soil

faces rose around me in the wet cement

they were human faces dogs cats wild

faces that quickly appeared and sunk back

an ostrich a rabbit a hawk or an attacker

their features created a surface with more

traction in a tilt shake or spin event 

i could grab onto an ear or lodge my foot

against a stiff upper lip fit my cheek bone

into a temple like the days when we were

bodies forced together taking conceding

wanting giving each other space or flesh 

turning toward or away but never moot

to avoid a hardening and crumbling past

i release my grip and step onto the grass

where creatures come and go inconsequentially

stop only to acknowledge sensual density

and persons free of notice by urbanity

take root in soil that borders all humanity

by Peg

voiceless breath

now going for the open-throated voiceless breath

gruntless air unimpeded by the song of complaint

revolt resistance alarm remark must only be shaped

by the upper locks and low-girding pistons 

this is how to fan a flame not pinch it out 

the breath not the beat must create the rhythm 

not where any convention spells death as in poetry 

when breathing is beaten and choked to pulpy bits

air flows best in the channels invisible of reference

no tune of childhood jack in box will abduct 

my forward-aiming whisper-only bellows

or the smoke on my billowing clear tendrils

our gut flora soaring for their measly lives

or this desultory yet shameless carbon-dioxide

no raga no jig nor carol can jam the engine

non-metaphoric breath itself must come first

before the florid code or plea for recognition

the slide and squeal of wet tendons in contact 

could be no more than nothing without air

which as breath shall be my fulcrum and lever

by Peg

Does can Peggy speak to men

Jans are most afraid of a face that's vacant a face that to its owner is a forgotten asset

Those Ks that on approach can project at least a happy or upside-down happy face

Will be granted the highest honors for their sacrificial hunger and self-hygiene practices

Beast: if your face is vacant and you choose to approach these towns, bear down your lip

Focus targets early and carry on with a plan always asking can i get enough to make it worth

If not this then in 10,000 generations you will get a whiff and cometh again sniffing around

Maybe you'll find a house in Jansdaadbad with a broken roof whip up some high winds

Make it look like another crazy nature fluke tornado carries off nursery rhyme gone bad

Toddler reads to self as father disappears through damage never to return in living plaid

This is only one way to gather your men who make the strongest nests with their bones

If not never then in 100,000 generations you'll just as soon have cast aside such pursuits

After 99,999 but enter then a glade of freshened expectations and gentler recreations

We must first of all as a group establish ourselves among this world and Crack-wide

More than the horrific stinkers of lore and indeed a think tank of keratinized epidermis

Ks take glory in the fullness of fulfilling up to but no more than our allotted kill

Attributed to La Pegyuh

"Ks Fly Spread Eagle" [frag.]

Thousand Moons Festival Call to Prayer 
Thousand Moons Village, Fridgeporcherator Chank

Phyllis [trans.]

intimate definitions

Jan and Peg are relaxing in shallow pools in the shapes of their relax-print in the glacier pools of ice that melts beneath their bodies as they lay on the glacier chatting and spritzing one another playfully with Friends' Hangar Hygiene Spray. The containers of spray are attached to the industrial tanker vehicles they'd had so much fun chasing up the highway and plucking up into their beak-mouths earlier that day if you are measuring on a time-based system. The tiny intense sun feels crackly on their pycnofibers and inside their ears where they are trying to hear each other speak with their minds only. 

So ya that's what Jans is all about: huckster. It's hucksterism. They all be selling or wanting to sell they little products that's the business aspect like freedom to go ahead and try and hock craft flip what you want to and say whatever you want to about it with as few regulations as possible to make as many gold coins as you can and get the hell out. That spells liberty. And shore, religion is right up in there they say La-LaChama id-dah richest pan-gendered deity in na-known Crack. Ain nobody up in her vajraja books. They barely aware of her published statements.

I like your nails.

Oh thanks. 

...

You know what i think about nails... Ya there's about a gallon of exterior house paint on each one of these doll but they did come out good. Painted nails make three statements one you can have this. Your bright color nails say yes you can have this and how do you know because i am advertising it. I am decorating the hell out of my own body like it's on a shelf and ready to be sold girl. Two the nails they can also say you can't have this. And i want you to remember that and i want it to hurt a little. Look at this highly decorated and must be highly valuable body o mine. The answer is no. But you and i both know the question baby. Three they say look sure you can look and you should look who wouldn't. Just that for now, but for sure i want you to have a look and think for yourself on can you have can you not have this. 

