Love

PHYLLIS:
How could it be love when
I can't say I'm falling in it,
and I only bump your sur-
face with a planet of time,
spinning with a momentum
that comes from wretched,
only low, wretched, sacred,
old impersonal wringing of
other people's writhing at-
tempts at pinning down lo-
ve? And how that only blo-
ssoms, like spores on a win
dborne molecule of filth, pr
opelling a tragic career of i-
nvoluntary grinding on air,
getting sucked in by forces
too massive to contemplate
?

REPTILY:
You are arrogant to suppos
-e that you can understand
my feelings or your terror,
especially in the context of
the known universe. Take f
-or example that smell on y
-our hand. The world leaves
you out of its mysteries and
conducts its thing regardles
-s of your silly outbursts of
lit crit. Your buddha thinks
he's driving when he's only
a hood ornament, dear. I a-
m made of essential solvent
-s which melt your quaint r
-esolutions n' hypothesizing.

Irretractable Post-Feminist Crisis

Total conversion or shutdown.
Shivica ficha 1: Chamatilly, frmrly "Reptily".
Comments: Girl's gone too far. Recommend full brain return, winged flight, excretory updates.

Amicus posts: 3

ap1: Chama is the Honey of Life. Our community would suffer her absence more than the brief monthly assaults. Our K response team is empathic and humanish.
Supervisor, All-Chank
Cement Employees Collective

ap2: Oh, Chamalachamalamachama. Chalamachamamama. We wail in anticipation of your claws.
Ultimate Worship Group
Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle, Sponsor

ap3: She might as well let it all hang out. She is enduring an irretractable post-feminist crisis. I have submitted a volunteer card for embedded feed monitoring and preliminary intimate grooming license. She will recognize me as a specialist and view historic spatting as too easy for vengeance. She'll eat me last.
Phyllis

Collar of Skulls

When I close my eyes I can see pricks of light in the pattern of the tiny bud cluster on your ficus. They dim in and out and the tip wags like the shamrock marquee on an old border casino. Death gives you a mask of hurt knowing and the joy of helplessness. I see your face in the thick leaves I sink among to steal a smoke. I feel the backs of your knees and neck and bump the hip string of a loin cloth on my heroic groin carrying you inert out of Aztec Town. Ever since you planted a collar of skulls on my breast, ever since crimson footprints first crossed the wake of the blessed, I been able to get up on my knees, and the rest just pulled itself together. I never knew all the carnage was what my own eyes bled while stomping past the innocent. Monster, our arms rattle round the plexus, so many palms turned up with final gifts, a mill, beacon eating wind. Only your power can make me stop destiny and give in.

Kev's Biggest Wanter

Worship Section

It says here that on Cabaret Night the Chama was serving cocktails to a crowd of tourists in a Carol Channing wig and wacky makeup. When she looked into one of em's eyes and saw a hatchet murder. Now she's coming out as having seen her own ghost through psychic time travel. Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle is expanding with a section for worshipers. Tom?

Tom stepped out of the bathroom like a robot, glowing in purple light. He seemed to have a bumping soundtrack. Sylvia stood and let the paper sag and watched him stroke the spines on the back of his neck.

Keep the Frontier Strong

Keep the frontier strong
Pioneers will come along
Step with all your doubting

Go to where the wind comes from
Take eddies free of aegis
Shout your song to strangers

Unmask the world that's known
Show her to the boundaries
Plant and spread her queendom

Traditional Call to Arms, Mthyuh Preservation Society

Pillow Talk

The Chama on "Pillow Talk"
with Phyliss

I am a primitive, an illiterate, yet I have a place because my work is an organic function and not everyone can pass this stuff.

Everything you produce looks like a bad and pornographic Degas, a motel-room El Greco if you're lucky.

I could be the gal who stencils red and black diamonds on the doors of the suites.

You've seen enough to know it all just makes you tired, and it's easier to just paint and drink.

Drink and paint.

Exactly.

Then why am I so goodlooking?

