[...] Once upon a time, there was a little princess who looked just like you. But she had a terrible hunger and begged to be allowed to eat the moon. First, the moon had to be captured. Then the moon had to be slaughtered. The little princess wanted to do all these things. She wanted to eat the light. She stole a knife from the kitchen, climbed into the sky, and put the knife to the moon. She slit holes in the stony surface. She broke through the flesh, caused the moon to bleed, and the little princess choked all the fluid down as it raced from the moon’s surface. Soon, the moon was nothing more than a stone. It hovered slightly above her, pale from all the exhausted pouring, and then, when the little princess opened her mouth as wide as it could go, the moon pitched forward and landed in her throat. [...]

(I finished the latest novel last night. Originally, I had about six or so more sections to complete but as the story went on, I couldn’t see the direction clearly. So it was time to give it an ending and then take some of the other parts I had considered and work them into a new book. I’m planning the new book today. I want something that is set more in a surrealist version of this world. The lsat novel, titled RR, was a little too surreal. I want something more Lynchian, something that is wildly creative but really has some meaning behind it. All I know about the new novel, titled BtU, is that it is going to have a lot of emphasis on things beneath things. By that, I mean, almost an underworld motif. A literal underworld, out of mythology, but one that is also slightly different. Not as many monsters and odd shapes running around but mundane objects that are used oddly. That’s the goal friends.)

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Here is a saint chanting his own name. I AM SAINT HOOD OF BUTTER. I AM SAINT WRENCH OF COWARDS. WHO CAN I WALL HOME NOW? Poor saint. The saint is confused. This is because the saint is underwater. This is because the saint thought he knew what to do with his brown mouth but then the lips puckered and everything went rushing in and flooding out. What is a saint to do when his mouth won’t plug up? Turn into rose petals. Make a disaster of every tiny vault. Or not. Conjoin the wrist bones and hope a single hand, double scoop wide, won’t make a mess of everything. Because here is a mess right now. And here is another mess and then here is a third mess. Here is a mess of a mess of a mess and when those messes reach into the depths of the mind and scoop the fly shit out, then another saint is born. I AM SAINT FLY OF ALL THE COMPOUND WINGS. Or is he? Where is the saint of brown water? Where is the saint of river pollution? Where is the saint of some red roads that were once mixed with yellow roads and only have a faint white stripe between? Where is the saint of that road? He does not exist. Possibly, he is dead.

[...] I find red mold growing on stones like faces. They are the same faces I remember from my claustrophobic childhood, when monk-like women snapped their spines into wings and jammed their pelvises into mayonnaise jars to study the adverse consequences to complete fat submersion. Then they made me eat the fat and I was sick for hundreds of days, which eventually translated into several years, and once those years passed, I considered taking a tongue to my knife and deciding which would thrash which. But stop thinking of the mayonnaise claustrophobia. Stop thinking of beaten eggs and the underlying egg shells, although the truth is, the best recipes involve some form of powdered shell. Why are the shells so good? It has something to do with the pelvis, although I can’t describe exactly what. Regardless. Here is a red tunnel. The red tunnel is tucked into my hands. The red tunnel passes from my nails to my wrists. I have a red tunnel I can eat up and then I have another red tunnel I can beat and then I have another red tunnel that demands to be obliterated with just the snap of my lids. Before the red tunnel, there was a blue lake that was more like a stream and everyone thought it was a lovely stream, all calm water, and perfect blue, but the truth is, bodies were submerged in the bottom, trapped by the mud, and so whoever went swimming in that stream went swimming with several thousand cadavers. [...]

Whatever the red room meant before, it will mean it again, and I will return to find all the wills lining the walls, and that will be perfectly beautiful. I will have a stomach lining that needs to be stretched over the head and conjoined with a light switch. But I don’t know what the wood room means. I saw a wood room and then that room burned down so that instead of a wood room, it was a cinder room and what does that mean? It means I should have thought things threw a little faster. It means I never had a chance to relax. It means I don’t know how many times I will be able to yank at my gut without vomiting. It means many things and each of those things is worse than the last and I am so tired. I want to fall asleep but there is a line in my arm that won’t move. There is a line stuffed into my veins and it follows tubes. There is a tube within a tube. There is a tube outside a tube. Both are pumping. Two tubes, pumping as fast as the liquid can flow, disobeying osmosis and gravity. What would you get if you combined the two? Osmovity? Gravosis? The process by which water moves with gravity. Or the process by which gravity forces its way into a cell membrane. Or a me membrane. Or a tired membrane. Or a broken membrane. Or a stolen membrane. Or a stony membrane. Or a bony membrane. We must submit to the gravitational osmosis before the liquid splashes our mouths. I watch the line in my arm. I watch the line move on and on and on.

