For Every Year

1674 c/o Felipe Ventura

2012-01-22T11:55:00.000Z

The Year Coffee Won

She passed by the Queen's Lane Coffee House for the sixth time that evening for the last time ever.

Three weeks had passed since her husband had slept with her and she didn't know what to do about it. Women weren't allowed inside any of the coffeehouses in England, so she couldn't go inside to get him. She paced back and forth, giving the tinted windows sidelong glances in hopes of seeing the faintest trace of him.

He knew this, sat way in the back, and continued to drink coffee. He didn't love her anymore. Coffee had told him this.

She started seeing a number of women who had been widowed by the coffee houses. She started the first women-only teahouse at her estate. They got together for afternoon tea, talked about the problems they had with their husbands, and they usually had sex with each other. The catalyst was the bergamot infused tea. After one of the clerks at the market told her that it was a powerful aphrodisiac, she bought a vial of bergamot oil and poured it on all of the black tea at home in the hopes of reigniting his passion for her. He didn't drink tea anymore so it never worked on him. Her guests on the other hand were very susceptible to the concoction.

She fell in love for the first time with one of the ladies. She didn't know what to do after the initial shock of realizing she had never loved her husband.

They continued sleeping with each other while their husbands spent more and more time at the coffeehouses. After a couple of months, some of women stopped coming to the teahouse and became more vocal about their problems. They printed an anonymous pamphlet entitled "The Excessive Use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE has Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that They have become as Impotent as Old Men."

More women started speaking out. It became a huge social issue. As the matter received more attention, more husbands started returning home.

In desperation, she and her lover began to drink coffee.

Soon there after they fell out of love.

Society was saved.

1673 c/o JDA Winslow

2012-01-09T00:15:00.003Z

Mary Carleton and You

Mary Carleton
is lying
to a European lord
(she stole his money and left him).

She shaves off her hair
flies to Thailand
changes sex
then goes to sleep
(surrounded by stolen jewels
and gold
like the gender confused dragon
she/he always was)

Frozen
in an iceberg
moored
off the northernmost
of the Rykuku islands
she drifts free.

300 years later
the iceberg melts
the gold
drags her down
he drowns
and I feel glad
as the water fills my lungs
and sorry
that I stole
that necklace from you.

1672 c/o Crispin Best and Ben Brooks

2012-01-05T00:25:00.003Z

The Disaster Year

Our nighttime is a slope of calm. Our nighttime is the smallest children. Our children are a cloud of tremors buried under the heaviest carpet. They push up sad pyramids we will never see.

Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles. Our children under steel and buildings, splintered hunks of lumber lowering. Overmuscled men could never lift and shoulder them and leave. Broken clouds sink buried under city calm. Our fingers pushing into earth that grows into a valley, cedarhemmed and empty.

Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole. Windowframed, I'm lonely. Lying on tile, my eyes become the kitchens I've known. I lie here and ask for telephones to ring. My eyes become a frozen river and a sled. My eyes become a staircase. My eyes become an icepick and a child who wants to sleep.

Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth. I lie here older still and still a river slowflowing itself into a lake. My cheeks are baby stars blown big by gas explosions. At the edges, ruins of a shed and rooftops burning. I hide my body in the lake, cheeks filling. Tiny bodies burdened under carpet. Shards of schools becoming turquoise crofts in the sky.

Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth and riverwet becomes a tree. Windowframed I am sleeping, from the lung of outside, older still through darkness. So old now my feet are newborn cubs. In daytime we're the birthmark of a cloud upon the earth.

Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth and riverwet becomes a tree of arms as glass fruits fall. Here between the centre and the edge belong our children, burdened by the sky, stealing fruit and black scabs blooming on their knees. Two children gentlesleeping in a garden of calm until a river's bursting out through noise.

Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth and riverwet becomes a tree of arms as glass fruits softly fall toward the pavement. And the darkness of my window is a river with fingerdug trenches in the waves. And tiny bodies buried while they slept.

Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth and riverwet becomes a tree of arms as glass fruits softly fall toward the pavement here beneath our feet, beneath the slope of night. Higher, beneath us, misted pineforest filled without our children buried and trees stuttering. We are up on this ledge and can see ourselves circling. Both of us now heavy with huge wrinkles hanging, swinging like censers, you with your eyes out, pointing down. When I stand and open a blanket now it is gone.

1671 c/o Rachel Stevenson

2011-12-11T23:02:00.001Z

Thomas Blood

Blood by name, Blood by nature: brave, desperate Thomas, from kidnap to Romford quack, royal-lover, royal-baiter, (crown)-jewel thief, block headed Roundhead, Blood feuds his speciality. Born in Co. Clare, a blacksmith's son in white gloves, Civil War, Charles recalled and Ormonde bore the brunt. Land grant, settled act, castle stormed, guards disarmed, Blood vengeance, Buckingham blamed. Black Maria wed. Ayloffe laughed.

Orb down the pants, crown squashed, sceptre split, farce most royal, a gallant attempt. Globe recovered, Blood discovered, death would be his, but the King lets him live, with five hundred pounds for return of the crown, Bloody but unbowed, pardon most royal - Blood will out.

Celebrate his daring, his derring-do, his rapscallion rascally ways, his Irish craic; not so much kissing the Blarney stone as a Bloody snog.

1670 c/o Emeline Morin

2011-12-05T22:11:00.001Z

La Futaie Colbert

As a girl I spent hours walking the woods, looking for fairies and the ogre’s house. I filled my pockets with twigs and round pebbles, my notebooks with dead leaves and my camera’s reel with faded impressions.

My passion for trees was nourished by my love and thirst for stories. In my books, trees were always those old wise men with special powers and superior knowledge. Their roots digging the earth, their crown fondling the skies.

When I was about ten, I went to a part of the Forêt de Tronçais, right in the middle of France, called la Fûtaie Colbert. The cluster of trees was called after one of the Sun King’s ministers who had the oaks planted. The minister wanted to ensure that there would be good quality oak wood for shipbuilding for the centuries to come. But shipbuilding evolved and the trees remained. As my dad told me Colbert’s story, I marvelled at those old gigantic trees standing around me. I could hardly see their tops and some were so wide my ten-year old self thought about turning them into a new home.

I spent hours walking around, brushing the trunks, feeling their rough bark under my fingers. I wandered, marvelled at every shrub and thorn, dreaming stories. Leaves and twigs cracked beneath my feet oozing a heady musty smell. The place felt both eerie and familiar. I could almost see it unfolding before my eyes; this time when fairy-tales Kings and Princesses still existed. A time when my ancestors had to walk the shadowy woods avoiding wolves’ den. Centuries ago. Legends were told about the forest and its natural springs. Voices and songs coming from the earth could be heard some nights. Strange creatures were hiding behind thick incised leaves and wicked pixies poured poison on mushrooms.

I would beg my parents to go every weekend. When I came back, before throwing my smeared clothes in the wicker basket I emptied my pockets, filling my drawers with my new treasures -leaves, twigs, acorns. The warm water of the bath washed away the dirt and blood on my scratched legs and I used to sit in the bubbly steam for a while, pressing the tip of my pruning fingers on bruises to see them change colour. When night came, I lay in bed, very still, my mind swirling with tales of knights and magic.

But nothing ever lasts and while a few years made me change, centuries overcame the great oaks. Many of them had grown too weary and had to be put down. Many, now standing high alone above others were hit by lightning. Every time one of them dies a piece of my childhood memories scatters away. I do not go anymore; I am not that brave after all. My early years’ reveries are bound to fade away like everyone else’s. I hear the wood is used for making fine Bordeaux wine casks. Maybe I should just abandon the magic forest as an inspiration for sweet tasty wine. I hear that’s what most grown-ups do.

1669 c/o Nicola Belte

2011-11-30T22:56:00.001Z

Tantalus.

He was a man of signs. The day he saw the Blessed Virgin’s face as he collected olives in his grandfather’s grove, he moved to the monastery. He didn’t ask questions.

Never was a brother so pious. His desires, his attachments, his previous life, all friable petals in the gust of his faith. He let language go. Chattering and chirping only pinioned the dove, and his silent devotion set it free; let it swoop across the orchards on the lower slopes of the mountain, bringing signs of God’s grandeur back to his heart.

He was ready, waiting.

Then she called for him.

He’d lie on his hard bed and feel her moving in the distance, growing impatient. He’d wake an hour earlier, and read the scriptures by candlelight late into the night, knowing he couldn’t placate her forever; knowing that she wouldn’t wait; knowing that he’d go to her. She knew his nature. She left him signs. Summer leaves curling up crisp at the edges; singed butterflies falling from the sky like shrivelled black confetti; dead, dehydrated flies coating the stone floor of his cell.

He’d go without breakfast, halve his portion at lunchtime; pulling vegetables from the rich, black earth and plucking fruit in the heat of the afternoon with his head spinning and his stomach cramping, still not tempted to take a bite.

He’d dream of her; feel her burning kisses across his stomach, her lip prints scolding, sticky; molten wax seals upon his skin, closing the deal, branding him “hers”.

He’d awaken feeling trapped; gasping for air, with his lips cracked and his eyelashes scalded away, the smell of burnt flesh heavy in the air.

He’d lift his gown and kneel on broken glass in the courtyard, his head pressed flat to the dusty ground as the sun rose, chanting, to keep out the growing roar of her laughter.

The dreams got worse. Women with frightful black tongues surrounded him, stroking him, their features obscured by thick smoke, permitting him only the odd glimpse of a sunken, lustful eye, or a gaping, blazing mouth. They’d pull him towards them, and he’d feel that he was plunging headfirst into a fiery pit, into bottomless perdition, into an unfathomable, sulphurous abyss where red magma pools glowed fierce in an unyielding blackness, and where he’d die; time and time again. He clawed at them, screaming, begging as he dangled, their skin coming loose in his fingers, peeling away from their charred bones, laughing as they exploded into sparks and ashes, letting him fall.

He woke with blisters on his hands, with embers on his soles, and thirsty, always thirsty. He knew that this was a test. She wanted to see if he was faithful. He stopped drinking altogether. His tongue felt swollen, engorged, alien; his head pounded and his skin crackled as he writhed; his limbs like tinder, impossibly dry.

