July 2018. https://www.artfarmnebraska.org/
Toile covers the island over documents. Dishes are twinkle-permanent in the pull-out tray. Vital foils for specimen-collecting leak on mango tea towels, jumping if summoned, by thought-batters and eggs. It is quarter past full three, full o’clock sumptuously pernicious, the FILE in front of me, TV, smells, the tulips plunked in glitterglue spells: Plug. I wonder… Positioned to co-exist, could I be complicit in taste-mongering? There are some arthritic surfaces to reflect, in fact, type-cast into kitchen utensils and then rehabbed, turn rent into, my rent. I walk like a cormorant, out to the boardwalk, shy like Agent Priscilla, to collect myself a Polly Taste: coconuts, treeflowers, molecular structures, pingpong chaise, a lychee, all the codes of bourgeoise cookery at my fingertips. Mhm. I, the archaeologist-rake, begging to superglue fenceposts to clues, all but superb fingerlicks between, open like the heaven’s mail: THIS IS YOUR DIRECTOR, REMAIN CALM, ALLOW–shoot, discharge surfaces. All of the leg videos wet. I’m soaking
up
signed,
DIRECT VERBATIM
One idiot Wednesday less, and two idiot souffles more. Thanks, Agent Dickinson, kicking me like May parade to Sunday. My recipes are going well, don’t you think? I blink, but still nothing, eggs, shells, toilet trees and trayTums to turn pockets out there’s not a wince nor worksum whiff if planets borderline personalitymanual then what? Don’t cry for me. I wash eggplants, wash sea eggplants, bite sea glass eggplants, hence–
Recipe for Sea Glass Eggplants:
60 sea centipede
60 big glasses
Liquid
Gloves (handed)
Dry icy
Lice
Distribute. Join. Ice it
It Sunday, girls, and I’m going lipsyncing to Eiffel 65 you. Did you even breathe or purchase the innocence requisite of this crime we are undertaking investigating, *sigh*, to? I think there’re stomachs riptide flows and if lightbeings were barcloons they would swirl without cholera via asps, they would fuck without being cholera period. Period! The light superfluous, fingers in waists, Diane summoned and reading menus, a standard shape, sound proctor, is here. I listen. Everywhere is smoked cheeses.
Next to me, a blonde pomeranian describes the delivery, only fevering during set-up, punch. “Doolittle, or die, hahahaha.” The joke, as prefigurative slop, a novice motive, distresses me, bibs as table legs positively reposition themselves in sneezes, real nice real conversational, easy. “Say, choosing between a doctor and a submersible, which would you excommunicate?”
“Hope.” Darts thepomeranian tongues, all jiggly with it.
Girls, they wipe, though precious not. Why lightbeings karaoke in utter disturbance is foreign to same winkers as is widely turbulence foreign parking on signage is blue, in serif fonts, why dome should read these is infuriating, their voices like pinecones hitting shields, all fragmented, blue, boisterous, foreign, DISTURBED, why are voices freaking pinecones that is please eyes. Girls, they whistle, though whistling not, as awoken were shields with serif S.O.S.’s fonts, calling blue, tangle day, a bluish piercing foreign on disturbance, fostered shield, now, is that signage saying blue? Who is that, substance, Sheriff Raphael, who??
“I’m back at the hotel, now, filigreed badger towels everywhere in folds, shavings, hair, little crop-circles dusting the carpet, parquette, even linoleate premiums’re listed on, the guestbook towels toweling bays and housekeeping keeps burning it, filigreed faxes ‘n focus, PLUS the phonebook’s personified right now, sitting cross-legged by the televisionstation, I’m sure… Diane? Is vocalization you? I shuffle mylittle stool pants at the documents, turn over, televisionstation, turn over, curfew bilingual, then try-sexual dams. Choo-choo, furnace, donkey chaise, this is Poptart leaking! Transmissive ….out.”
MISSION X: Tail Taxis Toward Tirol Taking Two Taffeta Turns To T.A.P.S & TRACK
T, Flanagan, tired.
T, Flanagan, hotel.
T, Flanaggann, in tracksuit! Goodmorning!
T, FFlanaggen, bed. Valise-wide but virginal? I ding-dong Uber to T.A.P.S
TMI, F, ™ focus, there’s trash to laying superimposed sidewalks full on bloat-pilled, planks, pigskins plus eyes so backdrop you should ream ‘em
Toaster Boy, F, F marks the map, I’m trying I’m detecting flesh…
Turpentine, a lightbeing surprises the bra, the pantyliner fresh as tattletale surfaces, sure it is
T, Ffffffffffffff, TTFFO suddens while tailgating on the telltale lorry, shines. Skrrrt? So?
T, while alligator, the splash subsides, and I see lightbeings in lorry-like constellations’ flies.
MISSION Z: Enter Excalibur Effervescent Extremely Embodied & Excrement Etc.
