarkable. I can hum—and sing, credibly— Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” and will be able to do so for years to come. One of these songs has already stood the test of the time, and the other one won’t. Some other sub-observations about the soundtrack here. The original, neo-Wagnerian *Top Gun *theme by Harold Faltermeyer, interpolated into Hans Zimmer’s new score, owns in a way that bypasses I-Love-the-80s-irony. The deployment of “Danger Zone” for the opening overture is lame—a cheesy example of I-Love-the-80s-Irony— but at least it’s the original song and not some nu-rock cover, like Nonpoint’s non-essential version of “In the Air Tonight” in *Miami Vice. *

&nbsp;

###### 9. *Top Gun: Maverick* is fascist

Oliver Stone called the first *Top Gun *“fascist,” and so it stands to reason—assuming you believe good old left-hook-throwing Oliver Stone, last seen hagiographizing Edward Snowden—that a virtual replay of its contents would be the same. (In 1986, *Top Gun *made the most money of any US movie at the box office while Stone’s *Platoon *won Best Picture, powered by a performance by Charlie Sheen, who went on to impersonate Cruise in *Hot Shots.*) Both *Top Gun *movies exult fetishistically in shows of American military power and hardware, supplied pro bono by the weapons manufacturers themselves; the same script approval granted to the Navy in ‘86 applies here, which may be why nobody mentions Iran or Russia, only “The Enemy,” which lends the narrative an absurd, Orwellian dimension. (We have always been at war with The Enemy, and we always will.) Kosinski’s rapturous, great-man-of-history angles on Cruise only add to the delirium. (If it wasn’t so tasteless to call him Cruise’s Riefenstahl, I would, and I guess I sort of just did, though I’m also sure Kosinski voted for Biden.) In her recent Cannes roundup for *Film Comment, *the excellent critic Devika Girish described the movie’s “American-exceptionalist fervour,” and noted its below-the-line complicity with the Navy, before concluding—adroitly, I think—that “[*Maverick*] isn’t ‘a good film *but *with bad politics’; it’s a good film in part *because *of its bad politics, and it requires that we interrogate what we experience, often in spite of ourselves, as ‘good’ art.” The only thing here to take issue with, hypothetically, is that this movie even requires interrogation, since the bad politics are put across with the same cheerful grin that Cruise uses to sell everything. The last thing that this very smartly engineered movie is is oblivious: rather, it’s confident, and shameless, and it deserves to be, because it puts its—again, fascist, while also, paradoxically, strictly apolitical— agenda across without any hesitation, bashfulness, or compromise.

&nbsp;

###### 10. Tom Cruise only wants the best for us

Cruise is the engine of the film’s confidence, and the starting and end point for how to think about what the film is, and what it means. I have thought a lot about it—and him—in the days since, and whether it’s possible to square an affection based on his being the Last Real Movie Star with my suspicion that he has almost certainly condoned slave labor in his various palatial homes. The extent to which one of the more consistently mud-slung celebrities of my lifetime has gone clear, PR-wise, in the last few years is genuinely astonishing and while it can’t all be due to him delivering the goods onscreen, that’s gotta be part of it. (If Mel Gibson came back with *Lethal Weapon: Riggs *instead of mouthing anti-woke talking points for S Craig Zahler, I think people would go for it.) Cruise appears in promo bumpers before *Top Gun: Maverick, *as if personally welcoming us to the theater and thanking us for our time and hard-earned money, money that could have gone to gas or groceries or opioids or whatever else. Tom Cruise knows the value of a dollar. I’m pretty sure that if you could prove, under oath—or under the influence of sodium pentathol—that you were somehow not entertained by *Top Gun: Maverick, *Cruise would privately scourge his flesh with barbed wire, *First Reformed*-style, as penance. It would sting, but not as much as the idea that he failed to deliver the goods. I won’t perjure myself here, however. I had a great time.

Ten Observations About *Top Gun: Maverick*

There are two kinds of fat people. There are fat people that were born to be fat, and then there are fat people that were once thin but they became fat, so when you look at them you can sorta see that thin person inside. 
Dr. Philipp Anderegg, Anorexia Dreaming

Last summer, at twenty-one, he worked his first summer job: Ice Cream Face. 

He tried fried ice cream on his third day. 

It tasted delicious, it tasted pathetic. 

He gained weight. 

It was more than noticeable. 

Whole new parts of him had grown overnight. 

People were talking behind his back. 

He hung around in the borderline moments and eavesdropped. 

He heard the things people say when you’ve gained ten, fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five pounds. 

Everyone recognized him, that was the worst part. 

His girlfriend didn’t comment, that was the worst. 