She taunted him. Sent him dreams of beautiful water nymphs in white Roman gowns; who’d dance around him, wet skin gleaming, splashing him with the droplets that they squeezed from their long, golden hair. He wasn’t a fool; he saw their combustibility, the flames kindling behind their aquamarine eyes, what lay beyond their tranquil smiles. He’d plead to wake up, will his eyes to open, but they’d come for him, holding back his head as he gagged and bucked, pouring jug after jug of water down his throat, until he’d snatch for it, and even knowing what they were, take it from their cold, dead fingers and drink, and drink.

He could barely move from his cell. His face was waxen, gaunt, like a penitential candle left to burn too long. He couldn’t sleep. Nothing now passed his lips. His brothers let him be, let him recede. They knew the ways of God, knew the path of devotion. They didn’t ask questions. They knew the signs too. He lay there, in silent spiritual repose, waiting.

And then she came.

He heard the commotion in the streets, the loading up of carts; the fervent, futile pleas for mercy. He staggered to the window. Black smoke. The mountain streaked with red and orange, the sky seemingly on fire as blackened rocks rained down on the city below. She moved slowly, regally, all of nature bowing down as she passed, jealousy taking back what was hers, clutching it to her core as all fell to cinders around her.

She wanted him. He knew that she was coming for him, and refused to leave. He wouldn’t abandon her.

He watched the sky darken, growing denser with ash, saw her snake towards him in waves of undulating magma, almost hypnotised. She took the fields, the apple trees and the lemon groves, the villages, the homes, the streets, but still he stayed firm, praying for his weak legs to support him, until it was time.

He hobbled out into the deserted streets, feeling his way along the monastery’s wall, blinded by the grit that made his lungs feel as though they were being compressed by wrenching fingers of fire. He could see nothing but her, hear nothing but her, feel nothing but her breath upon his skin, seductively smouldering, drawing him in.

He took off his robe. He wanted to experience her completely, his life was made for this; this was his purpose, his fate. He wanted her to assimilate him, to consume him, to annihilate him, completely. She burst through the gates of the monastery, and he smiled. He thought of the Blessed Virgin’s face that had brought him there, thought of the sun on his face the day he’d arrived, that greeted him like a benediction. He closed his eyes, and waited for her kiss.

1668 c/o Sully Sanchez

2011-11-27T23:58:00.001Z

a new universal language

yeh i have indigestion

IT IS NT MORNInG
   ahhhh where u @, my only father
i am both of ur DADs

   strap me to the ground im cryeing

   get crunk
get skype tonight
ur a bearded man after all

   these picture
Look at how much nature
   !
nature is
so nature
   it
   is
   i am It

a diarrhoea is
sorta
   like
a Pizzeria
Idk
except .

   i can feel lonely
damn
jesus take The Wheel

please
i am
  wall Street
  can i

i might
put me
or

   sear me please somehow
   a bit

actually fucking slam me in the 0ven alrdy
   im sick of defrosting
:)

o k i washed me

haaha i am sick of washing me now so i stopped
wa tcounts as nature today
   it is more dark than pictures

i want
   tapioca
   ball
   s

1667 c/o Clam Simmons

2011-11-19T15:42:00.001Z

John Milton

When young I was famous for great hair
it grew as I grew handsome in appearance
At school I trained to master the rapier’s grip
I wielded the bit like Attician wit. My fertile
mind was perpetually agape ready to devour
the works of Latin as if English were classic
tongue. My sails have been swayed by tempting
breezes, the courting bellows of pandemonium
but the long arms of horde’s approval could not
pull me away from pressing into the dominant
catalogues of thought. I lost decades to the raptures
of discovery, slurping through vellum
like a drunkard at the bunghole. The lucubration
‘twas epick, the long journey of learned reverie
required eternal squinting by candlelight
the glow of my pearls diminished to a desperate
pawing as if my eyes could beg Phoebus to hold
still the setting sun’s chariots, to suspend
the horses that ride into the dusk. Raving,
I spent dark seasons contending with bedlam’s
urges resigning myself to the manacles
of shadow. Mercifully my daughters read
to me, nursing the poison from my depraved state
feeding me, sliced chapters of the familiar
loaves of my conviction. Sometimes at night
after working the office of dictation I snuff
the wicks so the house may swallow a portion
of my daily fare. I imagine in the momentary
yoke of dull faculty we share lamentation.
Our weak body reminded of the strong judge,
who, with shorn locks and pricked eyes
supplicated for renewed agency. Unsatisfied
with mere petition, Samson pressed out to topple
the pillars, binding no strange foxtails in the service.
Juxtaposed, my conquerors are immaterial restraints
I struggle to teem through hallowed shutters
to escape the hindrance of my immediate cell,
to capture a script of the fall before the great release.
Finally exhausted, I might see Eden in the sequel.

1666 c/o Wes Schofield

2011-11-13T21:02:00.001Z

Newton vs. Satan
The battle for 1666

Newton awoke the first of January, 1666, at an o’clock of the a.m. At precisely the same time but in an alternate dimension, Satan, a.k.a the Lord of all Evil, rose from his slumber with a massive splitting headache. Identical in tone and timbre to the pounding drum housed inside the mind of the as yet to be named Sir Isaac Newton. Headaches, both the result of imbibing too many drinks the night before. Newton finished off an entire case of last year’s vintage with a few friends he was entertaining at the Salon. Satan, meanwhile, had been sipping a heady brew made from the fermented souls of hell’s most tortured victims while watching the ball drop at Times Square on his new plasma TV. The pair of them having personalities prone to self-indulgence, especially when under the influence, each spent the last hour before midnight denouncing their opponents and boasting of the great things they had in store for the New Year. Yet, come the light of day, neither felt up to even the slightest amount of greatness and spent the whole afternoon into the evening deep beneath the covers vowing never to drink again. Only Newton awoke at midnight to discover Calculus.

Down in Hell, come springtime, Satan had yet to come up with anything which might fulfil his promises of the New Year, while Newton had gone on to split light with a prism and prove a rainbow is held within. If Satan wasn’t careful he was going to lose the tenuous grip he held on all the Demons of the underworld. Already he could tell they were beginning to suspect he had nothing to do with the great plague that had ravished England of at least a million citizens in the past year. If he didn’t do something soon to distract them he might have an uprising on his hands.

His chance finally came when, at end of a long hot summer, a fire broke out in London and quickly spread to engulf almost the entire city. Seizing the opportunity to lie his way into the forefront he took all the credit. Even the most murderous of his minions could not fail to be impressed by the complete lack of compassion required to take an already embattled city down to its ashen foundations.

Crossing his fingers, Satan went to visit his nemesis that evening hoping to find the house burned the to ground and Newton’s charred remains. Instead he found him hard at work in his study, seemingly unaware of the chaos spewing forth around him. Satan peered over Newton's left shoulder and saw pages of numbers and symbols all, to him, incomprehensible mathematical scribbling. But at the top of the page was written a word he could actually read, “Gravity”.

Furious, Satan returned to hell and locked himself away in his room. He could not allow Newton to show him up again; perhaps he might be able to discover this Gravity first. Three days he spent watching the Discovery Channel and carrying out crude experiments involving a bowling ball and a feather. By the end all he could come up with was F is equal to M times A. Where “F” is the amount of Fritos consumed, “M” is the number of times he would murder Newton if he had the chance and “A” is absolutely how little he understands what the hell he is talking about.

After the third day, he began to hear the rumbling of growing mob outside his door. He blasted the volume on his surround sound until it pierced his eardrums and he could ignore the screams of hell’s fury no longer.

“What? What do you want?” he asked. “I was about to find out how much feces ends up on the average toothbrush.”

“Fraud,” the crowd chanted at him. It seemed the fires of London were now under control, and through there was a lot of property damage, only six people died. Worse than that, however, the fire had put an end to the plague by cleanly disposing of the corpses and killing all the rats that had been spreading the disease.

Satan could think of only one person to blame: “Newton”.

Satan found him sitting under an apple tree reading a book. Typical. Climbing the tree, Satan hovered over him whispering hushed threats and vulgarities. He wanted to strike him dead with a bolt of lighting but pride stopped him. He had to get one over on this pedantic dork. Looking over he spotted an apple hanging just out of reach. Inspiration struck. The old apple trick, it never fails, no one had yet been able to resist the temptation of all the knowledge in the universe. Satan smiled and leaned over to snatch the fruit. But as his weight shifted the branch he reached towards snapped.

The apple fell.

1665 c/o Katy Gunn

2011-11-11T00:09:00.001Z

Robert Hooke Studies Cells

He brings all his vegetables back to his room. His table is covered in carrots and fennel. Burdock and reeds under his bed. He makes another microscope. He writes a heavy book with illustrations. He makes a little money and puts it under his bed. Still his table is covered in carrots. Still he spends every day bent over his magnifying discs, windows to the insides of other rooms. Bare floors there. No tables. No beds. Underneath, no scraps of paper scattered in thistles and dust, no cramped script noting such tiny little rooms, the most delicate order imaginable.

1664 c/o Sam Riviere

2011-10-30T12:28:00.001Z

CRONENBOURG

Claude nearly drowns when the river floods.
The water came in faster than he could run.
He's saved by the man who practically invented beer.

I am huge, obviously. I bathe the scene.
There's a smell of river muck. In the opposite house,
a poet's being born. The last part is his fist.

Water laps under the door with a noise
like an enormous black tongue lapping. Its stagnant smell
announces the poet. It sticks to him his whole life

and intensifies during the creative act.
He curses it aloud many times, shame
driving him from the library and his private studies.

If I seem conspicuous or bigger here, it's because
there aren't enough things to compare me to.
I am more like fizz inside his mind. His tiny fingers

are failing to define it. The smell reaches optimum strength
during his long incarceration, where contrary
to popular legend, he does not produce his best work.

Often, when he looks up from his writing, I appear
and disappear in the window. My reflection is a slice
of myself, sliced off. I am not a constant, clearly.

Soon we enter the age in which the state applauds the satirists.
Claude coughs up some river muck. I touch his face. I want
to be like something to drink. Inside his fermenting, fist-sized brain

I am studied, conceptualised, photographed, redesigned,
filtered, compressed, stored at supercool temperatures.
I am refined and then refined again. He perfects this version

and I see my face floating like white plastic on the waters
of the floods. It's like… I can't, for example, from here,
on May 4th, look much like a beercan, viewed from above.

