Poetry & Fiction

Without Love

by

(a short excerpt from something very long)

..Without love (the mirror of love), I feel that I’m already dead, already extinct. I am part of the geological layer of plastic microparticles that will be the only evidence our species ever existed, if complex life were to evolve again from the bacteria that remain a thousand years from now. I am part of no story (biotic or abiotic). I cannot shake the counterfactual despair, the flailing wish that I had transitioned, had written these books, five years earlier, when the world could have received me, received my art. But no, this woman, this writing, could only have emerged right now, at this specific point in history, or where history cracks up, smashes against its bio-spiritual limit.

Read more

The Student

by

At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, kept walking on the path by the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression — all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.

Read more

You Made Beauty a Monster to Me

by

..I took the train to Sacramento. I thought about killers and about their victims, too. I thought about how I must be the only whore and the only romantic (which is to say, the only detective) on the entire train, or at least in my compartment. Did that mean the rest of the train was full of killers, or, at least, of accomplices? I was on my way to spend the weekend with Harvey. We had a small fight before I left, because my top surgery was coming up, and I said that if I couldn’t get the surgery I’d probably kill myself, and they said that was obsessive, they were worried about me, and I said but that’s why I’m getting the surgery, so I don’t have to kill myself, so I can be happy. It took me a long time to realize that I live, more than most people, entirely by instinct, in the murky sea of my instincts (my oceanic body), and that I never weigh the pros and cons of my actions, never think deductively, never imagine the forking paths my life could take, though in retrospect those paths, those labyrinths, become objects of dread and fascination (or is it that, instead of paths, life-in-retrospect becomes nothing but a series of crumbling, hallucinatory towers, a drowned dream, a womb that’s also a grave?) My reality is my body, and the other way around. When I was younger, I thought this meant I didn’t have dreams, since I didn’t have plans, bourgeois plans, but in fact it meant I was a consummate dreamer, that I dreamt with my eyes open. I became an alcoholic for twenty years entirely in an instant, without premeditation, just like I moved to South America for no real reason, or for entirely romantic reasons, just like I let Rebecca move in with me after our first date, just like one day I started taking hormones without thinking about it. I feel bad for people who aren’t like this, like me. I feel closer to a flower, a supernova, a subway schizophrenic, than to a res cogitans, a thinking thing. On the train, I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and watched the sunset.

Read more

Apocalypse

by

..I went to a friend’s Eid party and left within five minutes, because the moment I got there I knew I was in no state to be there, to be around people, the truth is I’d been spiraling out for at least a week, one night I relapsed, went out drinking with Christian and tried to buy coke at three in the morning and asked him if he would ever fuck a trans woman, to which he said no, but Harvey told me that was a lie, or wasn’t true (something that’s not true and a lie are two different things), and the next day Xylea came over to take care of me, she brought over cute little Daiso items and a cactus and held me in my bed and told me I was a beautiful person, and I told her I was in love with her, to which she said nothing, or almost nothing, and then the next day, or the day after that, I burned our friendship to the ground,

Read more

How to Cope

by

Stare at flowers.
Not the snap-necked daffodils or the hyacinth your husband flattened with the car.
Take in the unblemished blossoms left.
Remind yourself that future thoughts
and prayers probably won’t be for your town
and if your town, not your kid’s school.
And if they are, statistically your child
would be scared but safe, hiding in a closet
under mops or climbing from a window, running
dazed toward the expressway to flag help.

Read more

Nobody Knows His Name: A Note on Adam Scheffler’s “Heartworm” (& “Googling Myself”)

by

“Piss expressively.”

The onomatopoeic first line of Adam Scheffler’s poem, “Advice From a Dog,” hints at his virtuosity and his modesty. This guy ain’t too proud to pet and be petted. Another one of his openers make you wonder if he’s about to give himself too much credit: “She said my butt was a piece of art…” Not to worry:

…my greatest asset, if
you will, although come to think of
it she didn’t say it was good art
only a “piece” of it, as if it’s
not complete without her hands
on it…

Scheffler is careful about intimacies. I doubt he’ll ever go Lowell. There won’t be lines from a begging (or pegging) partner’s correspondence in his poems. Nor does this nice Jewish boy suffer from Maileria. He’s no wannabe macho.

Read more

Men and Women

by
“Men and women are Images, hanging ghosts in the air, faces painted on the wall, masks no face can enter, the rules of a game getting explained over and over again to everyone and getting explained by getting played. They are images, but they are not immaterial (nothing is immaterial): they determine who produces what, who lives what life, who is punished for breaking what rules, who can be raped with impunity, who can be beaten with impunity, who can be killed with impunity.”