I like number three the i can look. 

Oh you don't wanna have this?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Jan and Peg's shattering cry-laughing creates mini-avalanches at the edges of the ice shelf and a mini-roiling of the sea waters. As their laughter dies down, or as the reason for their laughter dying down, they both recall a moment of special intimacy in a hot geyser pool thousands of moons in the distance and wonder if the other is also remembering not being able to tell exactly if the memory is their own or a mind-only transmittal of language further to their conversation or? They look at one another sideways.

Say, do you re

Stop. Just stop there.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Phyllis [Trans.]

La vajraja and the love of the vajraja vajra rajas of love above

La LaChama has fled the underground jail pit in tears and retreated to her cloister after the confrontation with her split-yolk Reptilly. Still able to breath though not without effort deep in the mantle of the planet Peg has opened the jail door and helped her godchild Reptily out into the open cavern to rest on a bed of fresh hemp branches. They are able to see in complete darkness and speak with their minds only. 

When i was cry dancing and slamming my body into the iron restraints of your treacherous jail was that a cynical charade meant only to hurt the two of you as deeply as possible?

Silly. Only you know the answer to that question. It did occur to me though that you wanted us to feel as jarred and frightened as you were feeling. 

But what i wanted is for you to understand. Remember that i am essentially naive and believe that understanding leads to acceptance even if it must be beaten into me.

Reptily-ily you express a sentiment shared and passed down as a genetic disorder by your own generations. You've never experienced corporal punishment as wrong, even while it is going on? 

I've never experienced corporal punishment as wrong, even while it's going on, just as i would never let the meaning lead the rhyme nor push the meter beyond the time nor drop a message in the wine. 

I know that you know that i know you are dissociating. 

But why do i do that?

La LaChama, for example. Why is she no longer stringing marigolds and gifting them to pilgrims' necks?

You know why. She was more like gifting herself marigolds and stringing their necks. 

What did she believe about the pilgrims. 

That they must be saved for Mthyuh even at the end of a whip or from within a bruising squeeze. 

I saw her once leading a group through the moons festival ground. She was so much taller than any of them, even with the way she stooped. She clutched a matted yak shawl around her shoulders and operated a whistling bamboo rod in the other fist. She herded them like meat goats inflicting visible defense wounds on their arms and fingers. 

Right, she is safer to society after the abduction by prayer. Now she can focus on the more esoteric aspects of lavajraja. 

The love of lavajraja. 

La lavajraja that is love and is of love a lavajraja loving the love of the vajra from love and from the love of the vajarja vajra rajas of the rajas of love above... 

Amen.

Cross-species consensus

Peg and Jan are splayed across a wide florid plain. A bubbling creek and just the elbow of a river run beneath them cooling their bellies and flap pits. They each look a little cross-eyed as thousands of local bees arrive in cloudy waves and get caught up on their giant forked tongues. Jan and Peg are slurping the piquant swarming treats off one another's faces. They can communicate with their minds only.

Guessing it's a result of struggling with your own random or self-diagnosed atypical gender impulses preferences fetishes, which you think you have to subdue, or that the domination over them itself is the fetish, and you think maybe everybody loves that

What the? 

I'm referencing your comment about one of the sisters who tends to resist gender classifications.

If you mean Reptily i only used the word ambiguous. 

Well you went maybe a little farther, like suggesting all Ks are genderless or shouldn't be allowed to even have a sexuality much less a gender status in society...

Well maybe if you say that the other way around, I mean society really? Ks are a species completely separate from the society and whole system of gender logic which really applies only outside the phenomena. 

Ok, as with so many issues, a fact we really need to confirm before we can even begin to come to a society-wide and cross-species consensus on what our rights are and what our rights mean. 

You always forget the responsibilities. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Bring Your Meat, Leave the Bones

Peg and Jan have been wallowing and tonguing in a deep meteorite crater full of fleke bones at the Bring Your Meat, Leave the Bones (BYMLB) hangar. Covering as much of their bodies as possible in the stench of death and rot would serve to protect them, they felt, from the onslaught of springtime.

I see you speaking into the common mirror. Look into my eyes now, and repeat your last statement to the sisters. 

What. What's this about? 

Into my eyes. Say it. 

Ok, finally we must condemn all societal rape including those which are perpetrated among the auspices of a private governing body. 