(Now that I’m spending more time submitting shorter pieces, the age old question of “what the hell do I write” is faced. Because seriously, friends. What do I write? It’s not really fiction because you don’t see that much character development. And it isn’t necessarily poetry because there is some semblance of a story. So what is it? I don’t know. It’s a hybrid really, but most literary magazines just have poetry and fiction. And I’ve had several pieces published as poetry, when I intended them to be fiction. By default, I go with fiction. After all, that’s what my degree focused on. Fiction, fiction, and more fiction. The pieces are probably more like prose poems than anything else. Flashes. Several of my novels are a series of vignettes. At last tally, 15 of my novels can be considered fiction and the other 32 are definitely something else. Transgenre, cross-genre, hybrid, no one really knows what the name is. The lack of clarity makes the submission process a bit more of a guessing game but that’s fine. With the new novel, I originally wanted it to be more fiction but as the novel has progressed, I want it to fall into the “something else” category. I just finished the second section so the third will have a clearer divide between sections, with each one acting as an independent but related piece. A novel in related stories, if you will. And thus, that is where my head is at.)

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[...] The vines belonged to a great god with a large name and when that god went to sleep, his wife puked sugar over his genitals, then went to work stabbing him in circles across his bowels. She traced his intestinal tract with the knife. She dug the knife in far, then pulled the blade out, and bathed in the red fountain trapped in his musculature. I saw this. I gave her the knife and she gave me an ax. Then we chopped at one another for a few moments before turning around and walking away. That was how I got the mark on my face. She cut me once, then I kept chopping. And later, my hands were tired so I put the ax down and tried to fall asleep. She did the same thing. She slept beneath the god corpse. She pulled the cold god flesh over her and even though its body temperature dropped, she still felt warm because she was covered by flesh. She grinned the entire time she slept. I smiled when I walked into one living room and chopped everyone up, then walked into another room and carved everyone there, then turned around and sliced myself in half. I cut my face. I sliced everything and when I was done, I reclined on the floor in the red pool that would later dry into the red road, and I thought, I wish we had had mutton for dinner tonight. I wish we had had anything meaty at all. [...]

[...] One pill, two pill, three pill, hand. Hand upon hand. Hand into the stomach, where a hand was threatening to fall, and all the hand candles were depleted because a Hand of Glory does not have a long shelf life and so, with a blanket wrapped around my head, I took the pills and the hands drifted out of slits carved into my stomach. The hands wrenched open my eyes and drifted out, plucking at my lashes as they moved, and the hands were everywhere, even though they were made of ashes. One hand, two hand, three hand, pill. Pill in my gut. Blue pills, pink pills, white pills, red. Who made the red pills? Who thought the red pills were a good idea? Not me. Never me. I don’t trust pills I cannot swallow. I never trust pills that lodge in the back of my throat and require an extra swallowing. But I swallow the pill and my gut retracts, then reacts, and makes a big mess. I have a swallowing mass in my neck and I cannot pull the clot out and it might be haired or furred or made of threads. It might be a terribly dangerous conglomeration of hands and weren’t those hands created to be red? But my tongue is red. This pill is red. All those hands scattered around on the floor behind me are red. And there are red faces in front of me, even though the red really looks gray, but the red is there, and oh, that red keeps blinking like some kind of nebulous mouth, and if I get too close, it will suck my head inside, and there I will go, drifting and swirling around in the red, spiraling into the red bulk, waiting for the red to tear my eyes from my head, and we’ve all gone red! [...]

…..Before, we were gristle mounds, boned anomalies, maybe with forked tails, perhaps with fish faces. That ground, over there, on the other edge of the room, never sat neatly. Red, red, everywhere, and I kept sipping because I was too thirsty. Tomorrow, I will drink salt. Today, I will eat wood. I will open my mouth wide and allow matchstick men to settle down on my stomach. I will give them my ribs and livers. I have five livers instead of one. My body is in a permanent state of glory. Glory to my stomach. Glory in my hair. Glory tucked in my mouth. Glory over there. But then, look away from the red, because the worst glory is the one belonging to the scarlet wood. But think of salt. Think of salt all day, and then into the next day, and later, into the following day, and then keep whispering, SALT, SALT, SALT, SALT, SALT. SALT. Salt on the stairs and salt between the boards. But I have no salt to share. I do not keep the pieces of salt arranged in circles and I do not break the rock salt into granules with my teeth. I do not have wire jaws or metal clamps. I do not have the steel jugular. There is another bone we can replace with gold.

I’ve been very focused on submissions this month. Since May started, I’ve sent out nearly 30 submissions. Some are too independent presses for my novels and the rest are too literary magazines to see if I can get some short pieces published. I haven’t been this focused on submissions in years. Here’s a fun fact: when I’m about to submit something and I start worrying, I take a deep breath and click “submit.” Excuse the unintentional rhyme. But it’s true. My unspoken mantra is “breathe and just send it.” It’s kind of like taking medicine when you know it’s going to taste atrocious. You just breathe and go for it.

I also sent information about Hooks and Slaughterhouse to about a dozen independent bookstores around New Jersey and in New York City. I didn’t think about finding out about getting the novel in physical stores when the novel first came out in February. I’m not the best at marketing so with my little inner voice saying, “Capria, what do you have to lose,” I plowed forward and sent out those emails. Hopefully, at least one of the bookstores will be interested in carrying the novel on shelves. That would be so exciting. I got panicked at the thought of sending information about the novel out but then I thought, “Why am I so worried? Someone thought enough about the novel to publish it and I’m the author so why am I so shy?” I’ll let you all know about how that ends up going. Cross your fingers, friends.