Ride.
The cop.
Shit on copcar, cop. The joke is not the whittle-aperitif you
(Recipe for Whittle-Aperitif:)
( 7 sonorant slits
( ⅓ spoon elfs
( Splash of shell
( Shelf
( Soma Treats
( Nothing (glassware)
( -Neat-)
badboy cop uniform down. Hug like good god down. Slide down the polio boy, copper railing, whatever else sinks its operas into, baddie, lit like Super Floss, all dirt and polio, crikey, holey cop oak, in valets.
Are you ready for my birthday party????? A polio boy zoomies thru our centerpiece, standoff, no, orgasm, he, Excalibur, who arrested, is the polio boy. I am sick! Can I believe love! I could not believe the Excalibur! Hung to forever! Stir me
Here I am, now, in Italy. I’m a lady. I have two spots. A hole.
Here I am, now, defaced.
I’m looking around here, superfluous facility on fleek for appearance, widening chutes near the frays, would sooner diet in public Italy than die across pubic ads. Ya! This is fun! I like diva cups!
I’m really trying hard here, now, Agent D. Stop. I just wanna give famous. Guides just wanna give Harley. Quail. Suck for eggnog, for clues, for ergonomy, just give LSD! To myself? Stop. No (giggles).
Look at: Trees altogether arousal machines, source-plugs doused in source-spirits, backdrop brand deals, big-ass turnips. Trees, source-spirits mooning trails, teetotalling as spinal monks into blacktop supermarkets, blackmarket supercops, frail chokehold pearlbits in Lightbeing Trillicent’s armpit like if skies were follicle bits. I know! Lookie is a feeler! He is not sociable nor does journey remit jukebox to eyes, or else! Hahahahahahaha the blouse, like are lesbians perfect, laced or suggestions, is, this time, on fire.
Finally, I’m at Mission Y, blur. No, but really I forego anything to myself if it just doesn’t whirr. Somehow place bikes softer when I die-again yet feel hung to smithereens when I roll, careen, residences in Spain, here, feel:
W3: slime-rate
W9: excommun.
R4: minnows (p. gallon)
W1: Waists R6: watches, distributing
R3: Lightbeing Milli
W16: fire!!!
R28: E-scooter in tree
W10: Tree
Here I am, in States. In, first, containment, reaction cellulitic worst. In, for century, it seems I am air, am the honorary surplus division of cooking with mud, sometimes raisins, and electrocution (air), dry air moving about tops of steaming white-capped pork-pies, such asses as Mister Pluras turn to vile in vials of dream-(sludge!) lasagna (proctor!) and everything gets let lousy. Of pillage, curious, now, in wobbly-ville, the special lock store, bodyshop, trad-post, my initial condition deters concentration, of course, but I suspect air poisoning in the slightest positions in and around Wallisellen, the Dame of All Lightbeings. It is and is not superfluous, my condition.
Gas villas, not blah K. My guess as to which John Barcloon signed the script is John Paul G. to test #343, his mouth reads like a prune cookie-impatiens blistering drop of crime, ever so slinky, ever so shine. The WAISTCOAT.
Someone died. The lightbeing forum/.com breast says it was water, of held things, and I can’t exactly post denial under it, plus, Agent Herr Dickinson would SCREAM to saw me turn retro to her alba… Rules, surly lessons, tells forum-goers to spill, type love into 10-14 .login///me. Boring. Hue pantomime stall and return graffiti so the truth limps and kind of blazes, in neon shackled curlicues. Haldol. Agent H. D. Life isn’t so lonely as hackers set TV out free, if only you called it “Mine Pliny.”
The death was purposeful. Billiards were stuffed into and thrown-about pullovers, leaving static around flammables in possible spots, lots of coverage Lightbeing Milli flashing DEAD. Zippity zop. I cried in circles there, holding my brown petticoat brownhair brush Lightbeing Millicent had brown acrylics brown baskets thrushpellets in her brown eyes and nose bubbled around had a bugged purse everything was bugged and nearly wet, crisped to eternity, I blubbed.
Will cry wood if the pearl don’t shoot me weak you finger will.
Have technologies really cum that change, that fascinating?
Perpetual Summer, idea logical, returns.
Pin is poison and green like August.
So Fall irritates the dogskin, peering into irritates leafskin
Hey time, it’s me again. Juice
Hey time, it’s me, armlet.
Again Diane, ontime, curves
Rolling desks over trees and over folded trains, faster than singularity lima bean.
Is late a season? Some worry words vanish as filament pleads.
