Make a pyre in a ring of iron

Pass time unmeaningfully

Rest in a place of uncaring

Surrender to the call of napping

Flail in your sleep with abandon

Grab at familiar handles

Basic functions are a luxury

Planets are moving involuntarily

Appliances waken automatically

Collect these moments in memory

The year sluffs off all around you

Gather all the deadened units

Make a pyre in a ring of iron 

Send it all to the heavens

[Traditional]

barsh hird at dawn

same bird but with hammering

and others, a real cuckoo shop

a day already showy and sinister

but it's the brain that won't stop

i am leftover history from yesterday

yet i can survive and observe

these same lamps rugs paintings

when i close my eyes i can see

blackness on a bright field in the

shape of the common mirror

grey shadows of rugs paintings 

lamps perhaps primeval forest

 

i am the only living exemplar of

my species in this time zone

and going off to bed could end

up initiating an extinction event

 

 

by Jan

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)

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

It started millions of years before disco

As time progresses, 69 keeps getting colder. How is that possible?

Hi. I'm Dr. Donna Thong, it's 1:25 PM, and I'm not only not done with my morning coffee, but more so, I'm also not done with my more morning coffee. And I never will be. Morning Coffee All Day is an initiative I've decided to embark upon instead of Christmas.

You notice fluctuations in temperature and thermometer accuracy when you are stretching out a traditionally very limited chunk of a day into an unlimited paradigm. Unrestrained. There is nothing that doesn't get by you.

Now that I've had time to think about it, I'm going with the way the coffee may or may not restrict your body's ability to warm itself-- that along with restricted movement and blood circulation while sitting and sipping coffee at a computer for hours. There are also calculations ripe for having in terms of how a sun moves against a brick building and any interior responses to that or lack thereof.

Now, as for K blood, I've devoted quite a lot of reflection toward it and those, including K's, who carry it. I am now confident in asserting that it's not a "mutation." Referring to new discoveries as such is as insulting to the phenomenon/ life form whatever as it is telling of one's own ignorance of one's own ignorance.

It should also go without saying that the substance which, yes, has a faint purple glow even in daylight and creates a rhythmic pulse aura which sounds to the human ear like a drum, there is not even the slightest biological link between so-called disco music and K blood, K's themselves, or any carrier of K blood, biological or artificial.



by Donna
"May they always fly spread eagle."

The machines came for me and dragged me off to the future just as I was thinking I'd timed them out

there have always been machines coming back to harvest what we have now
it's because they're unsatisfied, the highest point of humanity possible, and
undisciplined, and ruinous, and soon we'll be able to start over once more with screwdrivers

every so-called singularity just a em-effin marketing campaign
they change everything and expect you to be their slaves
it didn't take a big step back from the filter of loathing to view the splooge of their damnation



Hoolie
Certified, Light Arms/ Cage Fighting

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

No-Go on the Mo-Ho

I never thought I'd want a pre-1977 house with axles and deflated wheels instead of posts and beams
so desperately
And then be so relieved when the plan stalled as if I'd never really wanted no mo-ho at all.

My engine of change switched on just long enough to open up a crack in the down chute
of my soul
And then, when I knew I'd never turn it over, backfire energy torqued me on after other dreams



by Hoolie

College of Cement, Chang K. Chang Chank Campus

OUR MISSION:

TO SUPPORT the local private business community so that, in addition to the tax breaks and new roads and stoplights they already get just for being kind enough to set up shop in our chank, they might be happy enough with the free training we provide their employees so as to be less likely to abandon our moldy, irrelevant old brick chank and take all the jobs with them.

TO OPERATE as if we were a successful, top-heavy, yet competitive for-profit business, while still being able to solicit, receive and spend tax dollars and private donations.

TO INVEST as much as possible in market research, publicity, recruitment, fundraising, customer satisfaction, institutional data management, commercial software packages, IT, buildings and grounds, and sport; and to provide excellent salaries and benefits to an important core staff of lucky fleyks from other places that can help make that happen for our community.

TO ENSURE that students are able to pay for the products and outcomes they purchase by focusing strategically on financial aid advising and any available student loan programs, public or private, to maximize the number of shiny coins each customer will bring with them through our doors. We have already installed the latest reverse-metal detectors at the main entrances to every campus.