I don't think I am mysterious enough.

1663 c/o C. P. Harrison

2011-10-19T10:14:00.000+01:00

Cotton Mather

Let's get Puritan baby,
ya make me wanna burn witches
and drown these bitches
til our colony twitches

Let's get Puritan girl,
I'll give it all I got,
rock out yo chamber pot
til we get Salem (Salem) hot

[Chorus]
I am the Puritan , you can be sure of then
AY (oh yes) YAE(oh yes, oh yes)
I am the Puritan , you can be sure of then
AY (oh yes) YAE(oh yes, oh yes)
This the jam, yep, yep, yep, yep,
Put your hands up (wave)
Put your hands up (wave)
AY (oh yes) YAE (oh yes)

Let's get Puritan baby
til we see weird ass visions
make some bad decisions
start locking kids in prisons

(Sly Deceiver)- I'm coming to git ya, coming to git ya, I'm coming, coming, coming, coming, coming to git ya!

[Chorus X 3]

Let's get Puritan , boo
you goodie little fox
I'll rock yo scarlet box
til you scream "FUCK SMALLPOX!"

1662 c/o Harry Burke

2011-10-15T17:08:00.000+01:00

1662, Taiwan

Eyes reveal dissatisfaction was perfunctory, Blatter first to back road. ". Right." Xin Niman this answer is too embarrassing to do a line of sight.

I couldn’t answer if you asked me too.

We were all arranged by height order outside the training ground gates. I recall a sort of hazy atmosphere, pick-pocketed with stars. Night was the only definite line. I think we were ready to go.

‘There’s something here for all of you, to be returned to me by midnight.’

A grey moustache signalled authority, a sort of strangled integrity balancing on high-waisted trousers. I tried to decide between five-a-side football and poetry, a wind grazed a number of houses. My heart beat, had I had a heart.

‘I’ll see you back here in a number of hours.’

What he really said seemed irrelevant. I’d never experienced real flying, really falling between castles, floating islands and nodes of superreality. This was so much more than rush hour. I once sicked strawberry milkshake through my nose, only now were my arms, legs made of sugar and dissolving beneath me. School trips are all tableaus and tannoys and too sweet ham sandwiches. This was thicker than reality.

Red ! stage; Green ! stage; Blue ! stage; gliding.

God we were up there for days. Light was the only definite line; peach cheeked and breathless eating only oxygen, I was nothing but the residue and mini milks, flying round sand castles arms wide, action man nylon trunks mum reading John le Carré and work on Monday, the tide going down and little limpets god hanging on like they could never ever change, I swear we’ll go back there one day.

Imagine little limpets hanging on to sand castles, concocting this notion of ‘siege’.

I think we were up there for days.

1661 c/o Dave Shaw

2011-10-11T17:06:00.000+01:00

Oliver Cromwell's Head

Oliver Cromwell's Head lights a cigarette and stares out across the Montreal skyline. It's nearing 0400h and he is still waiting for a call.

He can see Parc Jean-Drapeau in the distance and is reminded of the music festival he and Elizabeth had attended there in the summer of 1658.

Do you think Pavement will ever get back together?

The spike penetrating the top of Oliver Cromwell's Head is jagged and inconvenient, but he has learned to live with it.

No use in complaining, Elizabeth always reminded him.

These things just happen to some people.

The phone rings and Oliver Cromwell's Head allows it to ring three times before he answers it.

I'm not coming over; It's late, I have work in the morning.

Well, whatever.

'Night.

Oliver Cromwell's Head instantly feels guilty for the small sting of satisfaction he feels in cancelling plans. Elizabeth deserves better than that.

But what could she expect?

Oliver Cromwell's Head leans over the edge of the window to get a view of the street below.

Drunk people getting in and out of taxis. The dregs of the night.

Oliver Cromwell's Head is sick of waiting. Fuck this.

1660 c/o Lily Dawn

2011-10-08T12:39:00.003+01:00

Oliver Cromwell's Head

He stares back at us,
rotting up there
on his twenty foot pole.
The children laugh,
making fun of him
by throwing pebbles,
betting on who will be the first to
land one in his hanging jaw.
He is defenseless,
unlike when he killed King Charles
and crowned himself "Lord Protector."

You will rest up on that pole,
Mr. Cromwell,
for another twenty five years,
(save for the momentary removal for a quick roof repair)
until a strong-winded storm comes
to set you free.
For two hundred and seventy five years,
you will come to know the British museum circuit well,
until finally, some day,
you will be dropped back into the dirt,
three hundred years after you were lifted out of it.

1659 c/o Nicholas Liu

2011-10-04T23:48:00.004+01:00

Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Pausing Between Bites of Umbilical Cord, Addresses His First Aphorism to His Father

Nine months to birth; thirteen years to the sword? Would that you’d jizzed in the eye of my lord’s enemy instead!

1658 c/o Stephen Tully Dierks

2011-09-29T08:43:00.000+01:00

Quincunx

To create excitement I will write four novels about a character named Maizie Quincunx. The first novel will be called My Tongue is Useless. The second novel will be called It's So Hard (Life). The third will be called Rabu Rabu. The fourth, Bring Out the Tang of the Tay. Once I have written these novels I will change my name to Maizie Quincunx. I will be Maizie Quincunx then. My fifth novel will not feature Maizie Quincunx. Once I have created Maizie Quincunx and taken on her identity I will be done writing about her.

Who is Maizie Quincunx? She's a cool girl, I know that. She's wholly fictional. She's got on skinny jeans or a skirt; lacy tops; wears a lot of black; gladiator sandals; long dark hair; kind of an adorable badass, I'd say. I can imagine sitting in her room and telling her, “You're the coolest,” or, “It feels nice being around you.” She would smile and say, "No I'm not," and that's one of the things I love about her.

I got this idea from a book on my roommate's shelf. The author created a character and then took the character's name in real life. I guess she wrote her last novel while zonked out on heroin and it's totally insane. Haven't read it.

“Man, I am feeling a SURGE of happiness,” Tristan says on gchat.

“Cool. Probably going to slink out at 5 despite getting here late,” I say.

“I am doing fuck all. Feeling depressed.”

“Awww.”

“Want to cry. But feeling good right now. Like verge-of-tears good. Like any second it could switch and a surge of emotion could come surge-ing out.”

“Via Surge brand soda drink? Yeah. I'm just tired of being here. And hungry.”

“Not long now. You can do it. You should start packing a proper lunch.”

“Yeah... I've been trying to get on this salad-for-lunch thing. But I don't know. I feel like I'm getting flabby in the tummy, and I don't like it. But I get bored, and like, eating and drinking is the only thing to do.”

“Haha. You poor fuck. 'Existential quandaries.' I am fat but it's OK because no girls.”

“No you're not.”

“Yeah. It's cool man. Don't worry about me.”

There were five things to write about. There were going to be five sections. I forgot. Could you name a character I-Forgot?

I-Forgot listened to R. Kelly's “Text Me” on repeat while taking the train home. I-Forgot didn't have any money until next weekend. Unable to go out, I-Forgot talked to people on gchat and drank an energy drink. I-Forgot wished for air conditioning and sex.

I-Forgot had a piece to write, a tribute to the year 1658 for the literary journal For Every Year. I-Forgot searched the year 1658 on Wikipedia and found a mystical-sounding book written in that year. The text of the mystical-sounding book was available for free online. The book had three titles and five chapters. The fifth chapter was the most interesting chapter. Having copied it into a document, I-Forgot cut out all but the most interesting parts. It was now five short paragraphs. I-Forgot wanted to create a story with the essence of those five short paragraphs (whatever that could be), but it didn't seem to happen. I-Forgot wrote five paragraphs and looked at what was there. It was themeless and ragged and random and nonmystical. There was nothing in it. I-Forgot deleted each paragraph, one by one, all five, until there was nothing, and felt a little better.

1657 c/o Rebecca Perry

2011-09-18T17:57:00.000+01:00

Girl King

The first thing I did was be born. My screams were so loud they thought I was a boy.
Someone said, like a thousand fists punching through a thousand windows. The summer was so hot the orchard caught fire, and water dripped down the insides of the palace windows and rotted the wood.

The second thing I did was kill Descartes. The winter was so cold you could crunch on flower petals like ice. His lungs froze up. I had told him not to come in winter. I told him to go home. But men don’t listen to women. In this way I became a murderer.

The third thing I did was run away, naturally.

1656 c/o Dan Venn

2011-09-16T14:42:00.000+01:00

I only really drink oasis

I really hate the water Huygens. Whats the time?

I’m not sure. A pendulum clock won’t work at sea.

This is shitty.

The wind blows into Bernard’s ears and it’s all he can hear.

It’s cathartic. Look at how flat everything is.
Do you like right angles? We are perpendicular to the water.

To the fish as well. I don’t have a strong opinion regarding fish.
I’d prefer to visualise us above an empty space.

Ok. We are floating above the fish, which in turn are floating above the corals.

Are we still?

Would you prefer to be?

Yes.

Ok.

Whats the time?

...We’ll have to float for a few more hours.

I’m not sure where the fish are lying, but I need to pee before then Huygens.

They will understand. They would rather that than nothing at all. Fish don't like the dry.

I'm having doubts about this Huygens.

1655 c/o Joseph Harper

2011-09-11T17:58:00.001+01:00

download

1654 c/o Giles Ruffer

2011-09-05T08:34:00.001+01:00

23RD NOVEMBER: CERTITUDE. CERTITUDE. FEELING. JOY.

Blaise walks into town. He has no reason to and no money to spend. He has headphones on and a song called ‘Cool Ice Cream’ is playing. The way the music is played and the irreverent tone of the lyrics seem to control his mood and he cannot understand why. He decides his personality is easily manipulated and that someone could probably talk him into thinking anything, like joining a religious cult, quite easily.

A man approaches him and Blaise takes off his headphones.

‘Excuse me mate,’ the man says. ‘Now just listen to me, I know I look bad right, but I just need some money to get a cup of tea.’

The man’s face is tanned and dirty like he has been outside and not washed for the best part of a week. Blaise sometimes hides in his bedsit for entire days, washing himself when he is already clean, maintaining a pale complexion.

Blaise wants to carry on walking and waits for a chance to respond as the man continues:

‘Now I don’t want to spend your money on beer or anything, you could just buy me a Big Mac.’