This Springnite stuff snuffsout noise, and I am oomphed, ee, squeaky
A balloon. Trust everything and abort. Such siphons glimmer artful, dreamy, absolutely DROP CHIC I’m gurgling–OUCH! The branches –
A ladder gets me down. Tourniquette-art in rich orange glazes crossing through the figure at 4…4PM…quarter past nowhere sumptuous to pernicious, so I dip a lip and drink and normalize and un-boss and blueish, become perfect, lesbian, become bigger than myself, at least subbing dropouts of glee… Scrubbed out –
Flushback: Diane is trimming my topcoat. “What are we?!” Worksoap. It’s true, we are too hydrated for psychosis, at least, in theory, given recent death controllers determined lye, and, language arts determined hydrogen-happy in flask of laundry-liquid, permanently. Diane, I whine, I will continue braiding whines with jokes forevermore in sequined traces unless you demand the beauty rope– catastrophic lices.
Catastrophic casinos sans ouvertures sans limit fell into my sockets and erupted into money murse, streamlick service merch will sue the money hands if I, the skirt, will not sue first the cursey mop, the
Flushbuck:
COuld I be dead? If I scramble myself, oiled, in vitriolic kitchen, doth anything rise around bourbon’s beak?
Recipe for Bourbon’s Beak:
7 pinto sheaths
baby doll glasses
my iPhone’s gallbladder
1 bile pill
1 hill sash
Let rest, lass, then pass gass
Winks
I know I love Diane. If LSD wooed woolen pipedreams, the longlost courses, would I vaporize her for knowing? It seems iffy, at Mission Bay, to warble in courtship prefigurative of turns and dads…
Here is my outfit,
I wear it Monday-Saturday, when teaching class, taskforce. A situationship I was in, certainly, I had to be constantly thrilled to respond to uniforms, filled-
The other thing I wear is this: Worldly-girls shining floss for bloods, googoo
In the bar, I wiggle in the backseat, jukebucks jiggle like wiggle cues, polly wanna-be creaks. I like carcinogens I like treats bee-line beats bleached by teams. Bee-line to bushells, sleep on pell-mell, holla at a (well) call it by name: smell. Do you want shells?
Over calm ounces?
Do you want my bells?
Over doll houses?
Look, I’m not trying to seclude, (true) believe me, I not. Get over yourself, Spot.
My house is red. No one pilfers in phosphorescent who could be bastard. Elves, snowshoes, snot-elves simping all cold over forget-me-nots…
I’m looking at me. Gibby, I saw you. And Wimple, you are there, you are there, too! Bling, boo, I’m like six two, brain off, cuz, poo. Jacaranda, my grandma, are you with us? I have treats from 17 years ago first…e a t? Sayonara
Selective Seretonin Reuptake Inhibitor Blanket Trough Pony Relongator Gadget, Ignite. Grams Of Diagnostic Toile Kitcharee Sure Advantage Arm Bioidentical Brine WHY, WHY BUYEE ME Princess tights raisins if this looks fantastic, or if it bleeps I remember I really don’t gamble
READING: LIT BALM, The DADA Weekend Part II: Vik Shirley, Gareth Jenkins, Elise Houcek, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, Andrew Joron, Charles Bernstein, Lloyd Schwartz, and Carla Harryman
embed video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4_z9LLVYy4
(start time 1:08:11 end time 1:16:30)
The Leafs published by The Creative Writing Department!!
Five poems in NOMATERIALISM
I
Felt/saw the underwire it took all valiant in me to drop it.
For the nursing fires in va-va-voom an old sheet
waited to be coptic. Quirks of Malcolm. Sign of the remote.
Yes will you come for me another valence.
I come wandering as ever, demure
as light, polymathic uninquiry veering toward
a couch on a blanket
a wear of shitting is now
a blouse of creeping no less hard than terms
dropped, re-remembered in the sense of timber bleached
around the small ovular hole of a vintage picture frame. That vantage point.
Go, go, vixen of foreshortening.
Undertake as if artichokes will like your family.
Like families like pincers for a scythe–it comes
down: valence 3. Story-belt
on a tile floor. Tile despite knee
presenting hard-on story-belt, story-belt
of This Is A Tile Floor. Can’t wear it
Definitely don’t like it
Now in daily want poor fire real trim around
every day the same expected unctuous fabric killjoy redpeels
ice polling weeds thru crux trellis dicks on a clock
gravimetric jouissance fibres hunks where donespinning
II
Stop it, the Ides are sensitive.
Minus the pink big hard one.
It gloats nearly.
Thus is it to be surgical.
Everything is going to be okay I said
before Caesar died.
The house nearly done (just waiting on the tombstone)
Caesar died.
To be hurt is to understand.
The knife goes out to the party. A “surgery” is performed.
Day, night, day, night.
Gemmy, dodecahedron ice cubes
passed around.
These assuredly inappropriate for the weather.
These are nice.
Aerial view of what in phylum glops open a big one
in the garden.
Slow choke, Cokes, chalk.
The blasphemous negative.
No one could score that night, that night
was marked and could not be banged.
His bildungsroman I felt
in my cunt.