Soon, for her, his kisses became the opposite of kisses. 

She was disgusted. 

In a flash, she cheated on him.

In a flash, she broke up with him.

He was devastated.

Her voice was so low, so tight, he couldn't decide if he’d heard her. 

He learned about the body mass index. 

He was aghast to discover what the body mass index said about him. 

He caught an eating disorder like it was nobody's business. 
 
He surrendered, without hesitation.

During and after his day shifts, he was a master of his disease.

In his mother’s dark apartment, the retching was particularly invisible.

It was all that trouble: the finger beyond the end of the mouth.

He was pulling the trigger, he was tickling the top of his heart. 

(The right index finger is considered closest to the heart.)

He was reading *Anorexia Dreaming* by Dr. Philipp Anderegg.

An interesting read, sure, but he was technically suffering from bulimia.

He had a big secret nobody knew.

His shame thrilled him—his body was a pinball machine.

He was a young man, but he felt like a minority, and now he was irreversibly hooked.

Thin Person Inside

###### 5/16/21

syrup spoon scraping bottom, doze of ambrosia
don’t anymore collect perfume of dinner in the backyard
buzzy in a wilted body ongoing I dreamt of
cumface
the responsibility of the hollow befell a small winged creature, equine in feature
nuk nuk            sounded the chimney
throbbed the wooden table, heavy breasted
dosed summer with robin eggs. furies arisen toadies throaty. you, lord’s serf’s
cold shoulder boils. toll collected,
pocketed. golden paws hang kingly levy
to go to space in a space suit is a mistake,
she says wide-eyed, ecstatic
hair gel under ladles of heavy-lidded lovage, greenly lung, hark!
the furrow the hollow ardent
pasture beneath
a wheezing miniature horse bridge toll
collected

&nbsp;

###### >later still, peckish

in town there is a cafe and lentils
the creek will freeze
a person who lives alone chooses what is inside
and what is outside if
a plane fell near the window i
close my eyes and change its mind

<h6 class="exempt-from-text-fit-calculation" style="text-align: center;">from The Claire Bitch Project</h6>


 *


 Too bad in the sun the story is the same

 over here they try it again

 That’s all alright
 perfectly the same
 old time
 twice on the wind
 Outside
 the plane silently overhead

 What are you doing? this swing is
 Warm

 prick the old fire

 This space all over is
 Quiet for some reason

 fast over there

 Come back
 Don’t stop in the

 At the same time i’m leaving

 How to accommodate this
 big as ever
 Expand
 to fit you

 and you are all the space
 There was never

 Outside i’m waiting for help

 Your hand over my mouth
 My head
 Next press into me

 I’m on the only road I’m some
 monster
 I’m about to run out
 into the dark
 I’m a dark top

 And the talk is the problem
 Once around
 twice


 The pressure suspends on
 what freed it


 the sound goes somewhere


 *


 somewhere and it’s back

 cover your hot head
 The sun
 on the outside of your room
 the sky in disarray
 The rock on the roof

 you’re some
 other Creature

 distant sin

 Sane now the red spirit
 moves faster

 Wind picks up
 Face together the wind

 And i said on the other side
 i’m red
 and i’m waiting for to grow

 I’m a brick in the distant weather
 you don’t want to change

 You don’t want to say you said that
 but it comes back

 As you move you move so slow
 you move So much more than me


 *


 at the end you start
 to move Forward
 and he’s back in the white car

 In the dirt on your road
 before we never had enough time
 and now the spirit is moving to the other side

 That’s a little rabbit on the road
 That’s a little bit more that you expected

 The morning on the other
 Fasting getting small
 in your eye
 Getting small before bigger
 things come out to get it

 The other little special other
 on the road to your home

 That i can feel you behind me
 the reason you check over your shoulder

 and the light comes on
 you’re here

 take this hand
 against my mouth
 my face
 a little wider than expected
 Than expect we come together too often
 not breaking
 things out my window

 My widow on the mend
 in the bend in the river
 that’s an elbow
 On the shoulder
 And my left eye can look back

 I think you don't expect me
 and i’m here

 On the other hand it’s getting later

 The thing i stop having
 to my pleasure

 bad things
 on the other end
 And bad little creature
 my head

 I can’t hear you anymore
 I can’t hear where you’re moving to

 But i feel the whole place shake again
 under my feet the grass grows
 even through dirt
 Even in the white light and the landscape
 is always the same

 The static coming
 Louder Phone
 and book
 after book about time

 Water was toxic and dust
 was kicking up
 and the town left for another town

 and we are here now
 Making a little image of it

R

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C

L

I

N

E

R

>

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