Over 40 pages into my latest novel (single-spaced, standard 8.5″ x 11″ paper, Goudy Old Style or Garamond, size 12, 1″ margins all around, so you have an idea of how my pages look) and I decided it just wasn’t working. I had another manuscript I had pushed to the side and so I put the one completed story with the part of the novel that wasn’t working, added the untouched chapters to this novel’s untouched chapters, made a note that the completed parts weren’t usable, and suddenly, I have a whole new direction to go in. Suddenly, the novel has snapped into focus, which is always a nice thing to have happen. I didn’t want to get rid of the completed stories because they weren’t bad. They just had nothing to do with one another. So I separated them from the rest of the book with some carefully placed lines and moved on. I don’t like to leave files just hovering in computer space, unattached to anything. It feels mean.

You may ask, “Alana, how did you figure out what the novel was supposed to be about after so many sad attempts?” To which I say unto you, “I used a notebook.” A notebook? Yes, a notebook. A normal, college-ruled notebook. And I scribbled in that notebook and suddenly, as my pen glided across the page (or, more accurately, scratched along because my handwriting leaves so very much to be desired), the story was there! In glaring, beautiful color. It was lovely. It made sense. The closest I can describe it is that it’s somewhat like Hooks and Slaughterhouse, with a young woman who ends up traveling around this strange world and in each section, she has a different adventure. Obviously, there will be more to it but I’m okay with the brief description. It makes sense. I’m approximately 500 words in and I don’t hate it. Usually, the hatred sets in almost immediately, so I’d like to think this is a good sign. That or the book is on its way to sucking horribly and I’m too blind to see it. But I’m tough on myself so that’s doubtful.

Thus, friends, that’s where things are standing right now.

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…..I am in a red room. It is not always red, but when it is, I feel a deep cut covering half my face. I don’t remember the cut before. My life is as follows: I was born, I walked around, then I was in the red room with a cut spreading from my lips to my eyes. It is one continuous cut, without jagged flesh surrounding the lines. Where did it come from? It could have been a metal banana peel for all I know. But the cut is here. I touch it twice, dabbing the mark with my fingers, and twice, I push in too far, getting my fingertips in between the two meat slabs. My skin always hurts but I suck on a lemon square to make the puckering feel better. A little lemon can go a long way. Or, a little lemon can squirt out, burning an eye. I keep my eyes closed when squeezing and peeling lemons. The lemons are red. Red lemons in a red place, although the juice tastes the same. A woman with an ax introduced me to the lemons. When she said her name, it sounded like a snake hissing. She said, [Lisssssssssssssssssssssssseee.] Or, that was what I could understand.

(Things I’ve been contemplating: surreal versus real, submissions, writing style/goals, highways at night, and gorges.)

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DID YOU HEAR A MOSQUITO, the blue skeletons ask. DID YOU HEAR SOME SORT OF BUZZING? NO, NO. THERE CAN’T BE ANY BUZZING IN THERE. LET’S BURN SOME MATCHES. The blue skeletons reach down to touch the matches but the matches squirm away. The little men might not be able to shout but they can still move. They squeal and squirm. Matches roll up and down the floor, banging against walls, then fall down a flight of stairs to some inner basement chamber, and when they touch the floor, they shift beneath the boiler. Oh, boiler. God of the basement. Chancellor of the broken boards. Emperor of the snapped railings. You are a good man. Come take the little humanoid men out of their shells.

Abandoned fort passageway in Bermuda that I probably should not have entered but did anyway.

Matchstick men teethe on bones. They get the bones between the wood and chisel away at the calcium, making scowling faces. Their eyes flex and narrow. WE NEED A HIGHWAY, the matchstick men shout and stumble through a wall into a dark bush. They run fast, hopping up and down with their eyes focused on the floor, and whenever they hit the floor, their pupils bounce. THERE IS SOMETHING ON THE HIGHWAY! But is there? Is there anything on the highway, especially now, especially in the middle of the night, when the bones keep creeping and the eyes don’t work right? Matchstick men fall into puddles. They dissolve into the dirt. They bang against the curbs. They smack their heads against trees, then eat grass. Or, they smudge themselves against the grass as best they can, trying to absorb the verdant fluids through their wood, until the grains are stained bright green. They crunch their teeth together. They roll down hills, then struggle up hills, and creep back and forth while groaning. Stop groaning, matchstick men.

(The new novel is coming along. As it progresses, my usual long, block style is becoming shorter, which I actually kind of like. There’s nothing wrong with a little change, especially to get the creativity churning.)