TO SUCCEED in finding at least one student knowledgeable and cooperative enough to be able to speak as valedictorian at graduation and commencement in reasonably coherent English using an echo, a meme, at least, of rhetoric-like critical-thinky words.

TO PROTECT students from teachers who would attempt to deprive them of their dreams by word, deed, or assessment; these types of behaviors, including refusing to accept late work, not giving second chances on plagiarism, unwillingness to allow students to express their anger on them, unwillingness to allow students to scarf huge salads in class, sleep on the tables, or step in and out with their phones; these and any other actions that might create an impediment or delay to the receipt of the diploma once full payment has been received, will not be tolerated.

TO FIGHT professional teacher's unions and their members with every nerve, every fiber of our souls. We must resist their demands, destroy their organizations, and break their wills; alternately, we are open to a deal providing great full-time contracts, salaries and benefits to a small token group of their top leadership and depend on their historic penchant for corruption and brutality to bully it on down through the ranks from there.

WHY COLLEGE OF CEMENT

• College of Cement, Chang K. Chang Chank Campus (COCCKCC), is exactly the same, down to the graphics package on the website, as every other college in the Chanks. It is, perhaps, the shortest drive from your home.
• You may know an employee or want to get a job there some day, especially if you get too many DUI's and need work within walking distance during the winter months.
• Don't forget to check out our diversity statement and complimentary demographic maps; will you be comfortable with racial makeup of more distant alternatives? 
• Are you too busy achieving your dream to have time for study? 
• Just walk through our doors, and it will be like a party in your honor dude, just enjoy, no worries.

ACCREDITATION
 
Each year, our top administrators and executives climb up onto several buses for a trip down-chank to meet with past presidents of COCCKCC and other colleges, who make up the Board of Accreditation under the auspices of Mthyuh Protection Society (MPS). The Society has agreed to butt out of what is basically a dinner-and-drinks club for the last few dinosaurs of a serious, academics-based career-prep age which they know is long-gone, so it doesn't matter anyway.

HISTORY

Like every two-year college, COCCKCC was founded in 1964, and that's just darling. Skirts below the knee. Haha: shorthand! The white ones had already learned to read, write, and spell in high school back then. That's why grammar and punctuation are permanently barred from our curriculum.

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

• A racist homemaker.
• Retired Professor of Music, deaf.
• An older white gentleman, about 350 lbs.
• His brother in law, 285.
• Acting VP of local hospital.
• VP of local air conditioning company.
• A closeted gay dentist with a large local practice.

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

This is the office that's most political and cosmetic, but President-Superintendent Jansdaad is no mere hairdo on a figurehead. You can hand over your family's or company's "propina" into the waiting, sweating palms of Jan "Juicy Jan" Jansdaad-- or placed in an envelope marked "Kitty" and popped through the mail slot-- confidently and directly.

OUR FACULTY

We love our faculty! They are the ones with the professional credentials to provide the optics that scream, "legit operation."

Our core team of professional faculty are not distracted by having to sleep in their cars or attend required, unpaid "professional development" hours at multiple schools adding up to more time than what they actually get paid for even if you count the teaching part. They get to call all the shots in each department. They are the master teachers. We rely on them to make the decisions that count for all of our adjuncts and students in terms of choosing which mega-publisher has the best kickbacks and swag per hour of schmoozing with company reps.

1. Phil, 95, cannot stand at a lectern without prosthesis. Will be vested into retirement in less than 60 months under current state law.
2. Betty, a real B. She could smoke and tell you off at the same time back when smoking and talking were still allowed in the teaching cage. 
3. No original record containing the name of the third full-time professor has survived implementation of the Filter of Loathing decades back, but he is said to be waiting patiently in a hospice, nearly triumphant with his gender-discrimination lawsuit against the college for allowing a militant feminist auto-body student to snip off his face after failing a dent-pull-out midterm in 1985.

The rest of our "pool" teaching staff number in the thousands, but we might regularly call upon 600-800 of those, depending on current human trafficking statutes and how quickly they can submit their Statements of Self-Effacement and Full Legal Responsibility (SSEFLR) at the end of the prior semester. We've found that the teachers who pull in the most coins also tend to have signed off on their final grades well before the third week of class.