My cunt sensitive to the day.
I was remarkable insofar as
I was dreary, and yet I was not only living
but was also felt-tipping
each recommended scene
recommended by Caesar’s arbiter
bb right above
his cupid’s bow
so he could almost see his fate
but not know.
Daily done this work.
Reiki of a fissure ordered ukuleles banished.
Then the understudy
A room in brass polite
Fried eggs
Desire equivalent unless attention
I took one ice to the stone and left it there.
Were that meat to quell
or were that meat to harden
A breeze
I wouldn’t spring gloats
Never a man
Ritualistically fazing his gout
Ritualistically down in his heartbeat
There comes a point where I would like to exit
but the ritual is too harkening-me-into-it
The ritual is too hard
I’m a sea for others
I am a Caesar
III
In the dream, I am awoken by the spider. Her fat soul
flicking on the foyer of my middle finger. It is there
that she is soldered, to yoke the spider-spot
like a feather, like a dot, to me
eternally-writhing. If I try to flick her off
she’ll bite, how close to me she is. Could some passion
elate my heart till it’s stale?
I think she could, like veiling a house till its shale.
People like forthright designs, people like
capturing a stupid cache
illicitly every time I’m ill or I have to pee
I have to pee less saltly when I wake o I’m broke chanel
my pants are on
try try try
I try to flick the spider off but nothing less
than what I want to catch is what my patch is keeping.
Every want to want continuing
IV
NOT AGAIN NOT AGAIN
a kewpie fucking up
a cutie making gains
when a sign is the first good/bad real thing, I will repeat, I will poke
the stuff where a cairn gets made at a Christian University near Philadelphia, PA.
BUT IF I AM SWIM
believe I’m different stuff
or liver of fabric
in a Brain like Eating. Your swindle real regard of He does not peel
up the former fast, the thousand good samaritans digging up rye am whole,
FLIPPANT, FEELING IS
wonderful when you know
Orchestration flub
Coherence, all that jazz just the opposite of a euphemism
which is to say, is. Poke, poke. I swear there’s something in there I’m dying to drill.
ARE YOU ANSWERING
or are you fluffing
the overall landscape
of what is happening so the land looks like something hazy, painter-
ly and green, Jesu Christi but still there is something inside the inside of that
AND INSIDE THAT STILL
looks like a windowsill
smells like a peanut
I’m trying to get to it every Sunday, my day of rest but
the University gives so much homework I do not get to rest much less take my dalliance.
V
dremel in dremel in ach ach,
the pussy willow sallows when it brakes
the pussy willow swigs
the net-cooling impromptu remote controller
Look, it’s Light Iris at the Dairy Queen
light swills me from the group canoe above the text
the prophylactic embryonic foot
I drink it down, orange-juliusly
adding a gem to my cheek
with jealousy, a gem to my check
A Small Globe Of Catching An Itch Community joins in, I close the door,
wake from the dream at exactly 1:30 am twice three
days in a row not feeling tired, really, like a flight attendant
I wish
it didn’t autocorrect to “subside,” I wanted
to see your cats inside, living
Less
Less
Portico
Wings, and everything through touch
My Nightgown Wearer, your friend-system
too swallows
Two pages from TRACTATUS in DIAGRAM
HIS HAIR WAS RED
Today I met someone who is trying to write a Young Adult novel, and I tried my best not to make any immediate judgments about what he is like as a person. There is very little I can tell you about him other than that his hair is red, and he employs a particular method when he writes. LA METHODE is not particularly interesting or inspired, but, I have found, works a genuine trick on the mind, which, though initially appearing a detriment, ultimately serves as a great benefit to the writer. Here is just one of the benefits of modern dating. This man, we’ll call him YA, only writes in his journal at the EXACT MOMENT that he feels he is THE AGE TO APPEAL TO YOUNG ADULT READERS (that he is in the exact mental state equivalent to that of a young adult) and thus all of his ideas are entirely inspired and entirely true. There is only one problem, and that is that he loses all inspiration by the sheer habit of the act, which moves in a diagonal line, crossing out the true youthfulness of his pen. AH, THE TRUE YOUTHFULNESS OF HIS PEN, I used to stay up into the early hours while he was writing so I could smell it, adorned with the lingering scent of fernstem and musk. I would go down on THE TRUE YOUTHFULNESS OF HIS PEN with such tenderness and vigor that I could picture a movie being made about it, and people actually did come out and start filming–the story of YA and his wife. Isn’t that what I was? Though at times it seemed like he was cutting me too, crossing out the true youthfulness of MY life every time we made love in the EXACT MOMENT. So I started watching us from above, which turned out to be good for the art, too.
