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

White blobs

white blobs rose along the plinth of my spine

closed rose buds climbed up while standing

rolled W to E like bay clouds when asleep

white clouds feeling out a sound that beats

blobs white that grew from my own meat

used my vertebrae as a trellis or a highway

beauty masqueraded as a cause célèbre

pendant organ chandeliers merely decorated

the temple sealed in the slime of evolution

incubated seeds of its own demolition

dashing young trojans played the code and

won the day my defenses reeled and folded

to feel betrayal the mind wakes up with poison

steps away from its own vulnerable medium

formidably rejects the pale intrusion with

no choices but to challenge the illusion

the structure stands today ironically due

to the killing power of one they call the chopper 

who does not discriminate as to whom

or what gets drowned in caustic dayglo color

how can the mind be sound in a perishable dish

the flesh no longer grounds by way of physics

a world view from a drain that led to a mission

to live beyond the end of a sound unfinished

by Ilyn

Gut flora inline

though it's invisible we know that the gut flora reappeared

at the long counter at the portable oracle dispenser dispensary

either from one of the technological ministers or one or more

pilgrims trying to get in a walking tour of of the Lip of Mthyuh

for more than an hour afterward it didn't matter the source

for everyone who'd been there felt residual tendrils of 

funk in the folds of their clothing in the hairs of their 

noses and straight down into it's most familiar canals and 

nurseries this is how a panic can start when it's a strong enough

bloom that it seems to take grip of any moist cavity when in 

reality it only wants to live on the air enjoying its last few 

moments of counter-action as byproduct of a predator's diet

[Traditional]

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.]

This is not my belly button

This is not my belly button

Donna effed up and slashed it open

then closed with fancy stitching

to fashion me a new one 

If you're going to have a surgery

on your patio or balcony

you'd better have in mind the men

who like aesthetics now and then

men who keep an inventory

of body parts and piercings for the

off chance of another emergency

or when she's doing residency

 

by Mike

"I forgive you, Dr. Thong."

the humanity around me was stronger than my body will or cancer

it seemed like i was born dnr but i kept on waking

a hive or suspension of healing molecules buoyed 

my cells did what only one immune system could not

do by itself

these were friendly robots with drone-like intentions

a frightening singularity of focus that lidderly

cut and skewered and sewed in service to their

own profession

some might say if it weren't them they'd prolly assume

what's most healing is the stripping and cleaving and

what's left will live interred in debt to pay for

re-ignition

that a done submission of spirit and character

rare deferment to the throbbing support structure

trembles in turn at the business end of an 

org-tree mandate

but can they stop me before i commit again

to rampage on the place that brought me in

ghosts of my venom strangling the landscape

cries and sharp tears

by Ilyn

I only want to waste this day

 

jarring when the screen goes blank

mind is awake but the body is numb

same if you like to party or paint

might look dumb when it's said and done

 

might feel great when yr at yr peak

creed might translate to the joy of life

wait another 20 years before you speak 

never live long enough to get it right

i only want to waste this day

on vanity and distractions

waste it into infinity

there's no tomorrow and that works for me

though it doesn't cure the anxiety

get to hang onto my piety

nose is open to society

Reptily-ily

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

Ilyn on Shab/ Shab Under Ilyn

Lidderly broken inside

coming apart from within
physical connectors, structures

snapping and rolling

splitting, detaching ruptures

lidderly broken inside

i had mistaken the pangs for

"sadness," gut-level terror

a predisposer for suicide

will i get a new lease on life

unbiased by the part that's lived

stretching beyond the knife

return to a pain that's figurative?

by Jan

flesh-coloured virus

it started as a virus but i didn't notice
since the color of the bumps matched
my complexion

i'd only seen it once before, and just
a dot of it, and that was on my father,
back of his hand

mine were few, but one on my foot
was activated during an attack of
fire ant itching

from there they flamed, while beige,
enough to startle any dermatologist
from commenting

it's as if they've looked and seen their
own lives pass before them in
shallow relief



Ilyn
Jornada de Banyos Calientes

How I Experience Communication

Do you see anything like a lip moving on my face?

No. That's because I am talking to you, and I don't do it with a mouth. You are only even hearing the English because it's my organic empathic system that makes it not even matter and it's the biology of your no-K braino that turns it into recognizable symbols. In fact, did you know that if it weren't for the human capacity for what you call "denial," your flakes and no-K's could not even reproduce? Would not be able to.