LOCATIONS

• Right there at the freeway exit. Look for the smoked glass and plastic trim.
• In the old cement factory that provided historic levels of gainful employment for our chank before the automation of cement. Interior has been entirely remodeled in plastic and smoked glass with chrome.
• Right there at the other freeway exit in the landmark chrome-and-plastic Silicon4All building, a seminal freeway-side homage to chrome and plastic-- and smoked glass.

CAMPUS SAFETY

• Hands up! Don't Shoot! :)
• You must attend the Gory Shooter Situation holographic "shock chamber" presentation every three months and re-take the "Nothing You Can do But Scream, Die, or Kill" quiz and Bullhorn Handler's Workshop at least once per semester during class time.  
• Shove something in front of the door, hope it doesn't open out.
• How can YOU help to scare the shit out of vulnerable young adults struggling to see their way to a sustainable future? (Self-Paced PD, 8 credit hrs)
• Look around. Who should you report as a potential shooter? (Not a workshop. Do it. Now.)
• Gun Cleaning 
• Readiness Counts: When the day we've been planning for finally arrives, it could be among the most exciting of your life!
• Take Responsibility: If your instructor seems like she wants you to throw out your chewing gum, she may be pathologically not that nice and likely eligible for a no-fault conceal-carry takedown. See your Student Handbook for details and prizes.
• Gun Sharing
• Gunplay (some restrictions apply)
• Get a Campus Gun Permit (click here to print)
• Report Yourself as a Potential Shooter (IAMAPSR)

ALUMNI: LEADING THE WAY

We were able to track down at least four persons who took at least one class, or at least requested a Course Catalog, or received one by bulk mail, for this or any satellite campus and were willing to state as much on tape in a public venue.

1. Guy in a suit standing in front of a microphone
2. Woman in traditional African costume reading a book.
3. Guy with a chicken hat and two fleyks brandishing shiny new fryer baskets.
4. Smug-looking career lady pretending to use a smart phone.

CEMENT FOUNDATION

This is how we funnel the money. Click to send money.

NEWS AND EVENTS

Ice Cream Social blah blah I know that no one will read this even though we are way over budget on fancy dinners and events for stakeholders by which we mean local rich right wingers who want to police the library for stuff that's obscene and get court-side seats as close as possible to cheerleader poontang well on second thought I think some of the secretaries over in Administrative Self-Serving might have the time and inclination to see if there's maybe a picture of themselves posted here since they sort of had to attend the ice-cream social because the foundation set it up in the only hallway that goes to the bathrooms and made a really big deal about it if you came anywhere close to the table with the cooler on it but I don't think they are big readers, really, and the college not only has a Facebook page but also a full-time-with-competitive-benefits Facebook Liaison-Technician so they would click on that to see themselves shoving their strapless bikini career apparel into the camera of one of our full-time staff photographers now housed over in the Social Media Outreach building. No, they won't read this, and I don't even know why I'm writing it except to make it seem like I'm busy here so nobody finds out they haven't given me anything specific to do since my uncle Jan had a talk with the hiring committee and landed me this great full-time Education job with competitive benefits just last week.

FIND A COURSE

We offer all the courses you need for a rewarding career! Come and engage with our team of full-time Financial Aid counselors to find out how to buy a winter coat, get a bus pass, and open a student joint-auto-draft account at the COCCKCC Credit Union. COCCKCCCU will take all the thought away from transferring your loan proceeds into your very own Account of Indebtedness ("Easy AOI") with COCCKCC. Spin the wheel! Get a free hot dog!

VISIT CAMPUS

Bring some comfortable shoes! Our beautiful campus includes a glistening lake, a grove of award-winning shag oak, ice-skating rink, auto repair shop, ceramics studio, old-timey railroad museum and gift shop... all between the door to your classroom and the parking lot.

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

"You may still be illiterate and/or incomprehensible when you graduate, but rest assured that as a nurse, policewoman, air conditioning repair professional, dental hygiene assistant's aide, or any of the other rewarding careers supplied by our partnerships leveraging our foundation's perpetual fund drive with local labor exploitationists, you will definitely have memorized the most recent month's iteration of MPS format for in-text citations and Works Cited pages."