That's how you get away with it.

You're wearing a Timex, aren't you?

I beg your... yes, why?

Its ticking is about to give me an epileptic fit. Can we slip it between the mattresses?

[Slipping] You'll never be All-Chank because of this essential torpidity, the contempt for consensus or... regard...

You are beginning to understand my powers. They do not lie in rhetoric, sadly, nor in representation. I am a bloody wicca bitch. Can't you see. Your tongue is coiled around my clit.

*mphrmph*

Donna Thong in the Shower

I kept turning the knob to the Right;
I'd been letting Hot steam a shirt,
but it kept getting Chillier,
so I thought I'd run out.

In the lint-pecked mirror,
grimacing for a tooth exam,
Happy/ Sad lines crossed and
made crosses. In my face.

Then I pulled on my tights
inside out, so the seam wouldn't Hurt,
but it got very Warm,
and Bruises spread across my body,

throbbed, like Blood was coming out.
Disco music played in the purple Light.
I reached for my abs as they stiffened.
I thought about calling You in that state.

Down, Down

I learned all the lessons of cement
by falling down pitted, dusty steps.
It's a consolation, this knowledge.

My sexiness couldn't protect me,
nor did well-meaning tips change my mind.
I was a female doctor, dammit.

They stripped me of my Donna Karan;
now I scrummage like a thrift store rat
in a maze of snap diagnoses.

Y-Y

In an attempt to spit you out,
I saw we'd become one body.

We already share the template
to a double-Y chromosome.

Your long torso, my openness:
we will never turn from virtue.

My hands and feet are cemented,
nor can I hold you in my teeth.

Still just one of us can appear
in the same place at the same time.

Kev

Sucker's Dozen

Feel like your ex-husband is trying to shake you down?
Cannot stand the thought of dogs trapped in homes of the poor?

You can stop dropping off drugs and groceries and checks.
You are correct as the Constitution: they suffer.

What if you were suddenly removed from your context.
You would lick the forearm of a vivisectionist?

See a world that's just a sham Welcome mat for the lost.
Imagine you're there with the emotions of a pup.

You find out that gravity is the only power.
But you can't cure brutality by being a whore.

Jan
"I'm bad!"

Come Down Mthyuh

I stay up in Pennis, near Ground Bay. There's some RV resorts and a gas station with a POD. They have a golf course and some cows grazing moss on the Dirtiest River in the World. Mondays Mike comes down Mthyuh for feed and takes the pups while I work cement and watch cable at Chank Suites, 60 hours a 4-day week. I drop about two-fifty on booze and groceries and lodge it against the back of the bed. Don't need much hay. Llamas ran off with a minstrel. This is just until he can get a second mortgage or some family help. Then we'll build a fence the girlz can't chew and still have gophers on their plates every day. We used to call it Death Farm 3000 for all the graves. But Mthyuh turns up her babes and they walk away. When the filter's up the sky is clear of pests.

Come down Mthyuh with your truck,
Come down the mountain
Where life isn't measured;
Bring your extended cab full of dogs.

Kev

milk stigmata

When I breach one of Hoolie's commandments it's because I'm teasing for fear he'll become stigmatatose. I, a picaro, have learned to test how far he's gone. Man of searching, hysteria, visions, your love erupts in giving. We must keep him laughing, his heart chakra massaging itself with rocking guffaws or irony gently squeezing. In melancholia, Mthyuh leaks proteins and bastes her adopted king in a yoke. Shivering, he may find some rags or plains mammals to coddle. Wandering, he intersects his bloodline on a spirograph of orbits. Whimpering, he can drag along a civilization like a bitch still with pups on her tits across the grass on her way to piss.