‘Is there a McDonald’s this way, I’m walking this way,’ says Blaise, pointing in the direction he was walking.

‘There’s one down here.’ The man points in the opposite direction. ‘You can just give me the money for it, look I can give you the number of the hostel I’m staying at. They know me, they can vouch for me. I just need enough to stay there over the weekend.’

‘How much is it to stay there?’ says Blaise.

‘Twelve-fifty a night.’

Blaise imagines people viewing him through TV cameras, judging him on how he handles the situation and expecting him to make the right moral decision and renew their faith in humanity. And if Blaise succeeds, his kindness will be rewarded in an even greater way, with balloons and confetti and sailing boats with bikini models drinking champagne on board.

But £12.50 is a lot of money for Blaise, who has just calculated in his head that he has a budget of exactly £12.33875 a day for the next 14 days.

He tries to quickly recount how the conversation has escalated from asking for a cup of tea to £12.50 in such a short space of time, but instead creates a tableau in his brain where the man is sitting in a tea room in York. Bone China cups. A giant Battenberg. A woman with long blonde hair, bright perfect teeth, surgically sculpted breasts inside a bikini, sitting opposite. Blaise watching on through the window of the tea room, outside in the rain.

Blaise makes a half-hearted compromise.

He takes his wallet out and says, ‘This is like, all the change I have,’ handing the man two £1 coins.

‘All right. Thank you,’ says the man, his head turned, mumbling, ‘I won’t spend it on beer.’

Blaise puts his headphones back on and continues to walk in the same direction as before.

A few minutes later he notices a playground with people in. Although he doesn’t realise it at first, two of his friends are by the swings in the playground.

His friends have not yet seen him and he contemplates walking past, eyes on the ground.

He does this until he passes them.

He then hears his name being called over the music playing in his headphones. He feels bad for ignoring his friends and can’t think why he is doing this. He looks around, feigning perplexity.

He takes off his headphones again.

Blaise’s friends take him to a party at a squat. There are not many people at the party. They don’t even need to shout.

‘I think it might pick up once Tom and his friends get back,’ says Blaise’s friend Marc. ‘They’re just picking up some mandy.’

Marc explains the party is “Hipster” themed.

‘Everyone just looks like they live in a squat,’ says Blaise. ‘This girl looks like she’s in Dexy and the Midnight Runners.’ He points to a girl sitting on the floor.

Marc laughs. ‘I’ll tell her that,’ he says. ‘She’ll love it.’

In the top floor of the squat is a room, the floor is a sea with an archipelago of uncovered mattresses. No one else is there except Blaise and Marc who sit on the edge of a mattress and talk about their band that has not practised in three months.

‘I feel... normal,’ says Blaise, looking at a can of Oranjeboom. ‘I was going to say “I feel tired” but… I don’t know.’

Marc laughs.

Two girls enter the room. One is short with dreadlocks, the other is the one Blaise said looked like she was from Dexy and the Midnight Runners.

‘Er, excuse me,’ says Marc. ‘We’re trying to have a band discussion here.’

‘Oh, what is your band?’ says the short girl with dreadlocks as she jumps onto the mattress. ‘Hello, what is your name?’ she says to Blaise. She has an accent that Blaise cannot place.

‘You’ve asked me this like three times already,’ says Blaise.

‘Oh I don’t remember. I’m DRUNK!’ She throws her arms up revealing two unshaven arm pits, and falls backwards onto the mattress.

The other girl laughs and says, ‘Oh Marie, I love you, you’re so awesome.’

Blaise feels a desire to touch the girl he had earlier insulted to Marc. He wants to touch her in several places on her body for prolonged periods of time. He considers asking her—an approach which would at worst result in a minor loss of dignity—but decides not to.

Someone comes into the room and tells them to come downstairs.

Blaise looks at his watch.10pm. It will take him half an hour to get home.

‘I’m going to head off,’ Blaise tells Marc as they leave the room.

‘Okay. I’ll speak to you soon,’ says Marc.

‘Yeah, have a good night.’

As Blaise leaves the squat he passes a middle-aged man talking loudly on his phone. Blaise feels the beginnings of a migraine.

The migraine snowballs as he walks home. He concentrates on his feet to try and think about anything but the throbbing but by the time he puts his key in the lock his head is aflame.

‘Oh God,’ he tries to whisper but it comes out in a loud drone. ‘Oh God. Jesus Christ. Oh my God.’

Two hours later he can do nothing but write down this experience.

1653 c/o Laura Kochman

2011-08-31T23:31:00.001+01:00

Infant / Infanta

1653 it begins theslow bloom

of portraits, of a swollen cheek

heavy and soft in oils, baby skin

blushing littleroller

little thing. A match struck

will burn hotter every year. The first ofmany

corsets, stiff skirts hands hovering

on other surfaces as if to say

I am here, Uncle, and I can set the table.

As if to say I am full

like this round rose petals like skirts

can open in layers, the years

your anxious friends. 1653 a proposal

the first of many promises a small thing

harmless as a lost tooth we are skipping

many pleasantries Uncle, we

direct our gazes downward,

we seeeach other only. This painter

loves me with every pearl white

highlight on lace every exposed wrist.

As if to say why don’t you stroke

my face call me cosset a brush

did it once.

1652 c/o Joshua Smeltzer

2011-08-30T13:42:00.003+01:00

Haiku

Island of the free

surrounded by the enslaved

Waiting for the day

1651 c/o Susie Anderson

2011-08-24T00:17:00.004+01:00

1651

there is an ice cream container on my piano. in the container there are little pieces of paper that say things like 'diminished seventh beginning on b flat', 'dominant seventh of f sharp', 'a flat major' and 'e flat melodic minor'. most mornings i get up half an hour early, do stuff to get ready for school, then sit at the piano from 7.30-8am. i take a piece of paper out and play the scale written on it. i play it in different rhythms and at slow speeds. right hand, left hand, then both hands. doing this makes it easier to play evenly when you play them at the right speed for your exam.

my piano teacher is mrs adler. she has some sort of bad disease like cancer i think. it is not appropriate for me to ask anybody about it now because she has been my teacher for two years and i think people just assume that i know why she is so sick. mrs adler is the fourth piano teacher that i have had. she is not my favourite but all of the other students that she has are the best in town so i am glad that she is my teacher. my last piano teacher was more like a friend to me and sometimes i would cry in front of her. mrs adler likes flowers and usually has a new bunch of flowers every couple of weeks. she often talks about 'dancing with the stars'.

as well as my scales i am learning four pieces for my grade six exam. they are the hardest pieces i have ever had to play. sometimes i genuinely think i will not be able to play them properly. there is always a lot to think about when playing piano, so many theoretical things that get in the way of just trying to make a piece of music sound so good that it might move somebody.

i have to play in the eisteddfod as practice for my exam. it is probably the sixth year in a row that i have been in an eisteddfod but being backstage with everybody else who is competing is the same type of nervewracking, year after year. everybody is familiar. a young girl who is a piano prodigy, people from my high school, other people who learn piano at the same place i do. i try to ignore them and remind myself to enjoy playing, enjoy what will probably be the last time i get to play on the fancy schimmel. the schimmel is a big grand piano, the keys are spongy and the pedals are heavy.

this eisteddfod goes better than any of the ones i have ever been in before. i win a jazz section. i come second in a few sections. i play oboe in it as well. i come first in 'fourth year woodwind solo'. i win some sort of award for being promising, and the adjudicator tells me to keep doing music, he says something like 'the time is now' and i feel excited by how he is talking to me.

the exam is a few months after the eisteddfod and i am feeling more nervous than i ever have before. i want to continue being impressive. i want my last piano exam to be the best one i ever do. i don't know how to calm down and i try to listen to sigur ros to settle myself before i have to leave to go to the exam but i feel like somebody has pressed fast forward on me and walked far away with the remote.

my hands retaliate after all these months of early morning ice cream container practice. they run away from me when i am sitting at the piano in my exam and i play the scales too fast. i fumble through the sight reading, can sing the intervals, can answer general knowledge questions about my pieces. 'the baroque era was from 1600-1750...'

a year or so later i am home from university, at my mum's house. i have not played oboe in months, piano much longer than that. the ice cream container is on the piano still, but empty and dusty. my sister has sheet music strewn around the piano. all i can remember how to play is regina spektor songs.

i sit at the piano again. i am not sure if anything ever happened here before. one of those 'who am i? the sum of all the things i have done previously, or who i exist as, right now in this moment?' moments. are these things still valid, even if i haven't looked at a piece of music in months and months? the piano stool is lower for some reason.

looking at all the music on the floor... this is a piece from 1651 - baroque. this is a piece from 1870 - classical. this is a piece from 1974 - contemporary. i used to hide in those eras, protected by black and white keys and guarded by pedals.

on the table in the kitchen there is a 2008 eisteddfod entry form. there is a list of prizes and donations on the back. there is the award that i won. there is also an award that has never been on there before. it is 'the ann adler memorial award'. music is leaving me, quietly slipping out the back door, disappearing nicely.

1650 c/o Jackson Nieuwland

2011-08-06T20:44:00.002+01:00

Cafés begin to become popular in New Zealand

What’s up with all these fucking cafés?
They’re everywhere nowadays.
Everywhere I turn I’m confronted by them.
With their little tables and their hipster ass baristas in their skinny ass jeans.
Seriously.
I don’t get why people love them so much.
Whenever I try to make plans with anyone they’re all like,
“Yeah I know this great café. Lets meet for coffee.”
And I always respond like,
“Oh actually, I forgot, I can’t do that day.”
And they’re like,
“Oh that’s a shame. I’ll be there anyway so just stop by if your plans change.”
Like I would change my plans to hang out in a café with someone who hangs out in cafés.
I don’t even drink coffee.
It’s disgusting.
It smells horrible.
I remember once we had to make it at school and I drank some and threw up.
After that none of the girls at school looked at me again.
The stain on the carpet never came out.
People made so much fun of me.
Never again.
That shit is poisonous.
Caffeine.
Who needs it?
I’m straight edge and proud of it.
And I’m legit unlike these other posers, taking antidepressants and cough drops and shit.
A drug is a drug is a drug guys.
Don’t forget it.
I mean depression?
You need to stop being such a fucking pussy.
Do you think I got all weepy when my parents died in a car crash?
Hell no.
I didn’t shed a tear.
I just went on living my lief.
Without coffee.
Even if I did drink that shit I wouldn’t spend my cash on fancy ass drinks and expensive ass pastries.
I don’t want no soy.
I don’t want no chai.
What the fuck is chai?
I mean it’s not like we live in Europe or Paris or some shit guys.
This is New Zealand.
What ever happened to a Coke and a steak and cheese pie?*
That’s the only sort of pastry I can get down with.
And I know you’re the same.
Quit trying to be someone you’re not.
Don’t you remember all the fun we used to have?
Can’t you just come over to my house.
I’ll microwave some popcorn.
We can watch School Of Rock.
It’ll be fun.
I promise.