EMPLOYEE DIRECTORY

We realize that if you are attempting to search through our employee directory, you are most likely a disgruntled student or part-time employee trying to make a complaint, or maybe a disgruntled ex-paramour of Jan Jansdaad, the young, pretty, full-time-with-benefits Assistant II to the Executive Secretary for the VP Instructional Design/ Stupid Adjunct Support Institute (SASI) in Office 208887-G, first floor, 10-4 pm, whom you best believe is eligible to purchase a firearm if he doesn't already have one, so no. No Employee Directory for you.

Anyway, if you are trying to call your instructors, chances are we have no idea how you can get a hold of them. Most do not have phone extensions or offices on our campus, which, think about it, is a place of business, not some kind of teachers' lounge or union hall.

CLICK HERE FOR NOTHING TO HAPPEN

TRANSLATE

You believe that our translation of this page will result in an accurate facsimile of the English version.

Creo que las mejores mujeres jóvenes de mi vecindario se sentirían mucho más a gusto en Chukka Chank CC porque la verdad es que COCCKCCC es una mierda.

Dear Vikki Madrid:

RE: LET'S BE HONEST THERE IS SHAME IN W.A.S.T.E.

Thank you, Vikki-- I will contact Vikki Toledo.

In general I do not feel that I have a good grasp of exactly how I am supposed to go about either requesting or receiving a W.A.S.T.E. cert or even what those W.A.S.T.E. accommodations are supposed to be or not be.

I would rather not have to wander around like a beggar trying to convince the odd RTD jockey or Shootervax  administrator to help when I need it. Do I have to explain to them that I am W.A.S.T.E.? How does it work, exactly?

I do not know whom I am supposed to approach, what type of accommodation the Clinic is really willing to provide-- if any-- and what the Clinic's responses are to my remaining concerns about accommodation, which I provided months ago.

The Institute is a more hostile environment for me now than ever, and it's very difficult to focus on my patients and other aspects of the job that used to make it seem worthwhile knowing the level of hostility my mani-pedi supe and her OR posse have for me. I feel even more vulnerable and unprotected from this mizus whose behavior I have directly reported to you now that it's clear the Clinic supports what she's done and has rewarded her for it. This is literally terrifying to me.

I believe it would be better for me to request a lateral transfer to a unit where I can do my work without being the object of permanent shade and complete unwelcome from above no matter how well I perform or do not perform. I have always been qualified to work in High Grooming, I already vacuum eye shiv and pull foreigns at other ranch and rig sites; maybe at Chukkachank HG, I could be granted enough hours to actually buy food and make payment.

Alternately, or additionally, I still believe I should be paid for work that I was promised when I cancelled my Dorsal-Stoma residency and came on board nearly full-time at the invitation of Vikki London. She told me in front of witnesses that even if it did not work out, she would make sure I got the same number of hours in mani-pedi to make up for any lost hours in RMP. That was a lie, and now there have been major economic consequences for me (and many more coins for her!). In the meantime, another worker of the preferred species ratio in that department who started the same time I did is still enjoying most likely double the pay I am making after I got the shaft from the two newly promoted mezus who have enjoyed no consequence while my career at the Clinic (and my bank account) is ruined.

The stress caused by Vikki London's and Vikki Belfast's workplace brutality toward me has caused a lot of depression and anxiety and contributed to the loss of my relationship with the flake I was planning to marry and general deterioration of my ability to cope with confusing pre-and-post-procedural duties and other stressful aspects of the new environment I now face after making lawful and dutiful complaints with no positive results whatsoever, only punishing and negative ones.

I still believe that Vikki London and Vikki Belfast broke the law (discrimination, bias, anti-whistleblower activity, retaliation for reporting bias and intimidation, bullying; no Due Process), and that she and Overmizus Belfast tried to cover it up, and that the Clinic is also breaking the law by brushing my complaints under the rock and hoping that they go away with time.

You and the Institute should know that I am nowhere close to being ready to drop these topics, so I hope that you have not done so either.

Thank you,
Donna
"K's Fly Spread Eagle"

New family roads

new family roads
in emerging colors
can't absorb
history from a stone
if it isn't theirs already

you can't expect us,
now, to follow a
single historical
line, and converge
for any longer than

it takes to say it:
Time, in its truer
voracious circle,
supposed to blend,
but bleeds instead.