Peg

Shopping Bag Full of Dildos

You take decisions, you make purchases;
And then there is a shopping bag full of
dildos. It makes you think about death.
What if you died. And they have to do t
-hey thang and come all up in your hous
-e. They define you by your decisions, y
-our purchases. A procession of the livin
-g parade through dead-eying all the cra
-p. A dildo means you are either not a te
-am player or having way too much fun
with the one you are supposed to natur-
ally complement. That's no compliment.
A bag of dildos unpackaged means they'v
-e been in action. No one wants to touch
them. It would be like cleanup for a guns
-hot victim. There would be sawdust. Yo
-u might try explaining that latex natura
-lly sweats. That it explains a perceived s
-liminess. Your mother might go for that.
But you're dead.

Peg

Missionary Guilt

WAYNE:
the redness of your lips is extending its boundaries;
kissing a man with a goatee can really rip you up

JAN:
more than sucking my husband's mustache, only the smell of
his loins, close enough, represents the call of life for me

WAYNE:
gripping your upper arms, I can tell just how strong you are.
it gives me confidence to tangle with your weaknesses.

JAN:
why must I fear a sociopathy in my brothers
with you, an apologia for masculinity?

WAYNE:
my greatest crime but that which I am most prone to do
would be holding you dear enough to serve as an off'ring.

bent anachronism

I know I can't shake my head too hard. There's been no moon for a couple of nights. Getting used to the high beam flipper in the new hooptie. Waking up in a pool of lipstick tubes at the bottom of the boat told me I'd been in a real bumper. I scratch across the desert pavement on my knees. Jumping cactus smoldering and weeds. Foliage, then fire. A feathered witch pokes at the holey cholla bone with a stick. AAA on the way. Jan, wait for me.

"Wayne, my main enchufe at TRW, protege. You will learn the tricks of trade in charms and powders."

So you are the Chama. They said you were a topless Afro-American in her thirties.

"We will shapeshift and read coals together."

That one says you're hot. Boom! I like you.

"Father."

No...

Ashes and sand blew into ripples around the Chama and took her shadow in the ridges of its trunk. Crickets chattered. Wayne could see the spines. Then he could pull a rabbit out of a hat. Then he could manage his family. Then he could finish his work. Then he accepted two soft-centered suckers from the tow-truck driver. They drove over horned toads, out of the land painting, off MPS grounds. The road was not so black.

Mock Self Finger Feeding

It's not that we happen to be; we have to be.
If it happens to us, it'll happen to everybody
else. We're the great experiment, and we ar
-e still interesting. See all civilization's capita
-ls, writhing. I would encourage you to do w-
hatever rocks your float, and is also self-suc-
coring [mock self-finger feeding]. It can't hel
-p but help fill the moat what helps the good
tidings to overflow on all the old-folks homes.

Donna
"I typed it with my thumbs!"

Shiv Overdose

Family of Consumers

We live interdependently, buying style and smartly. Any moment of piggishness is copacetic in
the privacy of your home. We are a network of understanders, tapping heaven's color palette. If
you sign up for automatic transaction, you barely feel the entries and egress, and if you get the
rhythm, it starts to generate a flow, a chi-wave. You can look like the foto in the public oracle
dispenser if you stay up to date. We are all on the same page: a rubber slide that feels like
leather. It's a company with roots, entanglements, holes. We can produce chillun this way. We
can whistle them like smoke into another century, remembering. As we speak, my fingers are
writing checks. We know the weather in Orlando, Bensenville, Cliffe Suites. We can be there on
the morrow, while always in reach of the beam. A two-way street means we take our knocks in
the surf. The elite might be hypnotized by their space on the curve, no matter how far they've
turned. It's the bold hang from a big arm that will catapult our moon shots. It's the brave step we
don't take, for the wurl, which the generations wud want this way. Boys and their machinations
are under branding, butterflies, every gesture, expression, attempt: ours to claim. Every knee
jerk or shudder just creates more gism. We are a chain of strangers, enemies, happy to be sealed
from any one asshole's greed. Leadership means take our emotions and lay out the whole runway
so we can see our land. We will work for solids, make waste of air, enter a future every day. Our
aim is to clock in, collaborate, live, breed. Salt of the Sea and cream soda is the Mthyuh's fetish.