*And yes I realise Coke has caffeine in it but none of us are fucking perfect are we? We all have our vices. Every now and then I just feel like splurging. I mean, I don’t have anyone anymore. My family’s dead and all my friends are hanging out in cafés. What choice do I have but to turn to Coke? There are plenty of worse things I could be doing. I’m only human. Don’t judge me.**

**And I didn’t use footnotes because of David Foster Wallace I used them because of Terry Pratchett!!

1649 c/o James Chapman

2011-08-04T15:09:00.000+01:00

The laws of nature are discoverable by means of reason

As I combed her long dark hair she spoke of death as a glory. I would have to forget my body to feel this glory. Death was truth, culture, an engraving in copper greening on the wet ground. Underground, everything you can name melts into time, gets resolved by truth into truth. Like, the face of the beautiful woman becomes jelly. The tongue of the gourmet becomes soup. Truth tends toward glop, muck. As I combed her hair, she sang a hymn to muck, to the combining of all in all. As I combed, as I chased confused tangled clumps of hair back up to their source and negotiated their rhetoric and became lost in the problems of earthly insoluble hair, she took the crayons and put them in the cooking pot one by one. If she found a red crayon, she next put green. If orange, immediately purple. The wax attacked itself as it melted. Yet it was me who built this cooking fire for her, I even willingly stirred the pot, though gazing in my mind at the individual crayons as they’d been before they became ruined by truth. I best loved mocha, saffron, gold, uterine, royal purple, permanent crimson. Colors are ephemeral. Laughter is untrue. The list of untrue things is the infinite list of moments in the life of the world. That engraved copper plate has Sanskrit words mingled with Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Sumerian. To one who knows all these languages, it’s clear that the meaning here is hopelessly fucked. But for all of us who can’t read these words, the engraving is mystery, it seems to sing monody about what is permanent. The pot of all colors, when combined by melting, when viewed with ultimate perspective, that brew is muckbrown. As I combed the dark hair of my permanent, life-long, never-to-be-parted-from, souls-joined-forever-in-truth wife, my body was directly behind hers, but in this world our bodies are ephemeral. When a guy crossing the street suddenly laughs at a memory that hits him from twenty years ago, and you’re watching on the corner, you see his face change, you witness blossoming brightening. Next instant his laugh is gone. It’ll never reappear that same way. You saw it, yes. But you don’t know this guy, and he’s not important, you don’t have to care about his life or the hilarity he’s suddenly understood, the light that flickered in him. You should forget the whole thing and fix your mind instead on a particular text of a dead poet. That poet once witnessed the face of a woman crumple with desire. Another time in his now-ceased life, he saw sheet lightning illuminate a ravine and make it a revelation of beauty. Those two incidents gave him emotions, which he combined in a stanza, using them up so he couldn’t use them again elsewhere, thus approaching his death a stanza nearer. The poem became famous, was published again and again for centuries, now you know it. You recite it as you cross the street, you watch the traffic carefully, you want your body to live. The poem is true. The woman’s desire, the sheet lightning, those were not true, they were junk, and the man’s laughter you’re ignoring right now is stupid. Try to pay attention to what I’m saying, I know it’s hard. You can’t love both your wife’s hair and her soul. Or if you must, consider her hair a direct expression of her soul. That’d be unscientific though. Many women have tremendous hair and no souls whatever. Souls only exist in those people who love death, hence live for truth. Am I being clear? I combed her hair, irrationally since she could have done it herself, that was my love for her soul operating. A scientific approach to her tangles would be to shave her head and separate all the strands with a machine. Aristotle once cut open a fish to see how it worked. Nobody had ever thought of doing that before! The inner workings of the fish are not the same as eternal truth, since fish are ephemeral and pleasurable and practical and pointless, but at least the workings of fish are generically true. There was a cat in the room with Aristotle while he dissected. This cat didn’t believe in eternal truth at all, he just wanted to eat the fish. Aristotle would have said this is merely how the cat-machine works. That was how the Aristotle-machine worked. There was also a fish in the room with Aristotle and the cat, but because the fish was dead nobody mentions it as having the right to an opinion. Its desire was to exist, swimming, being silver. Stupid impermanent fish. Personally I’d’ve liked to see the fish in the water, flashing light, carrying life away within it. But Aristotle won’t let me, because I’m wrong, I’m just wrong. I combed my wife’s hair and she talked constantly. She said things you young people wouldn’t be able to appreciate, because you’ve failed to clamp your joy to the awareness of death. She talked about Descartes’ remark that the soul has nothing, nothing to do with the body. This was typical of the beauty of her soul, bleak beauty. Her hair expressed this, in my opinion, though not according to Aristotle. I was not allowed to hack the tangled clump of hair out with a knife, but must coax it, make it cooperate with ephemeral reality. Every day this coaxing. I was a crayon that would not melt. Palepink, almost white. In the world of light, all colors combine to create white, not mucky brown. I was not living, at that time, in the world of light. Light, soul-stuff, bounced off me like my skin was a mirror, floods of light, I felt none of it. So painfully pale. The sun had never touched me, and I’d never touched the sun. The sun is permanent, but my pleasure in the heat of the sun, that’s ephemeral. Have I got that right? No. Even the sun is ephemeral. There’s a ten-billion-year limit to its desperate desire to burn and burn and burn.

1648 c/o Chas Carey

2011-07-30T17:13:00.002+01:00

Westphalia

These are the lines we have drawn. Before today, I said things, I did things, and I admit, I was wrong, even though deep down inside I still feel like I’m probably right. Shakespeare once wrote “we are the makers of manners,” and maybe that’s true. Do the English even read Shakespeare any more? Who knows. Bad times over there. But I’m putting off the issue of us. Like usual, you’d say.

It wasn’t really war at first, but I don’t think anyone would’ve called it love. We were just there. Lots of shouting arguments in the early mornings, at my place or yours. Heads rolled. There were discussions in dark corridors.

I grew to learn the names of places I had no idea I was unwelcome in. You kept wrecking my reputation during the day and coming back home to me at night. Sometimes we sat across the table from one another, staring until we fell asleep. Why do you stay together if this is what you do? Someone asked me that once. I said I didn’t know any other way. I don’t think you did, either, though.

But yeah, I treated you badly. I never let you be who you wanted to be when you were around me, because you scared me, you and your modern love. I wanted to be the man for all seasons, the guy who went around known to have done everything, been anywhere, and you punched a hole right through all that.

So, sure, yes, I yelled. When it wasn’t going to work, I tried to throw you out. And when I couldn’t, I forced us together. Like I said, I still feel right in some ways. Like I deserved to feel new and you took it away. But these are the lines we have drawn. We can say all we like, but what we do day in, day out, that’s our own business, now. You have your space and I have mine.

I think we’ve got no choice but to try. I mean, you’ve seen through me. I can’t make you un-see. But we’re old enough and tired enough and after all of this maybe we know better. Maybe we can hold each other at arm’s length instead of clutched together screaming in the heat of the night. For a while. Maybe.

1647 c/o Justin Carter

2011-07-27T08:43:00.001+01:00

Christmas

Our father traced his earliest ancestor back to 1647, the year Christmas was banned in England by the Puritans. To commemorate our family history, he started going out every Christmas Eve and doing his best Tom Waits impression at the shittiest bars he could find, breathing in whiskey and singing “Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis” unaccompanied on the karaoke machine until the bartender, growing irate due to our father’s far-too-drunken state, would kick him out onto the street. Mother put me in charge of bringing him home. When my sister grew older, she began joining me on the yearly expedition. We would always find him laid out in an alley way, unaware of everything happening around him, coat-less in a light snow. We would throw him in the car, drive him home, and then leave him alone in the backseat. The next morning, while our father slept in the driveway, our mother would bring us the stockings of candy she had kept hidden from our father. My sister would smile at our only piece of “holiday joy” while I would eat the candy as fast as I could. Then the stockings would go back into the attic, away from our father’s ever-watchful eyes, into a chest in the corner of it, to be stored until the next season arrived and we repeated our secret rituals. When our father inevitably awoke from his stupor, he would walk inside the house, unaware we had celebrated the forbidden holiday, seat himself on the couch, and stare at the television screen. He never turned it on.

1646 c/o Benjamin King

2011-07-23T16:51:00.004+01:00

Guillaume Colletet Versus The Karate
Sluts on the Moon (Space Future 1646)

1645 c/o Derek Piotr

2011-07-20T20:24:00.006+01:00

you've lost Carlisle

aren't you afraid of Death?

sometimes I need a prompt, a push. a hand
to reach through fog and strike me; remind me
I am the rachis.

the rachis that made these wings is me; when I forget
what flight is, those days exist only to compare
to the times I feel the rachis as my spine, air coursing
through to nourish and lighten.

the days of absence complete the days of potency.

aren't you afraid of losing potency?

I wake and sleep in the same place each day, though each day
I grow stronger, lurch into my years of potency.
you're growing rust, it's coming from your eyes,
it's replacing your heart.

oil is gone from the earth. you follow soon.

(some seed buried deep.
slow rape.)

1644 c/o Shaun Gannon

2011-07-18T23:38:00.002+01:00

Nine Haiku

you make the fire
and I'll show you something wonderful:
a baby Bashō!

a Bashō
staggers out
of the peony.

a caterpillar,
this deep in fall--
still not a Bashō.

don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a Bashō.

from time to time
the clouds give rest
to the moon Bashōs.

taking a nap,
feet planted
against a cool Bashō.

winter garden,
the moon thinned to a thread,
Bashōs singing.

a man, infirm
with age, slowly sucks
a Bashō.

what fish feel,
Bashōs feel, I don't know--
the year ending.