MANIFESTO
I am starting this blog because THE JOKE OF THE ARCHIVES is not as thick or burly as THE JOKE OF PRIDE. I am starting this blog because it’s cool, it’s hip, it’s young. I am starting this blog because the SONGS OF MY EXPERIENCE cannot get over THE SONGS OF MY INNOCENCE. Yesterday, the songs of my experience called the songs of my innocence from a yonder wood (was GAZING into that wood), then called MY SONGS OF INNOCENCE on the phone precisely 58 times and was not ashamed of it, then MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE snorted a line of coke trying forgot the LINES FROM INNOCENCE, which left my experience even more confused, as it couldn’t decide whether cocaine was INNOCENCE’S song or its own. It did some good MYSTERY HUNTING. No cure’s better. A doctor told MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE that, and even though MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE cannot think of that doctor without thinking of TEAM USA GYMNASTICS and pervy doctors fingering children, because that doc’s also an osteopath, MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE still trusts him. Even though that doctor’s perviness runs deep, deep like the tiny filaments that run under TEAM USA GYMNASTICS’ tumbling matts into the darkness at the center of the universe deep, MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE still trusts him. M.O., SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. I am starting this blog because I loathe the phrase “starting this blog” so much that I decided I must put it somewhere so I can say hi to it once in a while, but only when I’m feeling sauced. I am starting this blog because I have been feeling veritably UNSAUCED lately, dry as the Sonoran Desert, and an ARCHIVIST told me this is the way back to wetness, and I listened to him. No–songs of experience wouldn’t do that, or was that the song of innocence?
Five Poems from So Neon Was the Rope in Trampoline
Focus And Enjoy
i liked a proposition
it was “focus and enjoi”
my shirt looked like it was spray-painted
obnoxious rainbow colors: i pressed it
somehow it released photos of you
color and color in one spot
bleed
and wetness so the paper rips off
how could i make this any more contemporary
Kind Of Medieval
your vibe is like taking a nap on a pen, then waking up
to the understanding that it’s a peg
i can’t deny what’s popular
a red cone like a wart-root goes in
since public poetry removes common sense
and style transforms objects into truths themselves
it’s kind of medieval
What It’s Like To Be Eaten
banjo roasting on the spit, i go
to emmiol to buy new jeans
your presence, just where the fire doesn’t reach
feels furry
you are purple or pink
partly raged in mellow leavings woken up
like a friend whose friend has broken them
o but i no
longer know what it’s like to be eaten
The Song, I Fall Far From It
coordinate syncopated tilt
like a wobbly man into the tree listening to the song “i fall far from it”
is this how a word’s radical departure from its history looks?
i don’t know,
so i write about it
and no matter how hard i think of a poem as a net
they’re the ones that feel densest
the net
like smashing into you, turning away
All My Eyes Could Read
the aspiring young adult author alights and picks up his pen when he feels
he is the age to appeal to them
i tried it, i penned
in the delirious girlstate of fernstem and musk
when my mind was like my audience’s
however, there was a sofa in the way
so when i leaned across to grab my notebook,
my body struck out and zapped me
all my eyes could read was “light bleads”
Three pages from TRACTATUS in Posit
Whose Shirt Was Surely Fleece
I gave up all my charms. Now, on Friday nights, I go to the grocery store and my charms are the soupboxes, the people I see when I look around. I go with my boyfriend and buy him a little treat, something bubbly but uncaffeinated, something with tropical packaging. DO I MEAN DEATH IS MAKING US GET INTO KIDS’ STUFF? Kind of, but not really. Its aspect ratio is kiddie, but the pixels themselves have much more sheen. They let things slide off of them, like a plate, the plate on which I serve dinner to the children I’ll never think of having. Sometimes I wonder if this is the real cause. That it’s not just death’s fault? That I might actually live in the world again, go out to parties, etc? Our bubbly water could be caffeinated. Cruel trick that all cool women will have to face. All women whose faces lag and lapse over the pixelated cart BECAUSE THEY HAD SOME BRIGHT IDEA. MOMMY TOLD YOU NOT TO DO IT! Mommy showed you curdled drinks! But I was too young, a baby who was already a baby. That’s enough, I thought, and went back to sleep. I went back to sleep, since I was the child and the mind of the child at once, since I was just a touch away from snuggling bliss. Mentally. Physically (I looked down at my cart, then at my boyfriend, whose shirt was surely fleece). I told him I wanted us to consider this a date idea. I wanted him to consider that I had come up with this idea and what that meant for us. I had a sneaking suspicion that he himself was into the tropical treats idea, but I learned as a child that men aren’t into sticking with.