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Matchstick men click when they move. They roll their charcoal eyes skyward and cough twice. Flint and ash fly from their mouths. There is too much darkness now. The charcoal men cannot see through their self-inflicted fog. You did this, matchstick men. You forced the night upon your heads. But they stare through and see something else. They bump their heads against the floors until the charcoal cracks in half. They are hungry for little pieces of stone clustered beneath their wooden box beds. One by one, the matchstick men pry their burned mouths open to take a piece of stone within. They chew with a loud crunch-crunch-crunch sound that splits windows and shatters glass but the matchstick men aren’t affected by flying shards and splintered roadways. Do they see beyond the black and orange? How can they? They don’t have working eyes. They have burned up embers. They have dark remains that aren’t anything. They are just bodies.

(I’m still alive, friends. No worries there. I finished my latest book and am now starting a new project but in between the books, I had/have submissions to take care of. Randomly, I’ve been slightly obsessed with watching true crime shows as of late, a direct consequence of watching the Investigation Discovery channel while on vacation. But don’t worry, there won’t be any true crime writing. I’m sticking with fiction. Or my version of fiction.)

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When she was a little girl, Charlotte Manson was nearly eaten by a pig. It wasn’t a real pig though. It was a man shaped like a pig. It was a man who thought he was a pig. He had a big nose that looked like a snout and when he sniffed, his lips turned upward, tucked inside, and exposed all those teeth lining his mouth. He stalked Charlotte Manson for days. Charlotte Manson couldn’t sleep and Charlotte Manson couldn’t get away. Poor Charlotte Manson was so afraid and the pig man stood at the front of her house, throwing rocks at her bedroom window, while screaming, [Let me in! Let me in, Charlotte Manson! Let me in. I will eat your toes if you don't let me in. I will bite your kneecaps. I will strip your shoulders. Let me in right now. If you don't let me in, I will eat every family member you've ever had and you'll have to sit around and scream while I vomit the meat up. I will force feed you all their skin, Charlotte Manson. Charlotte Manson, let me in!] But Charlotte Manson hid in the closet until the pig man went away. Really, the pig man never left. The pig man crawled through a window that led into the basement and he stayed curled around the boiler, not caring that the heated metal left burn marks all over his skin. Sometimes, the pig man was naked. Other times, the pig man was clothed.

(Darlings, NaPoWriMo is over. 30 poems in 30 days. Over. We have written and we have triumphed. And my latest novel is this close to being done. So, so close.)

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[...] PAPER CLIP: Do you remember when you used to bend me? You could straighten me out until you could use me as a key. Then you would lock me in your hair or practice breaking open bedroom doors with just a little bit of metal. It was just like your favorite girl detective used to do in all the books you kept stacked around your bed. She must have been a terrible teacher because no matter how much you wriggled me around in the lock, the bolts never popped enough for the knob to loosen. ME: I tried very hard. But there was a knack to it that I never acquired. I wasn’t meant to be a detective. PAPER CLIP: Or the precocious niece of your favorite cartoon inspector. No, you weren’t meant to live a life of mystery. It’s very sad. All you’ve ever wanted was a little mystery. ME: I do just fine without the mystery. PAPER CLIP: If you say so. But I keep thinking of other things, like the stomach cramps you suffer from every night. ME: I don’t suffer from them. I just hold them back. I let them come and then I suppress them. It feels horrible but I’m strong. I do what I can with all the skin I was given upon birth and eventual puberty. PAPER CLIP: Poor you. ME: Poor nothing. [...]

[...] The blue names are as follows: hemophilic blue, wave blue, mountain blue, purple-blue flower blue, hypothermia blue, blue-that-is-more-of-a-purple blue, ancient peoples blue, unseasonably hot blue, tight pants blue, cobalt, suffocating men blue, expensive gemstone blue, moderately expensive gemstone blue, inexpensive gemstone blue, shipwreck blue, Hispanic island blue, meandering blue, bird blue, tribal stone blue, paradise blue, favorite crayons in the box blue, obese sky blue, anemic sky blue, mentally self-assured blue, part-of-the-nation-about-the-fall-into-the-Pacific blue, uppity blue, duck blue, dark we’re-floating-above-nearly-15,000-feet-of-ocean-water blue, radioactive blue, this-ice-is-going-to-collapse-beneath-our-weight blue, thinking-about-ocean-predators blue, middle-of-Antarctica-with-the-penguins blue, mentally unbalanced little girl blue, gender insensitive blue, blue-that-should-really-be-green blue, blue-that-is-actually-green blue, blue-of-an-ice-cube blue, electrically charged blue, so-bright-it-hurts-my-eyes-when-I-stare-too-long blue, pretty expensive jewelry box blue, this-fruit-makes-a-mess-around-my-mouth blue. [...]