Donna
Sears Parking Lot

Salty

If I have cash and I'm willing to pay up now, would you let me offer them a bit less than your mass-mail quote..? No it was personalized, but by a computer printer, that's all. Say 18 percent of the new total including interest..? You could fax me the agreement, and if you'll accept a card tied to my bank account, we can settle this today. What is your percentage, sir..? Because you know if I claim 13, game's over for us both.

Donna leaned back against the tile kitchen counter top in her yellow gauze Charro pijama and farted. A salty peanut shell cracked between her teeth.

No, I'm not swimming in money that's exactly right. All I've got to eat is snack food. OK. Give me a minute to plug it in. I'm a doctor for chrisake. And dog food. Never thought it cost this much. I'm feeding you out of my bitches' mouths, mister.

Dr. Thong had been physician to super shiv-stars and wandering freaks. Now barely able to keep Juniper, La-La and M'Lady in kibble, she wondered if someone wouldn't once slip her a pro-bono, as she had done, on so, so many occasions. Was Kevin on some kind of Jesus trip? He had once, as a walk-in, asked her to put him down. Now he frequented a fiery healing pool.

O' Kev. You could touch my coin purse at least. We bonded on a pill-bottle bed, and that pumping beat. How could I know a lapse of shiv could trigger a random shiv test and set me up to lose my license all for a rotten night of hounding?

Idling Caprices

Now that the swimming pool had been drained for good, Mike took up with new ways and associates. One amante at the Preservation Society, another down at Shiv Council. A scientist, an accountant, a bum. Let bloom a goatee and a black, open-shirted look. Got into trouble with rents and men all the way to Cliffe Suites. Until he showed up here one morning.

"I'm looking for Julio."

"Do you mean Hoolie?"

"Told me he lived out back in the shed."

"We don't live here at all. We..."

"Julio." He was looking over my shoulder at I guessed Hoolie.

"Mike." Hoolie says behind me. I step out of the way and they say,

"Just because there's no water, don't mean you can't dive."

"We squirmed like eels in another atmosphere."

"Even while lawn salad bobbed on top."

"But now it's a neck breaker."

"NO. We've got lungs now. Ears."

"We've got the Filter down and K's rampaging."

"Yeah. I let 'em out. One of my pranks. Come dark-rule the chanks with me."

"NO. Come with us. We're deities."

"NO. My life is free."

"NO. You are a slave to shiv and idling caprices..."

As the sun set, the two worked out their issues. Silhouettes in pink on the listing log cabin porch. I, a woman, could not intervene. I wasn't even sure if Mike had the right guy. Hoolie isn't Mexican.

Chama-tilly

Dogreeve

Chemical Prayer

I can still think even though most of my muscles are under remote control. This reminds me of an office job I had while I could still cover my spines. Repetetive movement. I could staple six reports at a time. My finger muscles got strong playing canasta with Sylvia and Tom. If they could see me now. Soaring over a canyon. Bringing home lost ducks. Men. To my nest. To PharmSupply.

It started as an offering, because I believed in my culture's nirvanic system. Here, look what I've found. I am a cat with a bird, but no. A bird with a cat. Then the Mthyuh Preservation Society ruled to let the corporations infiltrate the Shiv, and then... It doesn't matter if you are a lesbian when... they are force working and resting you, cramping your style.

My African-American news anchor husband and mulatto kids: waiting in some hiya-percha. I am employed, enslaved, an appliance plugged in. Retrieving robot falcon. I try to be gentle, but they have fitted me with metal. Plucking an individual from a park or deserted place, there is almost no sound. One must clap one's beak around those who insist on retreating indoors.

All I want is to get my puppies to safety. You implanted your motivator chip right near that instinct. Sometimes they dangle from my toenails and mouth both as I sightsee my worn track. One day I'll find my kids and have an operation. I'll go back to them and explain how tied up I've been. You told me I could retire in a temple and invite all my friends.

Peg