“Guarding”
Another evening walk with him in this frenzy-ornamented town. Another lapping lag while on the sidewalk as my blood huffs to get the baton around (too much coke, too much sugar in the break). We pass, among other things, a statue of a lion, who guards the right edge corner of the small white house’s driveway. The statue of the lion is weirdly shaped, as in it’s got its legs folded under it, as in, it’s lying down. I wonder if the lion’s posture is contingent on the kind of home it plays in front of (mine certainly is)–when I’m at LEE’S, all my back can do is lie down and breathe, since it’s not random that they have those things. This house is random, too, but not the words I sent to you while noticing that lion, or that that lion sent to us in the space between our recognizing. “Guarding’s” the word. Guarding’s got fur. As in it came to us in the space between. As in it deputizes the Land of Nod(t) (furry, sleepy children nodding out with the gesture of a paintbrush amidst granite spires, sighing, the gesture of a mouse–baby blue snuggie… baby pink…). So you were saying the lion was doing not that, v lax in front of the port-style house with its trinkets parked in the loading belt. Also, the lion was granite, and so didn’t have any fur. I wondered, or was wondering, after you pointed to the lion weirdly not-guarding his home, his friends (might as well have pointed into the air) looking for the word to describe his failure NOT what word should be filling in the gap but whether it was worth mentioning at all. Whether you were worth it, this breath. Plus, I wanted to save it for myself. I discovered it, I unearthed it in its real beauty, which was not its clicking into this particular question but its clicking more generally.
Semordnilap
Pressing the bulb in the corner of my eye, a bird got caught in a snare, a flare, skittered, then I lay back down and thought I would never get up again. Then I lay back down into the white of my bed’s turf, down through the square of it, the plane, then down again, through the sheets of clouds, the elevation changing, turbulence-sans. I would never return to work again. Would that be a change? Or would it be anti-change? Inertia? I preferred to think the latter, to feel dead momentarily, though still fuzzy. Here from my Saturday-morning casket I watched various phenomena of the eye play in front of me like seeds in the air and a giant red bar of light. Like scenes in the air. Like deconstructed tableaux. How do I do that. I recall the people who have used the term, summon/re-imagine them in my mind like ancestors traveling in a great backwards-flowing line. Xuaelbat detcurtsnoced. The act is noble of itself and light enough to sustain Semordnilap. Is that my name? I do a lap around my sea-bed backwards and upwards-facing, arms outstretched. The names of teachers, mostly, come to me, the names of all my dead teachers. They fall into my open mouth like gently dropping fruit and taste, mmmm, like cherries. Cherries mixed with cream, so less red than pink. O yeah, xuaelbat detcurtsnoced. They’re trying to teach me something. To unteach? Every time I swallow another one, the scenes I watch in front of me on the bed become more and more meshy, less opaque. But no sooner than I think the word MESH, someone whispers YOU GOT IT, then I’m dead.
Praise:
Elise Houcek’s Tractatus is a complete retaliation against material abstraction. It’s unapologetic and loud, casting literary metal into stones and lexical stones into copper or ice. These deviating vignettes of Houcek: they melt. In August. They flash at us. In September. Today, they disobediently languish on the page of our eyes like a “slit of white duvet embroidered” on our “navy blue” reading glasses. With Houcek’s work, everything could become impossible again.
-Vi Khi Nao
“The antithesis of nature, but au contraire, what I mean is wild n free.” Get liberated by Tractatus, Elise Houcek’s neo-bimbo limbo through “the alluring trash/meanness of the feminine.” The atmospheric drama and high hilarity of Lara Glenum meets “Britney Spears’s SOS. Or a signal to the wolves, the dogs, the moon, anything chrome.” Immersive as a mansion of mirrors, Houcek plays through classic poem-stuff—beauty, memory, romance, and youth—until we arrive at the “joke-bed” of being, the fun house where language goes on holiday, gets a makeover, and comes home as philosophy.
–Candice Wuehle
Elise Houcek created a brilliant poetry page-turner in Tractatus. Allow your eyes to adjust to the breath placed between each letter and each unique insight between language and the lives that cannot help but speak it. Tractatus is a book we will be talking about with our friends for a very long time! Let’s get swept into its vortex, from escaping interrogators to patriarchy’s pronounlessness and a new meaning to chicken nuggets.
–CAConrad
Excerpts:
https://thediagram.com/22_2/houcek.html
https://positjournal.com/2022/01/24/elise-houcek/
Reviews:
“On Joke Architecture in Elise Houcek’s Tractatus: ‘FINAL PROOF OF THE ETERNAL SUBJECTIVITY OF LANGUAGE!’” by Maxwell Rabb
Tractatus @ bbooks in Berlin
Tomaž Šalamun Prize Semi-Finalist
for So Neon Was The Rope. Verse, 2021.
James Tate Poetry Prize Finalist
for So Neon Was The Rope. SurVision Magazine, 2021.
Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award
received from the University of Notre Dame in 2021.