***

[...] Whose charcoal? My charcoal. Whose skeleton? Everyone else’s. All those skeletons, stacked high with pieces of invisible wire clinging to the bones, moving in and out of the marrow, threading into the calcium and helping the enamel move back and forth, slipping with a lack of osteoporosis. Who wants grizzled bones? Who wants acid reflux? Who wants the staph face? Who wants the bad breath monologue? No one wants to touch the poisoned briquet, although the story is, some stones can absorb poison and keep the stomach from giving into a digestive frenzy. Arsenic is preferential but sometimes, it’s nice to give another poison a try, just slip a cyanide capsule under the tongue and bite down hard, or mix a drink of half and half of the acid and wine variety. But the stomach ache! The endless stomach ache and all the pitched pink pieces no one would scrape clean from the sink. What about them? And what about the tragic faces? And what about the misaligned jaws? And what about the rusted valves? And what about those mattresses that keep biting the broken bones when the calcium is just beginning to set? What about that? And what about the joints that cluster in the side, then decay, and rot into fruit? [...]

This is about the walls settling in around our faces and the floorboards creaking suddenly and some ugly stench coming up from the garbage pipes and if we could come loose, then we might learn a new secret, which is this: YOU WHO ARE HOLLOW IN THE THROAT WILL BE DOOMED TO A LIFETIME OF LUNG TREMORS AND IF YOU CAN COME CLOSE TO THE MAGMA CENTER, THEN YOU WILL KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO RATTLE THE CAGE BARS UNTIL THE METAL DISINTEGRATES BUT NEVER PLACE YOUR HANDS ON THE SOLDER UNLESS YOU ARE DESPERATE FOR ELEMENTAL PERMANENCE AND THE STOMACH WILL ALWAYS BE YOUR GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT IN THIS WORLD AND THE WORLD BEYOND, AS LONG AS YOU ARE CENTERED IN THE PINK SPACE, AND DO NOT FEAR THE EYE TWITCH OF A BROWN-SULLIED GODDESS. Enough about that though. More about the stomach valves that pressured in a yarn piece and all the bits of stomach bloom.

There is a book called DEATH IN YELLOWSTONE and it is about all the special ways visitors to the park have died. They consist of the following: poisoning, lightning strike, hot spring boiling, and animal attack. Death by electrocution is always considered a freak accident. Death by poisoning is something reserved for those living on the park outskirts. Death by hot spring boiling is what happens when you leave the safety of the trail or follow your bounding dog to a mud pit and you both die in a terrible hot water accident that happens as fast as a tectonic shatter. That is the best part about the hot spring deaths. You are boiled alive in less than ten seconds, although they must be a long ten seconds if you count them out. Discount anything about the wild animal maulings because it is a park and you should always avoid the animals. Especially the buffalo. They like to stab when your back is turned. Horn against bone makes a nice crunching sound.

I still have Bermuda on the brain.

Back to the dark hallway. Back to the dark room. The first time I came into this room, I followed a narrow corridor that wrapped around at right angles until the final wall was reached. There was nothing after that. There were no doorways, no windows. There were small alcoves set into the walls and the spaces were so small, they only allowed a fist through. Candles burned in the spaces. Even if I tried climbing in, I would only succeed in burning myself. So I did what any other woman would do. I pressed against the wall and slid along the mold until I reached the entrance and then I slipped free. I don’t know what I would have done if someone else had been with me. I don’t know if I would have been able to get out if there had been a hoard of people pressing up against me, especially those with sharp teeth and a bloody hunger. I got out of there and promised I would never go back. Everything smelled like mold and mildew. It was a watery smell that stuck to my lungs and I kept coughing the spores out. Whenever I go into the hallway now, I think, [AMALGAMATION! ANAL RETENTION! SUFFERING PUSTULE OF THE MASS DISEASE! DIETARY PROPERTIES! VACUUM PLASTER! SUCTION BREASTS! HUNGRY, HUNGRY DUST CLOTS!]

(Readers, I’m well aware that I disappeared for a little while. I was on vacation, specifically a cruise to Bermuda. The NEO came along for the trip and thus, I wrote about 12,500 words. I also brought four books I had every intention of catching up on but then I just kept writing so there went that. So darlings, here’s over a week’s worth of writing done in the middle of the Atlantic. Also, some of the pieces are inspired by some poems written by Alan Ginsberg so yeah. And after the pieces, there are a few pictures from Bermuda.)

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Which asphalt beast of uterine deposits groveled in the gutters and begged for a missed period even amidst the dirt? Inanna! Loneliness! Manure! Hideousness! Urns and pickled skulls! Lovers shrieking in your vagina! Enemies crawling into your eyes! Elderly lungs shifting in the redness! Inanna! Inanna! Curse of Inanna! Inanna the hungry! Maniacal Inanna! Inanna always starving for the flesh! Inanna the bleeding bridgework! Inanna the arrow shifting cellblock or Judge of melancholy! Inanna with her mouthed breasts! Inanna the fierce boulder of annihilation! Inanna the canned fertility! Inanna whose brain cells are calculated menstruation! Inanna whose tubes flood with seething redness! Inanna with lungs that are birth control! Inanna whose head is the insanity cube! Inanna whose eye is the funeral parlor! Inanna whose tongue is the butcher’s block slab! Inanna whose uterus demands sacrifices like an ancient prophet of an unestablished religion!