La Chama, Altachank Heights, Churchcock

You're funny when you cry

Let me drag you around the
world as i use up the last
scraps associations places
while i remember and they
still live but hopefully do
not remember what i give
to a culture not my nation

How about a last tour to
confirm the invisibility of
what i think i know is there,
see in my face what's now
and new, plus you and
some cab fare, and a hotel
room to go discover or to

Cower where you can't hear
leaf blowers or sirens just
cooling fans in a cable box,
muffled hums of a garbage
disposal or the water softener
if you wander downstairs in
an hour when it's time to sleep.


Donna
Drama Night
Main Clinic
Centre for the Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk-Therapy Apologist Associations

Started calling for his dog

The next moment he was sitting up and calling
for his long-gone galgo, noble dodi al fayed.
The other animals heard it even among the
notes of hypnotic song, tiny blue lights flickring.

He was sharing a fabric or film that held
suspended the present on a grid independent
of dimension. Juniper, craven, the survivor,
who won't lie in the bed of his predecessor,

thinks of him now. "We still share the fact of
our mutual presence, configured just here,
more than we can ever prove that time is real."
Two dogs and a man sit on a plane tilted from life.

Blue fill

Blue fill creeps along the horizontal time thermometer,
crappy white diamond jiggles in place on pause.
If you leave it too long it'll give up and startle loose the voices.

I'd rather sit and suspend my evening in a fork-tong satellite
than take that same amount of minutes to read your paragraphs.
I like 'em slim, my teeth, lines, rat-a-tat visions.

Control wand seems to send both in and out-way signals,
emotions motor round a color wheel: Our Dad,
Hope to win, dogs, a thousand gut-wrung wages.


Hoolie

Is Saliva Meat?

We call them rockers in this environment, where no one else is catatonic. Some see the many-legged harbingers of decomposition, others blind to any over-self. You might be tripping this wild natural filigree that's really an afterimage from the wallpaper in the men's or the back of a phonics workbook. Purple and red. There could be as many exclusive trademarks as flippers on a snowflake and still be the same psychedelic cutout rorschach family tree. Shadows split two ways here. Light, too, available in any direction. You wonder if it makes you a carnivore just swilling your own spit.

where we're sitting now
is so far into posterity
that it's a dizzying needle tip

as i dangle, unending state
wonder if it stops, when
, how am i connected

a flash cube might take away
all your time dependency
or a strobe light

last of the front-line genetic minorities
at a vertiginous future zenith
victimizing the right


Jan Jansdaad 
"Jan Jansdaad is Jan's dad Jan's dead daughter."

The World's Agents

Now that it's 11:39, a frightened user checks the time.
Even doing nothing, you are a part of the community.

When the filter came down we gave up futility,
traded it in for fear and opportunity.

She'd like to remember, forget, but she can't think
while the world's agents swim toward past and by me.


Phyllis
"Fuck you, men of Canada!"

His raw, hotted-up body

If my workplace is my body, then every cell hurts. And if because my body is a temple of work, where they labor just to keep it standing, then I can hear the workers singing from the lobby. If I had a finger for every one of the pains of giving body to the birth of work, then the finger would always be the same and repeated on the other hand. If my liver was a filter for all the poison going down in my labor-related milieu, if the lungs stank of my environment, if the heart, if the desks and chairs?

If a company is holding me, tightly, and I work to pay and be his burden, how can he owe me back my body when he needed it to help the keeping of it enable self-feeding. Now already both I and the man whose build I'm in are third persons. At least flesh cogs become wiry in a long flat arc, despite the sudden-precipitous last few clock punches. Brain taffy would be perfect if brains were made of taffy but not brains, but in turn they're made of coffee.

When you say you're stingy with your time do you mean you don't like to give it away, or that you literally don't allow that it proceed. For it cannot unless a movement's in the way. Still,

You'd have to go on working till they ring the bell. Even if there is no time. Even if this were a big dumb set on a rented scaffold in the truth of stasis where they made us believe in a clear river of unborn moments. You skewer a random few instants of experience scamping across on winged feet, long whiskers, your protist seeds, may even have some prints made. The invisible time river is like water because in reality rivers are made of water, and time is crap. Time is how long you can convince a primate to do your bidding before his raw, hotted-up body takes over and says, "No way, machine. I'm having a nap."