Three poems from So Neon Was the Rope in New Delta Review
Thick From Thick
the towns i loved and used to know nostalgically defined by the girls i hate
blew onto my nose
so many chicklet houses
like stacked blown-over and outlined-black boxes
including my bosnian heritage
as the wind separates material from material,
thick from thick
ew, i almost said sorting
It Is Likely/I Had Long Ago
if i have ever been an oath breaker, it is likely
i had long ago / incarnated as that waifer
pray thee my father Eric shook the farthest drape porous
or else arrested hearts will rot
just from its heat
do it now
i’m flexing my praying skeletontattoo
as i ride
praying cookieboy cookieboy cookieboy
God Had Meandered But Then Fucked
hey mice, might
continuous platinum churning
by the datum-chrome stove, the miniature stove
i look up random high-sounding definitions when i am bored
slow-knitting burnt hair
with a fanged detachment
as if a well-paid god had meandered but then fucked the life from out of me
i do like it
co-engineering items like that
Collaborative Essay in Action Books Blog
On Will Alexander’s The Combustion Cycle
When I set out on the hero’s journey that was reading Will Alexander’s The Combustion Cycle, I was happy and surprised (when talking Will Alexander, pleasantly surprised feels too subtle, and I also wish to highlight the importance of conjunction later in this response) to find a Mircea Eliade appearance in the book’s epigraph. His name is one which, ironically, functioned as a kind of taboo in my undergraduate studies in religion, shelved alongside other mid-century philosophers and historians of religion because of their their status as “living room” philosophers (think Joseph Campbell, or the application of Jung in either Eliade or Campbell’s writings) whose immense popularity at the time of their writing seem to annul the value of their theories in contemporary religious studies. Primarily they were discredited because of their failure to understand religion and religious experience as wholly contingent cultural and historical phenomena: Eliade’s notion of hierophanies can be said to imply a kind of dualism between sacred and profane reality, and further, a kind of essentialist or platonic phenomenology; similarly, the idea of the “eternal return,” which Eliade and Campbell share in some fashion, suggests a kind of universality that can be applied transhistorically and transnationally. Reading The Combustion Cycle, I am reminded of why I didn’t want to utterly reject the notion of a distinction between sacred and profane space and also why I couldn’t totally accept this distinction either: my proposition is that Will Alexander’s work in this book enables us to exist both in difference/definition and in a space of a kind of pure energy and incantation in which difference or différance is annihilated and we are awash in the space of paradisiacal psychedelic non-meaning (because what else is this paradisiacal shamanic space besides outside both meaning and non-meaning all together, besides outside and all-encompassing of both ellison and distinction). And how else could he write this poem?
One way in which I see this happening in The Combustion Cycle is through the careful listing of particulars, of the proper names of people, places, and things, shortly followed by language that seems to work to undo these particularities. He writes, “if visible/I would consider myself incarnadine/my blood alive & indescribable with salt/describing myself with an echo of nouns // say/the Paramo Sapphire-Wing’/the ‘Green-backed fire-crown’/the ‘Plain-bellied emerald’/or perhaps the ‘Purple-throated mountaingem” (26). And later: “I could speak of the “La Plata River’/of Venezuela & the Andes…I could speak of spinning Andean Lakes…& I am speaking of only one chemical diction/of one circumstance evolved/from an optimum habitat of light // & this light…totalic as an invisible cognomen/is a syntax of deities/is Anubis/is Thoth/is Ishtar/is Shiva” (30). Both of these excerpts demonstrate the ways in which the The Combustion Cycle enables use to thrive in/to feel within both difference/distinction and its annihilation, especially in the way the above lines pronounce a kind of “totalic” and “indescribable” “habitat of light” which is at the same time “describing myself with an echo of nouns” and contains an “invisible cognomen” which from it flurries out the multiplicity of the names of deities. And this dialogue between distinction and its obliteration continues throughout the poem in a kind of cyclical, “eternally returning” style. And we are, after all, living in the Kali Yuga. As Alexander writes, “I merge & cease to merge/with manifestation & its rifeness” ( 23).
Repetition itself seems to function as a kind of ars poetica of this thesis, displaying or unfolding a kind of multiplicity through the incantation of sound that simultaneously elides these distinct bodies into one great body. For example: “as I hover inside the Andes/as the fuel of an interior lightning subspecies/as an ark/as a sun on a tremorous ruby” (21). Here, the consciousness of the speaker is blasted out across time and space and yet there seems to be, at least for me, great enjoyment in existing in the specificity of the ark, the sun on a tremorous ruby. So both difference and psychedelic merging can be seen as modes to play in. Different object-bodies through which to experience experience. And I wonder if this quality of playfulness–which seems to be more what can be said than that this poem either says or does not say, that the paradisiacal makes meaning or destroys/lacks it–that exists in this shamanic “proto-reality” (the sense that we are traveling back in time in this poem is strong, and the word “proto” repeats throughout) might be viewed alongside the notion of “paradisiacal babbling” that Aase Berg puts forth in her essay on Language and Madness, and the way in which this particular kind of knowledge or being belongs primarily to children, their ability to try things out, to play.