***

Anne Sexton! I see you in New Jersey where you have the same name as my mother I see you in New Jersey where boys are born in cemeteries I see you in New Jersey where I can’t keep my hands straight I see yo in New Jersey where you keep slamming ovens I see you in New Jersey where you giggle into a helium tube I see you in New Jersey where we scrawl our souls in illegible lettering I see you in New Jersey where you creep back and forth in the crawlspaces I see you in New Jersey where one girl’s slipper is still one girl’s slipper I see you in New Jersey where you gargle sludge with your mouth half open I see you in New Jersey where you and I keep snipping our stomachs I see you in New Jersey where you bite canvas straps free from your thighs because you think they are rattlesnakes I see you in New Jersey where you insist the walls are growling religious incantations belonging to a faith you stabbed with a needle I see you in New Jersey where someone’s mouth should never be mistaken for someone’s vulva

***

Virginia, you’ve been hoarding the rocks for too long. You keep them in your pockets but that’s not where rocks are supposed to be. Instead, throw those rocks away. Instead, bury those rocks in your suspected grave. You don’t need rocks anymore, especially not with the quarries growing in your eyes. A long time ago, there was something fatty growing in your eyes. But that skin went away. You can’t trace it or lose it or miss it. You can stab it though. You can make it shudder. You can open your mouth and swallow an ocean, complete with all the dark and blue shapes rushing along beneath the surface. Or are they escaping? Are they begging to escape? Are they hoping to linger? The other day, I considered leaping into space. I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to bob for a little while, to think about what would change. I didn’t jump, because I have always been afraid of leaping into water, and there are octopussies with big mouths down there as well as bleeding bags of FEMININE PRODUCTS DISPOSAL, whatever that means.

***

I am in someone else’s horizon. The Dread Pirate Bone comes out of the sun to eat us up. He has a silver knife and nowhere to store it. Or, he has a bone to pick. A Bone with a bone. Or a bone with a dick. Enough about him. We fidget when the ocean splashes sun on our feet. Granted, I’ve been needing a little sun. I keep getting sick but that’s just because I’m stabbed by moonlight. The milk rot keeps me awake. The lactose sphere needs something to eat but aren’t all our stomachs greedy? Unless you’re a penguin or some other bird. Then you eat things up and let them out. Then you trap some digested fluid and release. Bulimics are also generous, although they give up what they chewed and so their mouths aren’t always clean, which is something you should be weary of. And if your bone is picked until the white comes out, then you should be somewhere else, silent and meditating over the illegible sphere of the ocean.

***

I have seen the sea trumpets. I have seen the resin bulks. I have seen black marbles. I have seen green sunrises. I have seen swollen spleens. I have seen conquered clowns. I have seen a man with his shirt praising heaven and his toes dedicated to hell. I have seen cardiac chests. I have seen foam of a mermaid’s hand. I have seen her stomach crests. I have seen her bloated waves. I have seen the knife in the pit of her flesh, like an apricot seed waiting to lurch free. I have seen one, two, three heads stuffed into an ignited oven. I have seen pressured ribs. I have seen the triple sun and the quadruple moonlight. I have seen something glassy in that water, something like a mirror, but something less than a mirror, and if I had seen myself, it would have been a cause for suicide. I have seen the salted glands. I have seen the chlorinated milk points. I have seen the acupuncture beasts. I have seen the sweetened steak rinds. I have seen the many causes for menstrual concern. I have seen Sylvia, Virginia, and Anne. I have seen three women with pilgrim’s hats come marching up the valley way, then slither into the tarred ocean

***

I sit in a box and whisper, [Have you seen the land whales?] What whales? The land whales. The whales of the land. You’ve heard of fat of the land. These are the whales of the land and they have heads that range from deep indigo to cerulean to sea foam green. They are the most tropical of whales, even though they have stone mothers and fathers. They have stones of every proportion. They have stones that are hideous in nature, then are broken into joints, wedged into nodes, and flipped into notches. I rock back and forth in the box. I turn from side to side, flipping my ribs, hitting the box back, and much later, beating the box front. The box is over there. The box is in the corner. The box is outside the light. The box will never come close again. But without the box, we have nothing. And with the box, we still have nothing. Forget about the box. Ignore the box. Pretend the box never existed or, if you prefer, pretend the box died and now you’ll never be able to touch the box again.

***

Meat steals the vitamins from me. Meat takes the vitamins, throws them out the window, and runs around screaming. Its tongue drops out of its mouth and wags violently. Oh, that meat. That meat is the worst meat in the world. It loves making a mess. It sits on the floor and salivates. It leaves red marks everywhere. Some of the marks resemble halos. The other marks are less halos and more monster faces. And all those meat stains lean towards me, then back away, while the closet door flops and hardens like a piece of meat. Everything is meat nowadays. But some of the meat is tired and the rest of the meat rests on the floor, waiting for the juice to redistribute or evaporate. Some of the meat thinks in terms of red and blood and sinew and the rest of the meat thinks about yellow fat. All that meat and all that fat. All that meat. All those terrible things that shouldn’t be allowed but are still sitting there, thrusted into the basement, sighing with the trembling sounds, wondering why the meat was recreated. And it was recreated. It was recreated suddenly and then it was recreated again and this process was called REJUVENATION.