So... I wish you would look me in the eye, an organ we have in common, and state your credentials as a professional by implication of your manner, sir.



by Missy

They're not birthmarks

They're shadows, animated watermarks from below that move
Across the years from breast to back of hand to forearm to ear

As if he were the same reborn and again apart from the ripples
That appeared uniformly but randomly not defined by place as

Much as shape and darkness, color, ochre ruby, cloudy edges,
And velocity, if you were going to use time as a measurement


Chamatilly

He Sweated It

Always ask yourself: how is this moment auspicious
Then remember who sweated all of it for you
See when he dropped it shook loose some shit and
Made him less valuable as bud (blood was 33%)
But more for humanskind to gather from lily pads
And cough up for Volca in the form of a shiny coin



from "Good Graciousness: Ilyn's Perspiration as Nourishment"
Children's Myth of Mthyuh

Deal Maker

sometimes yr wrinkles take on a heavy
dropping pressure against the skeleton.

you need to fling an eyebrow scrotum
backward just to see whuts up ahead.

or in a convertible, scarvs on yr chins,
some flaps of manz largest organ coul

-d fly off cracking loose as in shingles.
Giant tissue boxes and chili canz that

used to be marketed to the Y (MCA)
chromosome alone? Nau gone away.

My Horz

I was just thinking how I'm resenting, maybe unfairly, all of my bitches lately. At first I say I'm turning over a new labia: never again will I hang my time out to dry on some lowlife hohoo ain't even turning tricks. Who think she can survive on my jism as a fix. Not so. Cuz that's too rich a treat for dependent mthyuhz cayn even work beyond her lips fer a snack o' some food stamp points fr the lil' baybeez. This is an economy fr double income, high rolling self starterz who can share meat as well as preen, luv. You got to have something equal to give if you gettin the biggest dickhead you ever seen, luv. Adoration don't make the queen, dove. She gotsta have a trade outside a shade an speckin pay in diemunz, mthyuh, cuz my preservation, above all the othyuh, is whut I spen my day lovin, not yo ass-jaded ball inspectrz with meterz on they taints an credit scorz like teen-mom newlywedz...

Ilyn

gut flora

While renting a uhaul, the
in the process of hiring a truck,
some of the vendor's stomach flora
released and attached to my face.

you could almost see the blooms
of coli as they splashed on your
eyes' moist surfaces and flocked the
uvula. Even five hours later, my

his gut mosses linger in my sinus
chambers and continue to stimulate
synapses reserved for archetypes,
arranged marriages, harsh caprices.



by Tom
"How life can be separated between tomorrow and today, where I've forsaken society by knowing almost no one but the famous. How I've changed home into a structure that had spent a year splayed in three separate but potentially interlocking components, in a meadow, with sticky bee hives seeping throughout it that would start a walkathon movement among any normal gathering of concerned citizens... How in 40 thought-out moves not a one was aimed at something like whatever this is, but something measurably better... But how the plain truth is that, with a fat bitch laying by my side, I can spring forward into the same strange land that you are all trying to navigate, how I can live in horror and sanity somehow, all integrally, where a plan is a map and a map is a planet... Sylvia... come back to me..."

surprise vs. inevitability

REPTILY: It's great how you keep going and coming back to life, but it's not the same as reincarnation because it's all in one breath; I know because I am still your blood mistress, and you've only been gone a week, a month. You were just here. Hey, the pink carnation, literally, in your lapel has not finished drying. It's the original carne, horseman.

ILLYN: But uglier, a taking to task of symmetry. Once I tried to retrieve some dry cleaning I'd dropped off in a previous expression. Lou looked up at me and said he was sorry, not that I died but that I had to insult the community and its grief that way, over and over again. These arncho raiments, he said: Might as well stick with the wormeaten pinstripe on yr back. ...It stung.

REPTILY: N' I know how they say that a Craw dive is the only noble way to treat yrself out, that the Mthyuh is hungry and the patriotic gesture is to beg her to eat you first, but how much of a sacrifice, bro...? How much, when you know that it's just a matter of planets moving through space without you, while an uncomfortable recital, dreaded meet-and-greet might be avoided, before you are back in action with yr credit rating through the sea floor and one ear a little lower than the other?

ILLYN: Like a warrior must fight, a dyer must dye, a narcissist must write, I sacrifice my will to live a full single life. As my flesh is torn and burned away by soft-molten and sharp-cool gravel, I accept each day as either vital repair or road to terrble destiny in randomly uneven ration.

REPTILY: Like the fall-and-recover dance aesthetic of early-80's Highchank.

ILLYN: No, not really like that. Unless your critical fulcrum is core theory. Right. Wherein the human body is reduced to a rag doll on a whip handle.

REPTILY: Hot.

ILLYN: Yes.

Death of Bill Naughdon

You can fast when you are mourning because
grief feels like hunger, so it's all the same,
but you can't eat to bring someone back,
and reanimation of life does not fill one
stomach.

A Cock is a Whole World

When once with the morning you are off
There's a whole day blossoms free on ya
Bran new sensations, slurpy kisses, funny
Wrinkle-puss puppies swelled with candy.
Fresh being gives the environment a gloss
Who can help reaching out to this fat hope.
Now everything matters more than before.

Sistah Grupe Project
Connie
Donna
Mike