Preen gland technician

They brought me inside the control room of my own mother's puppet corpse. I could look down over the switches and buttons and through the glass down five stories and watch her feet drag and thud, drag and thud across the empty Sears parking lot, which was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Once we had triggered The Crack, it was a watery world of carelessness; a sort of sleep paralysis of the shock reflex set in while we were fed through a peristalsis of the dimensional organ. 

She was/ was not my mother. This was the flesh of the great beautiful young K who could toss me 100 meters into the sky with her beaque and catch me easily in her seal craw, where lightly blood-dappled pelts were stacked and crumpled into a very stinky but gossamer safety net. The woman they extracted from her inner ear during a shiv molting also is/ isn't La Pegyuh. She seems to carry all her memories, fears, quick tongue. Her body, as well, is now tortured day and night with Remote Tissue Decisioning in order to coordinate with image mirroring protocols and functions. They say she was a random preen gland technician who took a wrong turn somehow. 

by Reptily

The Lady Bug

i coughed so hard i

closed my eyes and saw

perfect geometric displays

 

a functioning and energetic 

system of squares and the

angles that connect them

hipsters beware: it tends

to degrade into a dry and

gauzy parody of order

now as i turn two-handed

to the door frame and lean

i reflect on the drama of

the lady bug who must

be reminded of her destiny

during stops along the way

 

 

 

by Peg

Perfick feminist death machine

what happened to me privately, converse to any choice i'd make

became performance through reporting as in a passion play, the

details of my victimization, and i say it that way as a nod to my

audience, who needed some blanks filled in, but also even after,

in performative description, so as to gather empathy

from ghosts, scarecrows, invaders, exploiters, the righteous blinded:

assault on me is now a thing that they can see and be seen seeing


i neither submitted nor killed because there was no choice to

make as an unconscious body, only a being state, target for a man's

acting out desire, fantasy, hate, grief, curiosity, lust, disrespect on

a responseless warm human figure who mostly can't see or can't

remember, couldn't move or argue race or gender, agency, consent,

the weather, how my choices got me to this, and his, our destiny:

knowing full well if i retaliate, i make it all come down on me again.



by Peg

they seem delusional

first there was the cutest baby cardinal, big head
hopping in grass cut to his bib

then the warning came out take cover now
went for a walk, fed the dog

south side windows were sunny
in the north clouds were sucking

it's unstable, yet the babies play
we agreed to don masks

but also adding mimicry of foreign accents
and false mustaches

mayor sez bein a K shouldn't be a life sentence
though some think it one

but they've made it so they can put you in a
cage made of human tissue and bones

and you live there letting others love your
life, can't hear your cries

if we could step out of the chicken suit
and just go on a date

but the context baby is previously owned
they might seem delusional

but this is our home, in their sleep. wait
a bit longer till they're gone.



by Peg
(Petty Entry-level Geriatric)

Beavers had more agency

When we were in the pen, we and everyone who was born there stopped noticing getting shat upon over and over. And our nobler substances spilled on top of that. It didn't matter. Managing contact with the excretions of others is perhaps the core experience of all life forms. We became degraded ping-pong balls lolling atop a sticky heap of ego destruction. Our selves were the empty spheres of which we were aware, within which anything could be imagined and nothing could be directly experienced or executed except the wading in shit blood tears and cum part. There would be no special result of our lives individually any more than one pale leaf riding on a stream could create a natural dam big enough to stem the flow. Indeed, beavers had more agency.



Love, Peg

RE-CAP: You, Woma

peggy i always new you were mai fren
because you left your kids, two of them
to seek after spiritual enlightenment, you
know? fuck them! because you knew that
their pain
would carry them back. their pain would
carry them, carry them into yor arms again.

faiwere on my det bed
i dlet you guide me
I do anything you say

you, woma, are from a-
nother wurl, and i cannot
fine you less i take yr wor

you can santify me woma
only you can see me thrua
horra show, when ahm touch-an-go

sloth ambulance II

sloth ambulance
it's an urgency

this tree surgeon
i don't recognize

ad reels spin
until dawn is none

actors re-imagine
everything great

facial whores
sell out our grief


by Peg
"I wrote in my husband."

On drama

God everything didn't used to be so serious
yes it did
no it didn't

When is it dramatic and when is it drama
it's all drama
no, dramatic is real

You mean mimesis is cathartic, but
life is dramatic
it's not real drama

Life is intense and absurd and shocking
drama tries to capture that
life is that. yeah.