***

The meat! The meat! The unparalleled meat! The meat with all its furious glory! The men who come upon the meat! The men who swear they learn the meat! Or not! That meat! His meat! Her meat! My meat! Our meat! Your meat! The meat we surround our parts in! The meat we make our beds in! The meat we hold tightly! The meat that lifts off the moon face to swaddle our empty fingers! The meat that does not want to be meat! The meat that will always be meat! The meat that was meat before, will be meat after, and is presently meat! The meat that is all meat! The meat that is the meat within the meat! The meat that is outside the meat! The meat that will hold the meat! The meat that will change the meat! The meat that will alarm the meat! The meat that will abide by meat! The meat in that corner! The meat within that wall! The meat around that doorway! The meat lodged in that corridor!

***

MEAT: I heal immediately. ME: No, you don’t. You don’t know how to heal. You’re a meat slab. You know how to sit on the floor and melt. You bleed spontaneously. You sit in a puddle of all your fluids. MEAT: I hate the fluids. They’re discolored. Each one is an odd brown. Do you find that brown in nature? ME: It’s dirt. MEAT: The brown? ME: The fluid. MEAT: My fluid? ME: The brown fluid. MEAT: But what am I supposed to do with the fluid? ME: Bathe in it. MEAT: Bathe or marinate? ME: I guess marinate would be more accurate. MEAT: But if I’m giving off fluid, aren’t I juicy enough? ME: You can always have more moisture. MEAT: But what if I become fluid? ME: That could happen. Add some pineapple juice to your bath and soak for a few hours. MEAT: What will happen then? ME: You’ll fade away, just drift into the fluid and be gone. Maybe you’ll leave a red trail behind. Or some brown. Either one will be fine.

Neo in the middle of the Atlantic.

This little writer found a library of rare Bermuda books.

Crystal cave in Bermuda.

Water surrounding Bermuda that inspired several pieces.

[...] There are nails there. There are nails gone away. There are nails ruined and condemned. There are nails split down the center. But everything is green. There is green here. There is green in the sky, green on a shirt, green on a wall. So much green. Green and stones. Green and cliffs. Green and graves. Green on everyone’s faces. There is green over there. There is green pushed into fists. My sister plays with the green. She stirs it around, moves it in swirling circles until she makes a puddle of green mud. There is so much mud, she falls into the mud. She moves around the mud and sloshes back and forth, touching the foggy banks, thick with sludge. She claws at the mud. [There are secrets here,] she whispers. [There are secrets everywhere.] She sees the secrets in the tree. She scratches the holes open and fits more secrets into the trees. They are cyst trees. They are ruptured trees. They are rotten and sparked and spiked and thrusted. They are those trees. They are the worst trees. They are always terrible trees. They are trees when they should be cysts. [...]

***

[...] And what about the marshmallow mouth, that worm annihilating woman in the lever of the lunar sky, where the curtains draped over her stomach muscles and the holy vulva stretched into the broken glass pits? Where did she come from? How did she move her heels over the ground so harshly, with the tip-tapping rhythm of a hungry woman with too much in her mouth, while her knees locked together and the toes moved independently, screaming out, [WE MUST EAT THE WORMS!] And so the worms were destroyed instead of eaten, because some worms are better smeared on the ground then churned in the stomach, and the worm mother is not a real mother and how did that woman push the child out of her open pelvis? Was it with a thrust? A grimace? Was it with the oven timer, with the bleeding chicken, with that turkey limb coming out of the dresser? Was it with that wall in the corner, the one overgrown with gray straw and moon patches? The child sat motionless on the dresser, its half-formed head dropped back to stretch its neck out, and when it rose in the air, its lips smacked and pustules grew, and when its stomach fell, its body sagged and then its cotton ball grew. That creature grew and grew and grew until it was gone. Then that creature screamed and salivated over everything. That creature was lost in the night parts and then vomited onto the sour curbs where the trains came in and out of the living room. But how was it made? What part of the sperm broke off before finding the egg? What egg was half-shattered upon reaching the uterus? [...]

***

[...] where someone put steroids into morning coffee, then slipped knives over the school bus tires, thinking, TIRED TIRED TIRED ad infinitum, ad nausea, with the root vegetables and the roof blocks, with the plucked violin strings, and the faces composed of cardboard, where the dark keeps giving up pig growls dedicated to those hanging from wires, and every musical instrument is really a tetanus tool, where some body parts sat slathered in manmade butter, and even more fat clots created the pneumonia outbreak of the sanatorium sky dense with the inconsequential thighs of some bad meat and much more, crossing and igniting the nocturnal itching, where every hand curved into itself and every fingernail sliced a wrist, and the nighttime news was heavy with spells colored brilliant yellow, even though the sun color made everyone uneasy, but then there was also the slaughterhouse where the throats caught the hooks and the dough rounds fried until hard, and someone glanced beneath a tire and laid an egg over easy [...]