..One time, Xylea said, a client was supposed to go down on me and cum on my feet, but he kept trying to fuck me, and so I started going on a long rant about Aileen Wuornos (the lore of Aileen Wuornos, the litany of her crimes, crimes like a Dadaist poem, a poem written in the flesh about the goddess Medusa and about men and about the abyss) and then when he tried to stick his dick in me I stabbed him, and he looked up at me like what the fuck, and I was like why do you think I was telling you about Aileen fucking Wuornos, retard?

Read more

Leave Me Alone

by

Pictures

..A series of drawings in a sketchbook. In the various pictures, Leila is drawn in blues and purples, while the girl she loves is drawn, usually, but not always, in reds and pinks. Sometimes the girl she loves looks a lot like Leila, but her (Leila’s) face is more angular, she’s a little taller, she’s got a femme fatale look to her while the girl she loves is more conventionally pretty, Leila has a heart tattoo on her right thigh while the girl she loves has a butterfly tattoo in the same place, Leila has big tits and the girl she loves has small tits, or medium-sized tits, usually they are both wearing a slutty little dress, both girls are haunted but Leila is undeniably more so. In the first few pictures, Leila is walking alone on the beach, smoking. In both pictures she’s smoking, actually, and in one she also holds a gun. Like some kind of femme Mersault, a thotty existentialist. She stares out at the horizon, and yet her gaze is rapt, as if she’s staring at nothing, or into the abyss. In these pictures, she is heartbreakingly alone, as if she’s arrived at the end of the world, like the girl in La Jetée.

Read more

Union

by

They’ll fire us after we’ve been
at the company a certain amount of time,
to bring in fresh employees who haven’t been
ground up yet, who haven’t been sliced up
and turned into meat with plastic covers
over us to feed to their customers yet,
who haven’t burned out yet, as if the job were
a kind of fire, and we were the kindling, or as if the job
were a kind of crop circle and we were the corn
that teenage aliens doodle their graffiti on for a purpose
that’s beyond us, for a purpose we are told
to believe in, and I too am angered by employees
who tend too slowly to my needs, who peer
mole-y eyed at me from stacks of paperwork at the
DMV, or who squeak mole-y voiced at me from
burrowing too long into the twisted tunnels of a phone,
angered at them for not being paid enough
to know English, or how to turn on my
cable, so I can watch rich beautiful people
with no problems fail to fix their personalities,
or watch an exposé on how people are
already hard at work doing nothing to fix
problems much bigger than mine, like wrestlers
paying for their own brain damage,
or a community developing cancer trying to
blow out their favorite flaming river,
but it’s easy to be bitter, and it’s hard to join
a union, to show up to the meetings,
sign your name to the list, stick your neck
far, far out from its shell, so others
will stick out their necks from their shells,
until we are a field of necks too numerous to
chop all at once without making a mess,
or until we are a field of throats blooming all the
same words at the same time, the way people
join together to pray—as if God were a
little deaf and can only hear us if we’re all
speaking at once, and a little nearsighted,
so he can only see us if we stand on each
other and form a human pyramid in the exact
shape of a person struggling to build a pyramid.

Read more

The War Poets

by

It has been a year, a year of bombs and voices. These people speak through translators, these people speak their lives translated through war. This is the collective landscape, wrapped in the mist and myth of the moment, told in the fractured piecemeal that is war.

Read more

INTRODUCTION TO THE METHOD

by

What happened
We were going to gather snow
From the tops of the mountains
In summer
That’s what he said he wanted
From there we would carry it back
On the backs of our “swans”
To the city
To sprinkle it onto the roiling streets
And citizens squinting up joyfully, gratefully
This we would do not for personal glory
But purely for that of the city
Eternal glory to the nest where we were born

Read more

Berlin

by

…Now, literally all I want is to be hot and famous. I want power. Not power over people, but the power to act, to provoke desire that expands my capacity to live. This is not the lesson I’m supposed to learn, but I’ve always learned everything, including my lessons, a little askew. If someone were to say, what has living your life like this gotten you so far?, haven’t you always been like this, even before your transition, in one way or another?, I could only say that it’s led me to dark and beautiful places. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me on a spiritual level: for instance, don’t I need a little Hierophant in my life, an internal structure, a system even? But I’ve never been able to fit myself into a structure, a system. Maybe that’s the Capricorn in me. I don’t care about astrology, but I like any spiritual idea in which the universe is speaking about me, or in which I am speaking the universe.

Read more

He Could Sing, But He Couldn’t Fly

by

We heard about the memo: Legal Aid lawyers had to ask for papers,
a green card, policing what the law called illegal aliens, as if they
had antennae sprouting from their heads and searching the air,
sputtering in tongues from another planet, choking on oxygen.
This would account for their coughing, not the oil tanks empty of oil.

Read more