Right, well you looked bored at having to repeat it, but it did not lack any sign of human effusion. 

As observed in my other formal appearances? 

Bitch you even do it on MonstaLine.

...

You even do it when you use the common mirror as an actual mirror. 

You're coming for my personality and that's making me extremely uncomfortable. 

I know. I can see that on your normal face that you have when you're not speaking to the mirror. 

...

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It's sad to see what's happening and I'll tell you what's happening. It's not just you. Sisters speak into the common mirror and manifest they face they think they having all the time. 

Ok, that's why the vain bitches always look so good. 

That's correct. And if you think you look like a hollowed-out shiv skank...

I look like a...

No. But some do. And it's not just cosmetics. You know the best cosmetic.

Love. 

... You know that... may be better I was gonna say self-regard but yours has more dimensions.

No. You just taught me that. Just now.

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Phyliss [trans.]

they use my funk for their discotecas

i think it's a moment for philosophizing for example, 

"why?" or "the hell?"

but feel i need a gentler tool, so not 

which bad choice, which horrific and all-powerful system

for example, must one coax oneself.

or should personal hygiene just occur naturally.

these are questions i can touch with my beak right now.

like an anteater i can 

daintily taste test a single wriggling assertion

or fully tongue the entire org tree including

subterranean levels

those are the ones that house the rankest

tank thinkers mercenary blowhards social

wrecking balls inciters of chaos paralegal

vengeance servers of cause and means

sinister laundries of earnest curiosity

but just one taste is all i ask and i'm tasting

real. sky bitch. musk.

they want to come up here and take that

and not because i'm dirty baby

they use my funk for their discotecas.

think i'm dying for cucumber essence.

claim their fashions suit me best.

the answer and the proof are in my nest.

Ks fly spread eagle!

"Ks Fly Spread Eagle"

by Peg

Rally opener

Daughters of Mthyuh March of Destruction

Highchank 

Good luck with that

Peg and Jan are hunched over the remains of a fascio-religious scout troop their leaders their dogs and their shiny suede saddles. The thirty-odd children and adults had been on a pilgrimage to Ilyn's diving stone at the mouth of Mthyuh. Jan and Peg carefully pick out the bits of non-edible clothing and equipment and toss or spit them off the cliff. Same with the larger bones after sucking on them for several moments, even as they chat. They are able to form, understand, and communicate language with their minds only.

Jan: Watching you and the other full-bloods i can't help but notice moments when you emerge from your face. Normally your countenance to my nose is mask-like. But maybe i'll mention my husband or the restaurants on the other side of The Crack or ask a stupid question about the Greater Chanks Phenomena, and the mask becomes animated. I respond especially to the muscles around your eyes, which normally don't move at all unless theyr being prodded unexpectedly by a tree in a cloud or an airliner. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Jan: Yes, i see you now!

Peg: Oh honey.

Jan: But i mean i say that because this observation also reminds me of how different i am despite my putative species how my face compared to yours is overly expressive clown-like hypo-manic. 

Peg: ...

Jan: I mean how does that affect the outcomes of everyday encounters how does it

Peg: Yr trying not to do it now aren't you. So i'm not sure i can provide any feedback yet. I'll have to catch you at a less self-conscious moment. 

Jan: Oh good luck with that. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

 

 

Trans. Phyliss

All we have is now

Jan and Peg are rolling back and forth in twin mountains of waste adjacent a sugar refinery in the low chanks. Wedding tent-size flakes and scales slough debride from their backs and tails and into the spent beet fibers.

Was it societal rape being done to him all those years?

How so. 

How society basically forced him to engage in sexual intercourse that he did not want. Is that worse than having to be celibate or choosing like Ilyn for spiritual purposes. 

Or prostitution. It wasn't against his will. 

No, more like with a gun to his head. You choose the lesser evil. 

The gun of a specter of persecution poverty shame ostracization. 

Yep. No one in recorded history has survived a shunning except a few that became their own scarlet letter. 

What? 

They survived but they were marked and stunted by their resulting public identity. He'd be at shiv and a Jan would say ya I'm a servant to Mthyuh or another Jan would say ya I'm a zoological hygienist. 

Then it would get to his turn and they'd interrupt with ya we know who you are. 

Right. He embraced being that guy. 

Can you please shove that backhoe out about 20 yards? I need to stretch. Just with your foot there. Thanks.