***

[...] churning in the hot and cold water, all cluttered in the intestinal region, then moving back into those drunken stretches of perverse love-making in someone’s soaked backyard where condoms grew into latex roses and every stretch of the arm was another thorn impalement, where some men were asked to put something on and laughed and poked needles into each balloon, and other men came with weapons weaving and piercing to lose their stomach matter in that great sky hollow where, in the thrice-fold of sunlight, a grotesque dawn stretched from that wrinkled forehead, and another sunset dipped into the uterine vomit, and even more worms slithered in, then bit soft skin, and came upon the glowing sun with all its mythological properties, pulled together by string, surrounded by that genitally enhanced fold stuffed into a wine bottle, then made into a noose, and later, punctured high with cocaine residue pulled free of the gutter, where that body, usually mine, was opened up to reveal the vagina and then that cervical mouth, the mouth within a mouth, the sudden burst of mental vocalization and the glistening everything of all those crunching thighs and the hollowed vulvas, as if the flesh could have become male shortly after the transferring redness and the sudden purple bulge in that western corner of the sky which resembled naked flesh beneath that disgraced body part and the carved softness of tiny spinal pockets where those granulated braincells kept lingering in mountain ranges, begging for some atrocious sin to be committed in the wood houses and lake abdomens [...]

[...] Inside this tower, where some men witness shipwrecks and other men light their little lanterns, and even more men struggle to reflect light with a glass mirror, I watch the ghosts flicker in the dark, their phantasmal limbs stretching out of the walls and combining with glass shards on the carpeting. Once, I knew a girl who wanted to find out a watery secret and so she climbed into a lighthouse and hid in the light and murders crept past her, not knowing she was the only fogging the lens with her breath. She breathed for hours in that glass and finally, they went to sleep and she crawled out, only to find herself surrounded by broken floors. And so she had to jump, which she hadn’t been expecting, and she threw herself over the railing and fell nearly two hundred feet into the surging water, narrowly missing several large rocks, and she floated on her back in the water, assuming a dead woman’s position until the murders fished her out of the water and left her without even attempting mouth to mouth resuscitation. They didn’t care if she was dead but she had a piece of mysterious glass in her hands and it was the kind of glass that can solve unknown murders. She fixed everything, just by hiding in a magnifying glass for a little too long and after that, she was overly proud and kept searching for skeleton keys and shattered doorknobs, as if there was another mystery she had to stumble upon, but there was nothing, and eventually, a tide filled a small oceanic cave, drowning her. Her body was left crashing against the rocks for days until finally, a blood trail leading out of the cave assisted several people in her corpse recovery. [...]

[...] She had yellow vertebrae incapable of keeping her body in check. Her head rose up, then dropped down, and it was very sad. She was always too sick for anyone to handle. She was eaten up. She was swallowed by the yellow. All that yellow was there. The yellow came and went. The yellow rolled back and forth. Yellow in the back. Yellow in the front. Yellow to the sides. The yellow went into a pot and boiled. The yellow rotted until the yellow was gone. Goodbye, yellow. Sayonara, yellow. No one wanted yellow to come too close. The yellow was there, then the yellow was not. The woman became crazed by the yellow. The woman vomited yellow. She held the yellow to her face and she poked at small yellow clots that formed over her stomach planks. So her yellow abdomens were completely compacted into a small yellow shell. She ate the yellow. She threw the yellow up. She tossed the yellow out. [Where did this yellow come from,] she asked. Beneath her mattress, she found a single yellow fork. It was not the kind of yellow fork she ever wanted to eat from. But she ate the yellow. She swallowed the yellow up and then scratched the yellow away. The yellow was in her cheeks, giving her a jaundiced glow. In the distance, a yellow baby shrieked, and the yellow baby refused to stop screaming until she dripped yellow fluid over its face. It swallowed the yellow, turned its head, and disappeared into a yellow piece of paper. Where did that paper come from? She didn’t know. She played with the paper, turned it around in her hands, then tore the paper into shreds. It was still yellow. No matter what, it was yellow. [...]

…[...] The men linger near the window, inhaling and exhaling, getting sand and other stone grit into their lungs. When they exhale, the stone expels outward, hitting the ground and ricocheting around, and I am happy to see where the stones settle beneath the staircases, hidden in the dust like a mollusk jewel. I know mollusk jewels well. I like to see them stab a pair of hands. I want to watch them eat up a piece of steak. But can they eat a piece of steak? I know thousands of things that can eat a piece of steak and all of them are tired and the rest of them are glowing with a disguised pigmentation that makes them look more green than meat. But this has to pull the yellow to the surface. I see the yellow and the yellow sees me. I know the yellow and the yellow cannot be me. The yellow lingers near my stomach cramp, lurching and dropping silently, while I imagine a different place where the yellow lines all the streets and every stomach is mine to play with. I have a lovely stomach that I keep in a velvet box. I hold that box in my hands. I make that box snap at the hinges. I tell that box to come close to me. I make that box vomit urine over the sea. But it is a yellow sea and so no animals are hurt in the process. [...]