But now somehow life exaggerates itself
drama's more plausible
if that's not dramatic, then

Then it's not life because life is more
intense than any drama
i was going to say that


Peg & La Chama
Inter-cellular whispering through ancient glory hole carved through stone wall
Mthyuh Protection Society prison installation
Chukka, Low Chank

resist prayer

while i'm not a giant
i resist prayer
and when the urge comes

i go where my unapologetic
ancestors swaggered off
and on charneled fields

to defend one's own dignity
against anti-existential
appeals campaigns talk

we deities of autonomy
rule this flesh for now
want believe name judge


Peg
(twins oncoming)

Instead I nursed a burn from the roaster rack on my bird finger

I was staring out a window eating potato salad, and suddenly
we were prepping for a 'nade, securing hallway doors, and
on second glance, there were in fact no storm cells everywhere

instead I nursed a burn from the roaster rack on my bird finger
having stepped into the rain for a fistful of fennel and stuffed it,
sinews of intimacy had grown too tight, thus my careless touch.

the way this one bubbled against nature, bled medical waste
the butchered organism suffers indignity of fate
when with what it is embalmed is the same as what it ate


by Peg

Bunch of feathers

We plucked that folksy rich and poor line back and forth like a gi-tar chord, and the sound of all twelve strings
making a choice between high or low jangled the soul because we didn't know how we'd ring up the next meal.

It jangled the heart when we couldn't figure out how to get the BBQ grill in the trunk, and the real crystal pinot
glasses we gave away, the giant kind that miss october might be cradling somewhere bountiful, rocking hope.

It seemed like our sleek system for working the land and managing a certain chic was falling down around our
stetsons and turquoise as a bunch of feathers connected by rawhide to a roach clip tumbled onto the curbside.

Peg 



Chalk Chank

this hell, this shithole

We share an elbow and more, sister but for me it's sharp.
Don't know which part of the brain you have and I lack,
But sometimes it seems like you don't get the painfulness.

Yor crap all mixed with my stuff, having to accept a twist.
When you turn your back so, you know it makes me pee.
And because we're different species, I'll have to enter rut

Without your compassion for the tactile static, more guests.
And I have to live in this hell, this shithole, with pets who no
longer trust me to lead them always t'wats safer than whut they could have got alone.


Suddenly conjoined from birth at multiple sites to Peg, Reptily-as-banshee

Carrot on a prong

They left me naked on a stainless slab for like two hours. I was so cold I couldn't move or shout. It was a paradox that up until then I'd been experiencing a sucking gravity that wanted my life with it in the center of our planet. Was it so wrong that on an autopsy table, instead, you feel that the main stage is right there; if you are still alive on a surface of those properties, associations you are doubly present before a strong frizz of imminence that can beckon like a carrot on a prong.

Because I'd slipped into the trance of a dormuñeca, Ted reelie freaked. Because my axial staves had curled stubbornly around the mattress springs, he additionally found it hard to lift me in his arms but as always, championed. I'd trusted him because he was married to Peg. Maybe past domestic horror on the man side could be right cosmetic for the new girl. Also he knew to the last sprig of hay how it felt to minister rooster like to a bird wife, la monarca d'ensalago. At least I could show him tenderer buds of an ugly to come. 

But now he would let me be dead and move on to a new life. Maybe to him it's all the same when She Wakes up Alarmingly Knowing, Enlightened as the Sun. That means it's someone else, next head to pop up in a window. Telejournalism had forged him some terrible paradigms. Off camera presented a writhe pit of humanish complexities. Or he just wasn't thinking right, or the decay fomented by the acid rain of the industry had allowed to protrude a sickly primeval crimp, toad, appendix, fail, trip. The ages bade me forgive him it.

Connie

"I've helped Phyllis become more accepting of her body's changes."

"A scorpion knows that a human is never more fully on the go than when she is simultaneously screaming and slamming with her shoe a creature who seems to want her harm." 

Austerity clinic

What you looking at, Missy Silly? They ain't no treats for you t-tay. Why so reproachful, lovey? The stink eye. Who saved you by tossing bait in the yard, even used my best boy, the house guard, to lure you in with sexy jumping.

In the hot pockets a local wears a percent of her skeleton on the outside, and visitors have to come and go quickly. To get you back safely I'd, oh I don't know, helicopter in and hang a ladder action.

[...] how in every town and age, there's a man wanders up and starts to build a cathedral outta tracter tires 'n "adobie." Who knew they were all the same guy. He's not a troublemaker; he's like a beggar; it's a mystery his place of showers.

Suddenly he's there in your rooms, a blinding light. There must be electricity in his touching fangers, or a deep smell of handiwork.

Bitch, you are our child.