1643 c/o Helen Dring

2011-07-16T12:49:00.002+01:00

The Soldier Walks Like Light.

He sleeps like he prays, lost and deep. He should be steeled, half awake and always ready but, instead, he slumbers like a man who sleeps with people he trusts with his life. He came a week before the others. He is thin, like a scholar who does not eat because he is too preoccupied with books and parchment. He should not be a soldier.

Clothilde says the man that hides at her house is much different, that he tears great chunks of meat with his teeth and swills down wine like it flows from a spring. Her man is a fighter, pure and bred. He sleeps with a knife in his hand and watches her when she goes to feed the chickens in case she is seeking out Roundheads to betray him to.

But our solider is silent. He nods meekly when we offer him food and nibbles on bread like a child. He reads until the early hours, his eyes straining in the dark. Once, when he saw me watching, he asked if I could read. When I shook my head, he took my finger and traced the shape of the letters on the page, reciting each one to me as he read. That's the closest any woman in my family has come to reading, that would-be soldier holding my hand as he turned the pages.

Tomorrow he moves to the church. The church, my father says, is the central point. There will be many others, ready to defend the King, to fight for God. I wish my soldier would stay, that we could hide him here forever. He could be my brother, or a cousin, or an orphan that we took in years ago. No-one need know. But there is a shame in avoiding battle, in running from the fight.

I closed my eyes as his footsteps walked away from our cottage. Farther up the hill, the church stands proud. His feet are light against the grass and I know, without looking, that he walks with his head held high.

The Roundheads will come with the dawn, and my soldier may not see the dusk.

1642 c/o J. |Bradley

2011-07-12T22:27:00.001+01:00

Dinner is Served

The fine China remains locked in the armoire. The silverware sleeps in red linen napkins on the dining room table. My mother watches Hyacinth Bucket correct the new vicar how her last name is pronounced. My father slaps open cabinet doors in the kitchen closed like a jaw.

1641 c/o Sully Sanchez

2011-07-10T15:21:00.005+01:00

a description of the famous kingdome of macaria

what is the right number of people to exist
right now

i'm either going to turn you into a magnet and
throw you off a bridge or calmly unzip your
clothing i can’t decide

just relax and stop ruining everything it’s ok to
be a quiet dandelion it’s a utopia after all

the fridge is our utopia and if we had decent
coats we'd live there 8 months a year easy i
reckon

eventually you’re going to think of a reason for
cartwheeling down the street trust me

wait would you rather be experiencing the
moment you’re experiencing right now or the
best moment of an African dictator’s life

i can probably take you out if you want and you
can watch me bowl a 116 or something sounds
fun

i want to sit a badger in a tin bathtub and throw
confetti and then turn around slowly on the
spot as it falls while he watches

ok but you are still only about half as serious as
any kind of sandwich

there are two types of people: us and
gondoliers

i promise

i would like to lie on an iceberg near a penguin
and when he sleeps i'll put a medal round his
neck and call you to come look

this is ours and this a utopia i promise

1640 c/o Ben Brooks

2011-06-27T22:45:00.002+01:00

On Yixing Tea Pot and Loaves of Leaves

Zhou was my Grandfather’s Springer Spaniel. She liked the orange leaves. My Grandfather liked bean curd, and I liked white chocolate. Zhou grew like a raincloud in Autumn. She pulled herself across the carpets and sparks leaked from under her tail. Me and my grandfather are determinists. We believe that when you turn on the light, the light gets turned on.

Me and my Grandfather live on the hill of Perspex Dolls. That isn’t part of the story, just we don’t get many visitors.

The moon was rocking and the air was a cactus. Me and my Grandfather were in the garden watching each other breathe. He was wearing eight scarves. I was topless. I was building my chest up so that I could climb a glacier if there were floods in the new year. There was a bonfire, which was really just a small tree, covered with hay and firelighters and matches.

Be nice to your mother, my grandfather said.

Okay, I said.

Bean curd, my grandfather said, and he lifted a fistful of it out from his left breast pocket.

What is Limnic Eruption, I said.

Lie down, my grandfather said, and flecks of bean curd jumped from his face.

We lay down in the mud and dead grass. My grandfather started on one of his coughing fits. His spine became a skipping rope.

Are you okay, I said. Do you want me to bang you on the back.

No, he said. Don’t bang me on the back.

I rolled over and fell asleep.

In the morning I thought I could hear steel drums but I couldn’t. Zhou was inbetween me and my grandfather and I could tell she was dead because she doesn’t sleep. She used to but she came home from her dreams daubed with bruises the size of lilypads. It made us upset. We fed her dandelions for breakfast. I like white chocolate. We live on the hill of Perspex Dolls.

She’s dead maybe, my grandfather said.

Yes, I said.

Bang her on the back, my grandfather said.

You bang her on the back, I said.

My grandfather kicked his Springer Spaniel and her body moved. We saw a large swelling in her stomach.

Leaves, I said. Loaves of leaves.

No, my grandfather said. Fetch the scissors.

No, I said.

Marry a girl who can jump, he said. Like really jump. Whole flights of stairs.

I wanted to hit him but I didn’t. I sat down and itched the insides of my ears. My grandfather pulled Zhou apart. He climbed inside of her. It sounded like large men beating horses with pickaxe handles. There were candles in my ears. I vomited a little.

When my grandfather reappeared he was holding a clay teapot filled with Oolong. He says that was the first time. He says that is how it happened. When we’re both on our rocking chairs, looking out at the floods rolling in. He likes bean curd, I like white chocolate. The sky is blue, the air is mud. Zhou liked the orange leaves. I’m tired. She was a kiln.

1639 c/o Carolyn DeCarlo

2011-06-13T16:05:00.002+01:00

Sakoku

She stands by the front door, right on its edge, her toes pointed toward the threshold, not touching but very close. She’s very near to the door even though she knows she shouldn’t touch it, wouldn’t dare to touch it, her palm up to greet it although the greeting will never reach it. This feeling comes and goes and sometimes she has to get as close as she can, as if to tempt his rage. Outside, she hears the familiar grainy vibrations of a tricycle, the burgeoning voices of children racing past and she has an impulse to join them or invite them in that she must suppress and she feels the cool, varnished wood on her palm before she can react or stop it.

Impossibly fast, the voice descends from the stairs What were you doing? and he is upon her, rushing upon her too fast it’s impossible, one hand twisting in her black hair, pulling down sharp on her neck. Ah! she cries and the sound is quick and high. He pulls harder until her knees clip the tile. What did I tell you? he yells but his voice is suppressed and she knows she is going on a journey, her calves bite the grout as he slides her toward the stairs and up, the turning key a familiar sound then blackness.

He doesn’t touch her any more, his fury has changed—it is quieter now but always there under the surface—and she often wishes he would, just to break the hopelessness of it all. In the beginning, when everything was heightened, he would push into her room after her, his pants around his ankles, pushing into her and rough. In the beginning, when she still had the confidence to leave and he still had the sexual drive to force her submission. Sometimes she misses that, the harder actions, the deeper burn that is over now. She is afraid of this feeling, but it is there and she will admit it.

It has been too long since she first crossed onto this suburban plot of land, since she last saw her mother or felt the unexpected thrill of a stranger’s face nearing hers or invited the mailman in for a drink. In the darkness she counts the seconds the minutes, the time he leaves her growing longer as the years accumulate. He is able to forget about her when she is in there and she thinks that must be a pleasurable feeling and sometimes she wonders why he doesn’t just release her but she remembers the deepest hunger is for power and he will never let her go. All that remains now is a routine without feeling, a routine built out of force that will continue until death, which she assumes hasn’t happened yet, and may continue after. She pulls her dress down and pushes her breasts up and hears him approaching on the stair and hopes at least he will hurt her a little.

1638 c/o Becky Lang

2011-06-08T15:29:00.003+01:00

Moone

1638 began on a Friday. Greg was lying on the ground outside, staring at the earth. What was he supposed to do tonight? He took a knife out of his pocket and took a slice of the ground, rolling it up to make a mock telescope. A piece of gray, clay-like substance fell off and he put it in his mouth.

Emma had said she was busy, looking away while she took out her ponytail and started weaving it into two small braids. She didn’t have any binders so they just kind of tapered off in the ends and soon they had fallen out altogether.

What was she doing? Greg wondered. Maybe she’s visiting that crater about a mile away with Oliver, and the earth will move away from the sun and crater water will go purple and he’ll say Come in and she’ll get down to just a white cotton bra and panties and they’ll swim and throw mud clay at one another and laugh.

Greg got into a crab-walk position and stuck his knife into the ground. Slowly, he walked on three legs, twenty feet one way, and twenty feet back, cutting out a rectangular slice of ground with the knife. He took his piece of moon and then spun it like a lasso around his head until it grew miles long, and then he whipped it down to the earth.

It hit a man named John Wilkins in the head while he was running down a hill, chasing a quill pen that was rolling away. He picked it up by its end, thinking that it looked like a sandy gray cat tongue. It was hot and strange, with a few beads of the substance crumbling off the end. He put one in his mouth and it tasted like burnt marshmallow and rotten limes. He tugged at the rest and was surprised to find that it tugged back.

That night, John Wilkins was laying on his stomach and digging out loose bits of tobacco from his bed cushion when he heard a noise outside. He looked out the window and saw a brunette girl with dark circles under her eyes. She was running the other way and then suddenly stopped. She looked over her shoulder and then walked toward the house.

She looked about 14 and she was mostly naked. He opened the door and saw that she was bleeding in her elbow.

“That bird bit me,” she said, and her voice was thin like the holes in bread.

She was covered in gray mud. John went inside and wet a towel and then told her to come to the creek that was down the hill from his house. There was a small pond next to the creek, and they got inside. He cleaned the blood from her arm slowly and asked, “Why are you here?”

“Because it’s so boring up there,” she answered.

She motioned for John to come to her, and as he approached, she leaned her head to the right, exposing her neck as her wet hair fell. John touched her skin with the tip of his tongue and it tasted familiar so he gave it a big lap. The gray stuff crumbled off and it was the same sweet, scorched taste as before. He kept licking it until she was clean, and then she ran out and jumped into the creek.