Wayne, Sr.
"I understand workers."

Sixty-Nine Cents an Hour

My first real corporate gig since shilling boner at private pool parties for the Chicago mob landed me right in the peaking tip of the dot-com boom. This time I got to be the old shuggie with the time-done-alive cred if nothing else. The mean street in between had been a beautiful government sliding down a rainbow of duty and patrimony, but I was ready for all the opportunity and glamor of a whurl-wide pyramid schemata. Even though you know already my only retirement income said and done now is from leasing out these tracts.

My new boss was half the size I had been at his age and twice as green. With a twitch. Always seemed to be sweating it out, this guy Pete Steeves-- what if they fire me, well it's curtains for me and the wife and kid, that's whut, and forget about the options. Just lettem get you drunk and goofy after work, dick-flip yr earlobe now and then, fetch a few things, learn the acronyms. VC is no longer Viet Cong.

But Pete also had another thing i didn't know he had, what they called hunger back then. It's also when they started leveraging the word leverage's leverage all over the place, almost like they were leveraging it. Just like when pundits and academics started saying the word "piece" all the time. Like, "And then the other... oh, i don't know...PIECE of this is, i think..." (they had to pause before the word piece as if they had just then thought of using it in that particular kind of brilliant figurative play). Around that time or a little before they also decided that the "UH" sound is too like a troglodyte. So everything has to be "AH" instead, as if a light bulb is going off over your caricature. AHnbelievable. Then the final golpe with the engine-like, throaty cackle talk, wicked-witch-of-the-west schtick to sound hip, ironic and also sassy!

Stumbling along a quaintly sooted, deeply rutted urban lane only meant for drunk young guys in ties leaving downtown bars at night, a street like the hormonally ergonomic curved charnel chutes for beef, Pete mistily confided that he trusted me in a special way. He expressed that as, "I feel like I can tell you anything." Next thing I knew I had responded to an urgent-toned invitation to his country home for a meal.

The Steeves' house was so old you could not even change a diaper in it due to its landmark status. It looked like "Shakespeare" condos, but lower, maybe where the ponies were groomed by jockeys. The double-dutch doored entrance with the capital X's on each under-wing opened wide to reveal an eerily medievally scene for riding the information revolution. The wife-- was it a bonnet? No, one of those prep girl tortoiseshell tiara deals--perched on a short stool across from the daughter, who was actually in a bonnet, being a baby, in a Georgian wicker, no, a varnished Confederate willow-switch ship bed, squeaking slowly. Was it a tyke rocking itself to some primordial Esperanto hymn in a flammable cradle edging our land's hearth, or another shriveled and catatonic relative?

As in a roadside "Mystery Spot," I could not stand up completely straight at any point, angle or coordinate in the structure. Pete and Nancy had developed stoops, though they could have geometrically fit erect in a technical sense, maybe just not psychologically quite like duck's backs around the time-travel/ anachronistic lifestyle piece. Pete, intuiting that I wouldn't stay on for whatever was boiling in the cauldron at the end of a hag's long spoon, immediately presented me with a gift. It was warm from being in his hand, and it stayed that way even after leaning-to in the cool vinyl toll-coin tray of my GM tank for the hour it took to get back home to Highchank.

Pete's gift is made of a hard, dark wood that holds energy beyond its own life better than most other previously living tissue. It is so much more valuable as a dead absorber of however the sun can stir dust into sparks and finally fish-lizard-rat-ape-calculator. Pete's gift you might call a totem he picked up from some port where they give a tourist a dark kernel of place and a little more, which can taint. You might call Pete's gift a fertility symbol with just the suggestions of parts carved roughly and all from one piece, but that was also the whole point. Along with how it can't stand up even though it's obviously a man. The soles of his feet are badly cut, really more like hacked at by a god making sixty-nine cents an hour.


by Donna
for Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologist, Autumn Double Issue

damnatio memoriae

ANNUS NON GRATUS:

I didn't ask that you be born into my world.
But for the lively spit and frying pan of the latest
spin, we'd have dropped you in the oubliette.
Now you are the lesser sin on a trek of forgetting.

Chevied unto your breast, I looked behind in fear,
hounds and torches phasing thru at the time door.
They carry fetters and impeachment writs and
would hunt, condemn across the generations.

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.