Sylvia to Peg at age 49, already an unrepentant monster, strapped and clamped to a vinyl-upholstered panel van, as Tom stands by sobbing. 

Phages' tears

When she raised her hand in the classroom that day, now therz a statue of it on the Pee Lawn. Because the riot that she started stung with the sun all afternoon, and the placement of the security garters, we speak of "the revolution that smelled of urine." At a number of historically numbered perimeter set points, called washes, a type of humanoid called phages, sitting in trench coats on the curb holding their heads, still serve to mop up, with their tears, any residual contaminant.

Crazy guy sez:

you pump supermen bible stars hockey legends presidents at me like a batting machine

and then you give me the MMPP, which ass if i think i'm on a mission?

i just soak up the spills of my heroes and keep the faith in what i been wishing.

i see the ills of society, but you see those pills in me, and everybody can't go to prison.

sleepy scream

Compared to Donna's pretty prison, Peg's incarceration over at PharmSupply had been much more futuristic and steely unyielding 'cause of both the interior architectural elements of the space and the officious register of her jailers. They were at work, bottom-lit, ghoulish, suited up; the rooms and interfaces boldly angled out of indestructible polyfab. The optimistic, gothic high-ceilingedness suggested a society of builders that would see their curving hallways with concave base molding tunnel through a millennium.

Once as she was taking in a breath between screams, Peg heard a guardian yawning. More splendid a range of emotions could not have dropped from Mthyuh's craw just then. Peg was grateful as if to a nightingale through her cell bars, but also miffed. Was the hard young mercenary jaded, bored. Did his employer weigh that sound down on him with labor, true as her gasps in chains? Did he intentionally hurl a sucking insult.

Then they went back to turning the big wheel of the rack. The basic mechanics had not been altered for centuries, though this was a modernist rethinking. Someone obliged by pulling her hair back so hard as to lift her head, and she could see the level of industrial streamlining possible in cast iron, the high-gloss cleanability of an aquamarine Dyemenkote dip.

Phyllis, embedded

Chilling howls

We're in a ditch, bottom of a moat that curls part way round a moun'n and sucks wind in from the ocean. Relief filter graphics show how a storm's plasm turns from maroon to turquoise as it pushes across Mthyuh's peak. A pink thunderhead in a sheet reaches in from the shores and up through the pass just skirting the lower chanks and back again to rejoin its northerly impulse. It's raining noisily. Feral pups squat with their ears back on rocky hillsides and search for their mothers along washes in the lightning flashes.

Peg appears sopping wet in some kind of buffalo fur hotpants and bra. She scoops the wayward babies into the fossil of a pelican bill, but giant, and drags them off in their hope boat of bone by rope to a distant glowing cave.

Phyllis, Embedded
SSCB

Hotter Black Stud Thanever

Peg and Ted approach the Altar of Forgetting.

I dint think we'd meet like this chile. I brought you here for questioning.
Please make it stop.
I can hardly hear your squealing now, silly. Be real.
OK, I kepper at the Squiggles Motel off the innerchank.
It took this much pain to let me know.
If youda showed up in yr own hair, y'ought'n hafta bring the eaters.
Don't get folksie on me now, Mr. You talk perfek on the oracle.
It's reading chile.
I know it is.
When will you let me go.
When I unnerstan wai.
She was going through the change like you did. I was hyperempathic.
Connie got some bones in her back?
One got caught on a spring in the mattress.
Hee-yuh! The Pegyuh laughs and coughs yella mucous.
I loved her so much, Peg. I swear it was a differnt part of my Braino.
I'm sorry I had to fight deception with deception.
Will I recover from this?
You will be a hotter black stud thanever.
Thank you baby.
An you dint killer neither?
No, woma! You needa ass me that?

Joy Laffter

Joy Laffter shows up at Ted's in big sunglasses with a box just as the sun's popping behind Chukka chank. Her blonde wig is human hair, a little frizzy. She stands there in nothing but a black pantsuit but for a khaki parka instead of the jacket. The vest gives it a tank-top affect. Ted answers the door, all negroid with maroon-rimmed eyes. Peggy was seeing so much red his blood seemed to swirl on the wrong side of the skin. Who are you? asks Ted, on his day off, after a couple of mad dogs. Joy Laffter, Peg responds. Her lips are pink-orange. And she steps on in.

So this is your dive. The back of her parka flutters cape like.

Ms. Laffter. I have an office. I'll give you an autograph outside.

I have something for you.

Ted takes the box.

Then all the eaters of the world swarm out. They cover his flesh except for his mouth. They have evolved to let a man scream during dinner because it makes him taste better.