Palm Tree / Dandelion

The ones bleed with the wind; the
others keep their trajectories
attached. In a full moon,
you have to look down the hill
to see that silhouettes of palm heads
are live and shaking, spotlit
as if caught rioting. A week-long
sound of rushing rapids,
nothing flies away anymore
but the spew of taco manufacturing
and the dust cast off of the rocks'
rolling, shriveling cactus, vegetable
and now mineral dust.
But the little bitch walks right up
and tells you she knows her name.
And you remember the moment you
fell in love, when you are clearly mine.


Donna
"For LaLa"

mod freak to freaky mod

I am sure that this potato would have been quite perfectly fit for a pig.
Oh no, it was a beauty, really, with only the one spot, so I took it out.
In a future, please to make sure the spot out of which you take the spot is also taken out.

similar status to a conquered people's

The neighbor's garage was burning down
and it sent up a fat smoke ring. When I
looked up above me, the center was the
sun. The smoke eye would follow me
throughout the county, across the southern
border, edges of the dunes and Chocolate
Mountains; the hazing red would cause me
acne, crack and decay close relationships,
beaches turned to black sludge, and the
footprints led everywhere you could go
there in the bowl and back again and again.


Illyn

Iridescent bird strains not to lose ground

went out to brush the dog,
decided to let his hair fly
unto a neighbor's downwind
yard. But a tornado formed
which pasted it on me as if
I'd been tarred. Then I saw a
bird flying in place at first but
when it darted, it directed
my stare into the thirsty sun.


Donna
"On Retreat"

You Can Lick My Apron

Illyn had ptsd so bad that his ptsd gave ptsd to his dogs. Then they started, and he started after them, to do a hurt walk. A hurt walk is when you are hurt but you are trying to walk normally, like right after you've tripped on a crack or walked into a pole trying to read a number on the other side of the street.

Except that LaLa and M'Lady weren't physically hurt, just scared of yelling and relative mayhem. He in turn stepped painfully barefoot through the debris field he left when he'd set off the sustained disassemblage of the past forever. The three looked out on each morning now as thorn-footed refugees.

Who was it resolved the conundrum of personal responsibility vs. divine plan or choice v. fate, Flying Nun? Answer is no one. You soar because you're on television, and vice versa. Doesn't mean yr invisible to the critical eye, even if it hasn't the capacity to translate its conclusion into a comprehensible howl.


by Phyllis

Anxious + Strong

We were wondering about the inspiration of some of the artists and also the effect that doing art all the time can have on the consciousness, and we thought about an artist for whom colors jump out, call out like little whores to him: this is who i am! can't you represent me. And then in a future time that's litterly slick, surfaces have become so shiny, either absorbent or refracting fluorescence, and they've become so good at hiding the machinery of the system, the technological infrastructure, that you only see what there is to see on a screen; it's not the actual colors of things in their immediate light spread eagle on a time tray as we now have. In that harsh and alternately shadowy futuristic ambient with human forms in minimalistic linear clothing such as Bill Blass or Donna Karan, the creator realizes that he must treasure all the bad paintings that survive from the past.

He's tough from advancements in understanding of the tissues, yet nervous existentially, and even more so now that the concept of time had been abandoned. His trial-period partner asks him, "How many steps toward death are we having been taking while we try and figure out if we know one another the way we believe we might should want to?" Following, she states, "Anxious + strong is a sexy but dangerous situation. You could stand up too fast and bump yr head and father any number of children all in the same motion just because you think somebody touched yr balls from behind."


Phyllis (embedded)

Flames of Soil

Am I pagan? Because I walk under bells I've hung around the house just at the right level so my hairdo brushes their clappers and makes them tinkle?

Is it prayer when I do nothing to avoid an action that will set off a sound that reminds me about praying? Why not, if the words would always be the same?

Is it civilized, unhealthy in some way to pay tribute to a number of deities? And what if not knowing their names has the effect of clearing out a space?

What if every surface were a safety suction cup where the four-limbed would always have a four-point hold? Every molecule of oxygen an air bag?

Can flames of soil reach out to draw in all bad and selfishly settle back to enjoy monstrous containment? Is the world, cold suspended, bled of its evils?


By Donna

Strangeness of the Future

In tonight's episode, Donna and Reptily occupy adjoining cells at the Preservation Society HQ in Dubbabhera. They whisper at an ancient glory hole through the decomposing granite.

DONNA: "A moment ago I thought I heard an owl shriek in the airspace between the Twin Chanks but it was the echo of my own gut whistle-farting, internally."
REPTILY: "If you can throw your voice that far maybe you can get us the F outta here that far."
DONNA: "You the one knows howda fly."
REPTILY: "It's not an item you know, it's a function you do."
DONNA: "Do your wings of light feel more like extra arms or an active back pack?"
REPTILY: "I am a jellyfish or spanish-shawl nudibranch who moves along only as a secondary result of breathing in and out, at one with the proverbial seawater."
DONNA: "And you're a salty bitch."
REPTILY: "You need to stop coming on to me just to pique my bristles; if I try to tear down this wall, I'll only skin my Epicel, and that makes less with which to fondle you."
DONNA: "Sea Bitch, does it ever seem that you're walking in a future that for you it's not meant? Where everything's a skosh off?"
REPTILY: "Like the light now, anemic egg yolk, music that impersonates a past, and the shriveled clueless recent gawking generation?"
DONNA: "Thasright, darling."
REPTILY: "All the time. And that's what I live for. Because I'm changing too."
DONNA: "Changing or disappearing. I mean it could be either. I donno, sometimes I... Tilly?"