He ran after her, but it was too late. He sat on the bank of the water and ate some grass from the ground, blade by blade. After a while, he walked up the hill and saw his pen. The next morning he woke up and threw up seven times, until he was just dry heaving. In his dizzy state, he poured some lemonade and began to write a book about building a bird-like contraption that can take you outside the sphere of gravity, after which you will float up to the moon. He called it The Discovery of a World in the Moone.

1637 c/o Len Kuntz

2011-06-05T23:01:00.002+01:00

A Place Called Mistick

My brother rips off a strip of deer meat and chews while saying, “We should kill them all. Woman and children, too.”

His long brown hair is tied in a ponytail and he’s shirtless. Wisps of wood smoke curl behind his back where a breeze twirls and the effect of this sight, mixed with Running Boar’s smoldering anger, makes me grin.

My brother kicks me, his toe as sharp as an arrowhead through the moccasin. Running Boar’s eyes are black holes, each with a center flame of red. His face twists and contorts. He has finger-painted two blue slashes on either side of his high cheek bones. War paint. He is too eager. Even Father tells him to settle down. “We are so many. They are but few. This is our land.” Still, my brother is a fuse, an angry coil. Once upon a time, though, we played with pet squirrels and swam streams. We used to chase mountain goats when we were younger, trying to out run them, but now we are men and my brother is all about decimating the white man, greedy to make their blood soak through the sun-baked soil of these rolling hills.

“If you are Pequot, you will not stand by and watch these invaders steal our land,” Running Boar says. “You are a fool with your happy ways.”

I have not told my brother that I am in love with First To Dance, she with eyes as blue as turquoise. Running Boar once loved her himself, but now the white man crushes his heart.

First To Dance is pale for a Pequot but her smile is ripe. I see her raising our strong sons. I see myself loving her as an old man, loving her all the days of my life.

Running Boar says, “You are too comfortable. You stare into the sky and spin silly thoughts.”

“Yes, it’s true,” I say.

“Someday the snake will draw your blood.”

I make a phony motion as if my hand’s been bitten. I jerk it to resemble spasms of spurting blood. Running Boar has no choice but to laugh. “My brother is crazy,” he says, shaking his head.

I believe we are no different than the white man. We have dissimilar skins, yes, and different customs, but our bodies and minds are composed of the same chemicals. We should be able to coexist. I am thinking this in my hammock on a morning when a few tiny birds chatter atop a bushy tree.

Today I will tell First To Dance of my feelings for her. She knows them already, but it’s better if I say these things with words to her so-pretty face.

Afterward I will ride into the settlement which sits in a valley fifteen miles from Mystic. I will ask to meet with Mr. John Gardner who is chief of the white men there. I will broker an agreement to ensure peace. I am certain Mr. John Gardner wants this as much as most of our people. If he resists, I will go to our brothers from the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes and gain their heavy muscle. But we will not make war. Fighting is what animals do.

I’m about to lift my body and start my day when I feel the air tremble, the ground shuddering. Birds squawk and scatter. I can hear hundreds of hooves pounding like thunder. In the distance, a dust cloud hovers over the peak of a hill.

Running Boar screams. He is the first, but the rest of us follow. Bullets and arrows. Metal and flame. One by one, we are erased from history.

1636 c/o James Duncan

2011-05-30T19:57:00.006+01:00

hehe 666 pt. ?

He holds her shoulder between a thumb and index finger. It feels like sixteen thirty-six—soft, still going. He compares it to the moment. He wonders where all his good ideas went. He says her name and she wakes. He had not thought it would be that easy.

She does a tired, indistinct version of the stretch that she does when she wakes up. She looks at him to ask “are you getting in to or out of bed,” but she cannot manage to speak yet. He smiles. He says it is okay, but he is unsure of what. Why did he need to say that. It is early, it is a lot of things / It is probably okay.

A light wind passes over the windowsill into the room, making the door creak on its hinges / and the image of a tiny wincing star flickers across the area in between his eyes and something else. He thinks about taking a bath but shivers when he thinks about stepping out of it. She wants to eat the soap that smells like Turkish delight and is already asleep again. He slides his side of the blanket between the futon and her body, so that it is pressed close against both. He puts his face on her face and whispers, “Mummified.”

He puts his feet on the floor and stands up. He thinks “dead” and then “no, don’t.”

Later, he sits in the corner and reads a message on Gmail:

also
i don't get the

"it feels like sixteen thirty-six"

why did you decide to write it like that

i mean...

is that the connection to the year?
that line?

ok baby
xxx

He thinks things unrelated to the message like “nnnnmnmnnn,” “are those teeth?” and then “not this again.” He sits on the edge of the bed, almost slipping from it, and looks at the little barely-breathing cocoon that lies there. He replies to the message on Gmail.

i think it might be like a bro with his woman[who is also the ‘piece’] '1636' and then he kills her.. : / iunno iunno iunno iunno iunno

i will make some frickin edit

but does it make sense, that line... dygi?

i feel autistic

He drinks a chocolate flavoured soy-based protein drink, tasting the soy about one second before tasting the chocolate flavour. He feels like this is significant. He considers shaving his face but doesn’t shave his face. He reads a message on Gmail.

well... i mean it's kind of confusing, like...

i really like it, by the way

actually a lot

(sorry i didn't say that already)

i was just confused about how it came across as a 'google file'

and i was like THE FUCK IS THIS GOOGLE WHAT HAVE YOU FRICKEN *DONE*?

but yeah

i do really like it

but

it's like... it's ok if it's abstract, or confusing, as long as i can tell myself "there is a reason that this is 1636 as opposed to just like... 1637 or 1840 or whatever"

does that sounds legit? or fucked?

i mean... could you incorporate something in there... or am i missing it?

that's why i asked about the title...

i thought "am i missing something?"

but ya

fricken

sorry about this... i'm being a butthead

BABY GOOD MORNIN'

He stares at the screen and contemplates the title “um more like 666 frickin meta 1636, hehe,” but feels that it would assume things about an audience or something. In a Microsoft Word document he changes the word “mattress” to “futon”.

Later, on Facebook chat, he writes, “how do I go invisible on chat?” and then “how do I go invisible IRL?” He knows he is confused but can only think about his confusion in a confused way. Yesterday, the Shogun forbade anyone from leaving or returning to the country.

1635 c/o Jared Dawson

2011-05-23T13:45:00.009+01:00

Distance is the space between my last word
and your next one. Distance is the arc this knife
will travel as it explores around your neck.

When Maria Callas hits the high note at the end of “Signore, Ascolta” in Puccini’s Turnadot, I cannot help thinking of Rembrandt’s “Sacrifice of Abraham.” Abraham, crouched over his son, one hand planted firmly across Issac’s face – a wave of violence rushing down from the shoulder. His face is turned towards the interruption of the Angel’s voice calling out, “Abraham! Abraham!”

Follow the blue of the Angel’s sleeve to Abraham’s blue robe down to the blanket spilling out underneath the notches of Issac’s spine. A wave crests just off his left shoulder.

Follow the blue that for two months trails Rembrandt’s first born, Rumbartus, and wraps him tight from head to toe.

Follow the blank gaze of the angel that passes in front of Abraham’s face, over Issac’s head. Rembrandt’s Angel of Mercy gropes darkly for Abraham’s wrist and is relieved when the fingers wrap around it.

Abraham says, “Here I am.” He does not move his hand from Issac’s face to wipe away the tear that you will see in the corner of his eye if you creep close to the canvas. His right wrist aches in the grasp of the Angel.

The Angel says, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, do not do anything to him,” using a form of the negative imperative that is reserved for expressing immediately pressing, specific commands. “Al-tishlach.” “Al-ta as.”

Abraham can barely hear the Angel speak over the B-flat rolling out from Maria Callas’ throat.

It peels Abraham’s fingers from around the knife.

Listen carefully.

You can hear the soft rattle of Callas’ molars vibrating one against the other in the 1954 recording.

You can hear the sound of a knife falling to the rocks.

1634 c/o Eric Beeny

2011-05-15T01:29:00.005+01:00

The Heliocentrist

Galileo drops small things off his balcony onto people’s heads as they pass by his villa in Florence, then he hides behind the stone railing.

Tiny pebbles, rare coins, water balloons.

One guy, Galileo drops a bowling ball on his head and it sinks into his skull like a cake.

The guy looks up at Galileo and yells something in Latin, but Galileo can’t understand him.

Galileo tries seeing the guy's eyes through the dark caves of the bowling ball’s finger holes, but it’s too dark in there.

Galileo just waves the guy on and the guy wobbles down to Galileo’s neighbor’s house, knocks on the door.

A few days later Galileo makes a yo-yo out of a large pulley and a strand of silk.

Galileo practices off the balcony when no one's looking.

* * *

Galileo observes small things through his telescope as the planet he lives on revolves somewhere in space.

He doesn’t think God gives a shit if humans think the Earth is where they think it is, whether or not it’s in the middle of everything.

He goes up to the roof of his villa in Florence and looks at the stars, imagines those small things falling on his head.

Galileo wishes it was his birthday, but for that he’d need a cake with candles to blow out, and since it’s not his birthday he doesn’t have that.

He doesn’t know what he’d wish for other than that it be his birthday, and that he’d once again be young enough to not have to appreciate it.

Galileo’s not sure how small the stars he’s observing are, but he knows they’re far away, and he thinks that must mean something big.

He thinks about what Ptolemy or Copernicus would've thought if Ptolemy or Copernicus were both Galileo thinking they were him.

Galileo watches from his roof, and something moves in the sky, a shooting star, a gash opening the darkness and the darkness healing back in on itself.

“What do these things have in common with my perception of them?” he thinks out loud.

“They both exist,” one of his servants yells up to him from a window below.

“Ah, horseshit,” Galileo says. “You’ve been cooped up inside too long.”

* * *

Galileo can’t sleep.

He has a hernia.

He lies in bed with his eyes closed, grinding his teeth.

He scratches his shoulder, his thigh.

Galileo becomes a star, his theories solar flares.

Controversy revolves around him.

He thinks big thoughts.

Solar system.

The Pope.

God.

Galileo wishes he'd invented the Pope.

Galileo wants to invent a new God, his own God.

Maybe lots of Gods.

God of balconies and God of pebbles, God of stars and God of telescopes, God of bakers and God of cake, God of bowling balls and God of water balloons, God of sleep.