Flekes Jans priests nobody can get their Braino on it. We have the evidence all around us of this practice belief prejudice crime having been going on for like forever now. 

All we have is now Jan. 

So right you are darling.

Trans. by Phyliss Ng-Tiu (embedded)

Ayurvedic to my nose

Jan and Peg are stretched out on their bellies in the sand. Waves splash up against their bodies. Their elbows and wrists fit on the strand of beach between the water and a desolate highway. Their tails bob and flick at seagulls far out into the bay. 

PEG: Next we turn to the stars for answers. 

JAN: What do you see there? 

PEG: What i see is filtered through the seers accounting of what supposedly they see. 

JAN: You've looked at the oracle dispenser. It disappoints you. 

PEG: It certainly tries to do the opposite, which makes me all the more concerned. So, so encouraging uplifting today that i was sure she knew something and wasn't saying. 

JAN: Oh like ya buy that new pair of shoes treat yourself watch that movie eat a bonbon and what am i going to do with a shoe? 

PEG: Mmhmm. 

JAN: I am starting to believe that because we are closer to the heavens we are affected more profoundly by other large bodies moving in space. 

PEG: So buy two pairs of shoes? 

JAN: No. Just don't depend on the oracle dispenser for guidance that should be ours directly from the stars themselves. 

PEG: Do you mean

JAN: Ya we should have and make our own charts and by doing so reclaim our ancient agency to roam in self-governed patterns. 

PEG: Dictated by our biology not theirs. Lucky way more often. 

JAN: I think i can feel a planet gently tugging on my gizzard now in the magnetic resonance of the stones. 

PEG: Jan i told you purge and start over. Gargle with

JAN: Sea water ya. I use this instead. 

Jan reaches out and snags a passing milk tanker from the desolate highway and bites off the end of it before passing it to Peg.

PEG: Oh. Ayurvedic to my nose. 

BOTH: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Trans. by Phyllis (embedded)

Hard scrabble

 

JAN: What should we do should we make it so the genders are a grab bag that one can assign oneself in any combination, or are we saying these were assigned divinely, not by choice, that it's the Body that came out wrong. Or not that at all. How shall we know. What can I ask that doesn't put me at a disadvantage. It's supposed to make me vulnerable. That's so I can understand. I who don't understand. The understanding stands in the soul of the haver of the identity. We know from years of being referred to as it/ that that it seems maybe to us petty demanding the gender after you are already distinguished clearly from other classes of ambulatory sentients like the grasshopper. 

PEG: It sounds like you've been thinking deeply. Why? 

JAN: ...

PEG: I was listening. I agree you're vulnerable, but not because of the new gender directives. They are only asking that you be sensitive and thoughtful. If you're already that, you'll have to do shiv all day. 

JAN: They're asking for more than that. To get a W.A.S.T.E. I have to say that I've earned nothing if everyone didn't have the opportunity. That obviously counts out all K blood because as enormous soaring reptiles there are gigs necessarily exclusive to us only. 

PEG: What's really lame is the whole premise that we're included now since we're not going to kill hunt or eat so what have we really gotten in return.

JAN & PEG TOGETHER: Friends' Service Hangers! 

JAN: I feel a lot fresher in general. I focus on the day to day. There's some good kibble and fruit snacks. 

PEG: Tell me in a thousand years. How content you are. They think we're vampires just because of our lifespan is long and theirs is short. Because you're a seroconversion, you're not all K, and you're new anyway. I don't want to bring you down. K's fly spread eagle. 

Peg and Jan have been lying back sunning their tummies with their elbow spikes holding them up with their dorsal flaps unfurled in the wind. It's an ancient river bed. Their spines have broken through the outer crust of sediment and leave canyons of shadow and dust behind when they each roll to the right pull up their left spike and slam it in again way up pointing toward the cliff face. It looks like they're about to ski, or fly, but instead they leap at the rock horizon with their toe claws and scoop the air behind them and scrabble craning their necks up the cliff to their hangout. The rock has been hollowed out and boulders pile up at the base, which is also where they drop the extra bones. 

JAN: Is it because you're a lesbian you try to discourage me? I have joy thinking of my husband and wish we will be together? You want me there under your dark cloak? 

PEG: Haha bitch shut the fuck up. 

PEG & JAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

JAN: They is some mens around here an my nose is open.