Sausage on Salmon

Ayre Fromme Diaz

White Farty Weekend

need not wonder now
tears driven into snow
who what was to blame
it's all the same today
tonight we fitful sleep
cradled chaste in sheets
unstained of false light


by Mike

The Wurl Made Me Creepy

Real People Playing Themselves in a Copy of Their World on a Movie Reel

Big people help little people get up and take their places
By pretending to be themselves instead of famous faces
A prison drama played out on a stage at a prison
Is realistic in every way but the lack of strong acting skills.

These are speeches that wdv normally been hushed or whined
in a way that's far more unattractive than a hero giving a line.
The homegrowns radiate from the sole professional actor;
It's his best hour and their forgiveness from society or reward.

It makes you wonder if yr playing yr own character all wrong.
Maybe finding out that in yor case bad acting is worse than lying.
Thought i was et cetera so real, simultaneously suspecting all along
that i am confirmably bad while redeemable in retrospect portraying.


by Mike

the Crack

grrl this feels like the crack in a damn samwich
where both of us wanna be the lower companion
you be damn, die be damn, dwurl doesn't care
between now and the years we grew up in
when we were young we were special and new
which only happen then
but our future's extraordinary rendition
are not being played out by actors in other bodies
what does it mean to live here among the rotting
in some ways the teens on the avenues
in some ways the teens on the avenues
are running the same set of vitals in an anachronistic bag
are getting a subjective other story
share with gone survivors conquests, foils and rivals
what they hope for is when we'll be disambulatory
but the creature inside the thing is relative only
of the species and scraps of language n' reliquary
experiencing the seasons critically, seen from above,
no matter the originality, is hairy-top heads roving.

Next generation

all the men i've destroyed
are ghosts now except alive--
they could come back at any time.

i may feel cobwebs at my heels
watch out who's in eyeline
start at the slightest thrill.

but most of all im free to
draw outlines around my heritage
move to the next generation.

Reptily

Destructress

I put my hand on the white bitch's head and brushed her hair back with a meaningful near-teary smile. She looked startled and then resentful like, "You can't help me. So keep your pity as well."

Have I destroyed another life? Indirectly, by divorcing its deadbeat dad?

Where is the safety net for non-traditional families? Society asks, gives nothing.

And then my pelvis fell asleep.


Mkidza Mlafv

White Smoke

I unnerstan you have a prolm with the hate on my face. But maybe it's a reflective moon of the huge sun of radiant hate I get every day in this place. That's right-- not radiant heat, but radiant hate. So if I'm hating a cat, it's just me hating whatever grocer butcher father accountint. 10 haters on one is much diffrint. It can burn fer years an pass along the generations. N that's why I'm in jail. Because one cell is cheaper than 10 to the state. Otherwise, it'll be all you morfurs of the innerneh. In this way, I'm a saint.

Reptily

Broken and Lame

There was a very small, cave-like discotheque in the basement of some chic shops down on Oak. Ducking from the coat check through a tunnel to the dance floor was the main salient feature of an evening alone there, apart from whomever might tend to reappear by coincidental rendezvous at the door to the men's or cigarette machine. A guy named Chuck once sat at the back bar for hours smoking and drinking Kirs before I sat across from him another hour staring as he smoked and drank. Finally, as closing drew near, I moved over and took the next vinyl cushion. I suggested we choose an additional wallflower and head back to Chuck's swingin' pad. We cabbed the three of us uptown a ways to a tax office with boudoirs and took the vacant one. Chuck's accountant flatmate spent all non-working hours in her "womb room" socked out on Darvocets or Tylenol 4's. The other guy felt excluded as he had predicted he would and left early on. At one point I inserted several ice cubes into Chuck's anus and gave them time to melt before going home.

He had me back for Chicken Andaluz which we forevermore joked was "On the Loose." He had been a man long enough to accumulate vases and dust on books. I would meet him at his job in a massive, stony district near the stockyards where he stood aproned and stirred sauces in a precious, signless late-dinner spot and smoked and sipped Kirs in the alley with the bleachy steam from the washing up dumped over cold, rotten grease on asphalt rising all around him. There were places to hang out for hours when he got off work where the level of debauchery seemed so deep as to be safely out of reach for hitting bottom. We could stand there smoking and drinking Kir and just be part of the painting until it was too exhausting and go back to the tax office and spend the rest of the night fucking in sometimes acrobatic positions where ears might be in a vice of two stockinged feet or the pelvis rolled like a fish in the gullet of a snake by my herculean thighs.

Then he moved to his last place, where every surface was covered with newspapers from 1978 for 10 years. For relief on the rent he'd promised to strip every turn-of-the-century wooden rail, board, knob, sill and restore it to a pristine state. It was a decade of heat guns and chemical glop and flecks and twist-rolled peels on floors but only one door and its frame got done. Chuck had progressed to an industrial kitchen at the employee lunchroom of a major downtown bank but had to stay in the park reading and smoking during warmer days or the tearooms at Ward's in the winter due to complaints he might "taint the food" from his famous carousing, and the union helped him stay on the payroll 13 months out of sight that way. I often wondered if I was to blame for leading him on and disappearing and reappearing and leading him further to the point he splintered apart, until he was broken down and lame.

Reptily

Rappolt-Kapeluck

Lockdown

We had a fight where I distinctly heard myself shouting why don't you get a goddamn job.
I listened to him zip a bag and slip out through the sliding glass door to the pool gate.
Then he stomped into the desert in the middle of the night and didn't return.
I thought I saw him on the shoulder of the highway out to the train station by the windmills.
Whoever it was nearly got us killed as I drove south and north people honking, didn't even
turn his head. But lately deep in the evenings I've been wondering maybe he never left at all.


Donna
"I miss you Mike"

Baked pasta

pj