Eight poems from So Neon Was the Rope in Always Crashing
So Neon Was the Rope
the zumba assistant most critical
of the people he is closest to
won’t mind the light that shushes flowers’ shared but sure-reaped flame
so then i moved that flame of light
to be nearer to its head,
washed my hands to rid
the penny-sulphur from my hands
i close my eyes
eternal suffering doled out to the vested
and the tired of us,
but so neon was the rope,
My Meat’s An Egg
from error is born my deepest compassion
it moves like a chef bursting into song
his vibrato reaching toward the heavens
my meat’s an egg my meat’s a potato
my meat’s singing across from me
that is why i am terrified to start the process
because i know it’s so beautiful it’s going to hurt
I Thought My Name Was Kiki
i know you love a good candle snuffer
or as we say “those fleshly flowers”
sleeping in the fort again after the lurid night
the rain has not ceased,
though i’m finalizing the bulbs in my pitcher
i won’t tuck-your-toes-in-individually
anymore for the wait to distribute
you thought my name was kiki
i was just oily
The Absence of Lava
come to me, yoda
i know a perimeter where the absence of lava
that’s it, shimmy on toward me closer
part of my blanket’s red and
part of my blanket’s orange and
when we share it we embody all colors
a beautiful spread’s
laid out across the sky tonight
if you could just stick your extraterrestrial hand
The Perfection of Benoticement
when you look at me, it is like a joke spinning
in two directions
or the fear of the fear of death
on the one hand, i can turn my face
into a string of pearls in goose or swan shape
on the other, you can be bad
and mysterious
through the perfection of benoticement
we hear a thought
My Favorite Was a Clear Blue Pipe
future night, focal seizure, blurry trees across the river
my body like a worn-out shag
huffing into the golden milk
that’s how sick i was
after the worst night you came to me with a drug and thermometer
but nothing
in the mud field would take
we tried innumerable positions
my favorite was a clear blue pipe
I Waved Goodbye, Too, To My Cure
she doesn’t know of her disease and it was a magic calend. with listmessages!
and this was the last i heard
spinnerets waved goodbye from across
the dream panelling as i waved goodbye, too,
to my cure
i check my watch
wartime?
no.
other reasons this could be happening
Like A Boy Reading What I’m Saying
three people approach a tree
from three different angles, forming the shape of a T
they ask its possibilities by their approach
and by their approach
like a boy reading what i’m saying in his own voice
it is hard for them to slake
the meaning from it
the space between the branches and their heads
a dumb retroarchtive silence
i let burn
A poem in Afternoon Visitor
Everything I Wrote
christening myself both sexual and stupid
i pour wax on myself / become the fire of the present
then i wrote it down:
meow hush meow hush meow hush meow
everything i wrote
became as a note
that made the world go
i could see far ahead of me one of the main performers
he looked like a yellow bird
Two poems in Prelude
What Critics
Manipulating hands
Down on the plain,
A lapse to dent a primate:
Each effort a suede moth I asked on.
There is no trick to the cup,
Arriving recovered to a shy deal
Though already a different photograph.
The shape loosens.
I found it hard to present people
In an entirely distinct opera,
Fifty years of what critics
Pioneering
Not a robe for language
Not a leash
Slamming at a flower
Where an ally chose.
One day, her uplifted palms
Will sign off. The insult, too,
Has generated novelties.
She referred to one winter
As a “calm press”– to know a phrase
Produces an alphabet.
Geometric apple of her right hand,
One hand
Simultaneously the synthesizer
And the mesh,
I set aside the study
Of pointing a puppet.
The Kind of Hope
Our schedule nicked the catamaran,
Through its flying sphere
A cloth lifts
A partly landing veteran.
The storm.
Of what I’d heard
In the record book, it parts
All equipment as lawn chairs
Face the clouds.
That’s one reason
We ghosted. Our view
Was a raft. Careful standards
For crossing on the minute
Keeping the kind of hope
Our pilot weighed, in daytime,
Back-to-back episodes
Sprayed with heat.
Passing
Bristling at the lectern,
His patterns were
Against the heart of chrome liquor
And the pasted ads from the holiday –
Cunning ever is the selves
We take for helping.
Had you prepared his applause
Instead of passing for it,
Like the island can clamor a call
And give our party relief,
The lures he made would culture
Thousands of pictures
Of wrecks no one expected
To prohibit.
No Familiar Symbol
Kalamazoo College, 2018.
Received from Kalamazoo College in 2017.
“Love and The Reconciliation of Opposites: A ‘Coincidentia Oppositorum’ in Hindu Depictions of Love”
Paper title: “Hinduism at the End of Life: How Can We Improve Our System of Care?”
For a project partnering with Music & Memory, Pioneer Network, and two elder care institutions, utilizing personalized music therapy and life story work.
Received from Kalamazoo College in 2015.