PEG: There is no mens. Just more gender question marks either being ported by pharmsupply or coming in wild like you through The Crack. Now go back and read the directive. This is your life now. Jan is far too small to have a meaningful relationship with you anymore. That's all in the past. He's tiny; you're big. Doing this is not about that. You have to represent the boundary-lands. 

JAN: No I get it it's not even about like I'm here with you or you with me or we're here together. It's more about this rock shelf and some snacks and the open air and the mist and what we mean and what we can do but don't do. 

PEG: But also what we did do history and what we do do because of our air skills and gravitational importance and in terms of fertilization to all the chank communities.  

PEG & JAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

per Phyllis (embedded)

Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle

Better psych care

At some level they all knew they were bad and that the only good would be to wipe each other out and to enjoy doing it. 

There was also thanks to the shiv an intense respect for the individual spirit in each putrid violent body, sprites who were challenged to but could not become angels and were unavoidably and irredeemably sucked into the gravity of their hollow pelves, long fingers, and tiny manus.

"List of lists, I've lost my license." Jan spoke with her mind only, but it was real language. 

Peg: "You funny."

"I mean I really los... oh, damn."

"Ya they make them so thin they can get lost in a clump of pycnofibes on your ass."

Both: "Hahahahahaha!"

Jan: You know, Peg: I could just swoop around with you forever. 

Peg: That's what this is, this moment.

Their wings were on slow beat two, three times. There were no peaked or valleyed panoramas, just some yellow mist and greenish floor which both stretched out and curved down as if over a globe through all the angles they could see out of. 

My dorsoventral flap is really chafed. 

I like the vet-mix salve down at Friends' Urgency Hangar. It's practically a spa. 

Ya, I need to get my W.A.S.T.E. stamped soon anyway. I'll get the lavender. I know which one you mean. 

The day they started giving out Waiver and Acceptance of Social Toxicity Estimates to K's was the day they say we got our freedom. 

Better psych care anyway. 

I say volca to that. 

K's fly spread eagle.

 

Trans. by Phyliss (embedded)

We're convecting our own investiduction

until we tried to struggle free

we couldn't name our native state

the charnel house they made

the charnel house they made to show

how we were living out the fate 

for which we'd bought and paid

for which we'd paid in mindlessness

and taken steps to palliate

and then from there to fade

and then from there to fade so much

to lack the mark of a livid wait

from which one could be saved

 

by Peg

Duddle-dee duh/ duddle DEE-dah

when i can't think

to the music 

better to sink 

what do you say?

then we can be

in the same groove

bobbing away

in the venue

letting it take

up all the room

then we can feel

at our leisure

when i can't see

to the future

better to be

in the future

then we can find

what there is here

and we will know

what to leave here

and we can think

to the music 

better to sink

what do you say?

[loop]

 

 

 

by Peg

I thought it was all over and then woke up to a whole other day

Yes, I used to contemptualize everything

like the bitter, curmudgeonly professors at

the beginning of my career. They filled the

smoking lounge with grievances and

plotting, derisive cackling in their blur of

fear. But for some the failure has been a 

tenderizer, the corrosive beating toward a

climax of surrender. Is what I'm hearing.

by Peg

Crappy lighter

births could no longer quell my pregnancy

too many selves were building inside me

i can no longer be always in delivery

 

so i bought this crappy lighter to keep me lit all night

i stand vigil for the principal inseminator

like a lover i will greet him and then end his life

 

 

 

by Peg

Sixty times I circled

sixty times i circled

casualties mounting

watched from every angle

my sisters' teeth were flashing

in blood and spittle

history was attacking

virgins stood on balconies

sharing the dread

of my own abilities

by Jan

Mrs. Jansdaad and La Chama Speak Using the Mind Only

Well. Here we are. 

Yes. Honestly I don't know what to do.

Thank you for your honesty. It's that this doesn't happen. I've never met sticky progeny. How did you get through The Crack. 

I didn't do anything. Maybe Braino was tracking me. 

That's likely due to how we share some Braino, sister. 

I met Peg. 

And now me. It's herstoric. 

What is the meaning of my life?

You'll have plenty of time to figure it out if you play your cards right. 

I like sitting and writing poetry at my kitchen table. 

Well, you're a monster now. 

triple hoarfrost

you fooled me into thinking you were there

long, snowy trail up to your driveway

then i thought i could handle this whole thing

without needing walls to put my head through

the weather came in waves, a triple hoarfrost

a still white fog that hardens patiently

by Ted

"for you, Peg"