Galileo gets out of bed, looks out the window, the sun shaping with soft light the horizon like a cracked glow stick.

He nails his blanket from one wall to another so it’s suspended in the air, and he puts a bowling ball on the blanket, and the middle of the blanket sinks under the weight of it, the blanket tearing a bit on the nails.

Galileo rolls water balloons onto the blanket and they wiggle in orbit around the bowling ball.

The Earth revolves around the sun.

The sun rising, it’s just the Earth revolving somewhere.

Galileo sends his servant out for more water balloons.

Galileo's eyesight is failing.

When the sun comes up, Galileo will get drunk and cover the window with his blanket, light candles all around his room and sit in the corner squinting with an inquisitive look on his face while the room spins all around him.

1633 c/o Andrea Mullaney

2011-05-13T20:09:00.002+01:00

The Big Girl

There came a point when I met my parents’ gaze head on: I was seven. My mother's eyes were full of worry for me; my father’s, I think, held a touch of fear. Perhaps I had a choice then: to keep growing or try to stay there and wait for my age to catch up with my body. But I couldn’t bear looking in their eyes, so I kept going until their heads were far below me. Then I felt like the adult and they were the children, so small, needing protection.

When they put me on show, at carnivals, at court, I felt that I should really be giving them something more for their money – a few tricks, perhaps, or a song. It didn’t seem so very entertaining just to stand there and be myself. Yet the gawkers seemed happy enough just to stare and endlessly ask such ordinary, dull questions: What does she eat? Where does she sleep? Where do you get her shoes?

No one asked what I would have thought the obvious one: What does it feel like?

It feels like my bones are pulling against each other, stretching to grow even larger.

It feels like I am a changeling from another time when everyone will be this size and we will all walk around level with the trees.

It feels like you are all the same, peasant or princess, just craning heads peering up at me, poor little curious children.

It feels lonely and magnificent and terrible and strange and painful, all at once.

It is probably best that they do not ask.

1632 c/o Scott Riley Irvine

2011-05-07T18:59:00.001+01:00

The Divine Hand, on the Arm Longer than the Other

The Wrist

Today is dedicated to the hand, its tendons, the pulp gleaned from the forearm.

Dr. Tulp has discreetly concealed the parts he had severed in sessions prior. The cadaver appears newly deceased, except that it has no neck. One arm is longer than the other. The chest is distended and swollen, the color of fly-blown light. Men in black cloaks jostle with one another for a seat as the Vesalius of Amsterdam takes his place at the center of the room. The event begins as an uproarious one. Tulp calms them to a low murmur. Their syncopated breath begins to form tides, like waves tethered to the moon’s pull.

Curling about his stature.

This is a ritual. This is Holland’s bloody church.

Tulp is dizzy from the smell, the cadaver nearing five days old. They leave it beneath several blankets in a back alleyway. The cold has kept rot from gutting what we need of it. The armored tones of an organ fledge the auditorium with deep, brown plumage. The doctor excuses himself from the opening prayer. He ignores the whispered offers of company. He escapes down hallways receding infinitely.

A student has left parchment scattered in the atrium. On them are sketches of Tulp performing surgery. Extracting organs. Striking poses during lectures he wished now that he hadn’t. And the skeletal outlines of his associates, his colleagues, drawn deeper and with darker shades, mouths frothing in his shadow, vultures perched around the cadaver. Tulp licks the creases for the taste of dead skin cells. Tulp folds the parchment into tiny squares. He wants to give them to a professional artist. He wants to burn them in his garden with the portrait of his father.

Tulp has returned, visibly shaken. Tulp has become conscious of his posture. He allows each of his movements several minutes longer. He buttons his gaze sidelong to the angle in which he had been drawn. The artist is among them, he thinks. Tulp’s face is among his pages. The cadaver’s broad feet. The men’s reticella collars, like wilted flowers on the operating floor.

The Elbow

We believe in redemption. Good born from the bad. The hanged man is allowing God's fluency in engineering to be revealed to us. It comes in wet ribbons from out of his mouth.

We are told the hands are God’s greatest of gifts. Great tact has been taken to present them as such. The cadaver’s hands were carefully manicured, given a thin coat of makeup, rosied around the knuckles. We had witnessed the cadaver’s execution. We knew him to be loud. An admirer of young girls. He fell from the gallows so that he may be consecrated by the scalpel.

We have seen his chest splintered into two halves. We praised our Lord for giving us symmetry. We have seen his neck part so easily from the torso. We praised our Lord for our fragility.

I’m a message from the brain. I send it here. His finger moves like so.

There is only the sound of a collective scratching of silverpoint to collagen. Unlit patches painted across the outer circumference of the auditorium. By understanding the body, we understand Him. We fasten ourselves to the bowing of the radial artery at the elbow. We imbibe ourselves with the protein of its wiring. The caustic sheen of the musculature ruptures with unbound intricacies. We don’t understand what Tulp is saying. We understand completely. We glorify him who glorifies our God, and in glorifying the body that allows him the organs, the blood, the dark purple hues beneath the flesh – we glorify ourselves.

1631 c/o Chantel Louise Tattoli

2011-05-05T19:41:00.002+01:00

Grandma, Can the Volcano?

Blow its lid, again? Child. They always do.

I remember 1631 was just like AD 79. There was this mushroom cloud. And it looked like Hiroshima. The world—my my, it’s so old. It’s too old to be original anymore.

I remember 1631 was red—all about red, little girl. (You’re a boy? Your hair is so long.)

Red everything. In Pompeii, pumice hit terracotta shingles hard enough to make it crack. It hit people and cracked their heads wide open, and they dripped as they ran, trails of blood that looked like lava to ants.

In 1631, ash from Vesuvius fell on red red tulips in Constantinople. It fell like gray snow in New York. I mean like at Ground Zero. That was red, too. Anger’s red.

Kiddy. I’m sorry. I’m too old to be original.

Does your mother wear red lipstick? In my day, I always wore red lipstick. I dated men with tempers like volcanos. Men who liked to blow up.

Your mother should cut your hair, child.

Me.

I’m only sorry I don’t have any red candy for you.

1630 c/o Kirsty Logan

2011-05-02T02:42:00.002+01:00

The Romance of History

If you were lost out on the moors, she says, like because of a snowstorm or a hurricane or a zombie apocalypse or something – and say in this alternate world I was a horse, too – then I'd totally let you disembowel me and then climb inside my body to keep warm. I totally would.

And also, she says, if someone stole the stones of your tomb to build themselves a house, because they weren't scared of ghosts or curses – and say that I was still alive and not buried – then I'd go to that house and tear it apart and rebuild your tomb. With my bare hands, I swear.

Most of all, she says, if the wind and the rain and the escaped prisoners all conspired to wear out the inscription above your kistvaen – or if everyone forgot what the hell a kistvaen even was – then I would remind them, because I would remember. I'll always remember.

I say: you've been reading those damn history books again.

1629 c/o Omar De Col

2011-04-28T23:42:00.003+01:00

Ernesto the handsome Spanish soldier returns
victorious from the Battle of St Kitts and attempts to
have sex with Isabella the beautiful Spanish aristocrat
but is thwarted by women’s fashion circa 1629

“I’m really hot right now Ernesto!”

“O dios Isabella, you are so beautiful, I want you really hard right now!”

“Take me Ernesto, take me!”

Ernesto unties Isabella’s overcoat.

Ernesto kisses Isabella’s cheek.

Ernesto removes Isabella’s hat.

Ernesto pulls off Isabella’s gloves.

Isabella kisses Ernesto’s mouth.

Ernesto begins to unbutton Isabella’s dress.

“Oh be careful Ernesto…”

Ernesto unbuttons Isabella’s dress more slowly.

Ernesto is still unbuttoning Isabella’s dress.

Ernesto removes Isabella’s dress.

Isabella kisses Ernesto on the neck.

Ernesto removes Isabella’s shoes.

Ernesto unclasps Isabella’s stockings.

Each clasp snaps loudly.

SNAP

SNAP

SNAP

Ernesto sees Isabella’s bare leg.

Ernesto has an erection.

Ernesto begins to untie Isabella’s corset.

Ernesto is still untying Isabella’s corset.

“Hurry up Ernesto! Dios mio!”

Ernesto removes Isabella’s corset.

Ernesto sees Isabella’s breasts.

Ernesto has a serious erection.

Isabella is naked.

Ernesto kisses Isabella’s neck.

Ernesto keeps kissing downwards.

Ernesto reaches Isabella’s belly button and feels something metallic on his chin.

Ernesto looks down and realises Isabella is wearing a chastity belt.

"O dios! Isabella! What the heck is this?! Jesus."

"Oh... Just stick it in."

Ernesto looks at the chastity belt.

"No way, it looks like a bear trap."

Isabella leans over and grabs Ernesto's face in both her hands.

Isabella looks into Ernesto's eyes and grins.

"Well, it's not like you're a bear..."

Ernesto interprets this as a crack at the size of his penis.

Ernesto storms out of the room shouting "YOU'RE A REAL WISEGUY ISABELLA!"

1628 c/o Madison Langston

2011-04-25T17:06:00.002+01:00

Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis
et Sanguinis in Animalibus

Those of us living
said, landmarks/ligatures. We said,
history. W called it: the record of how
it moved in us. W said he measured it.
Called it mechanical.

They said his project was informational
and emotional.

W said, The experiment
contained only blood.

Of how our insides are
organized. An abundance of
systems. A warm bath. Or
a thorax when breathing.

The skin being
performed. Or just the motion of it.

The way we contained it. Spinning.
A chronicle of events. A story.
Inventory. An

anatomical structure or
another hollow structure.

Blood and lymph. A loop.

1627 c/o Alexander J. Allison

2011-04-21T12:42:00.001+01:00

Zurbaran, Christ on the Cross

Today,
in an alcove behind the altar,
I saw Jesus.

I mean it was obviously him;
there was no mistaking that.

Against the darkness,
his head lolled deeply into his shoulder,
in a lazy, calm way.

Though still pimping a cross,
he wasn’t suffering:
he looked like a handsome fucker,
all luminous and ‘out-there’,
rare and enticing, like a shiny Pokémon card.
His skin was sculpted,
rippled with carpentry’s defined muscles.

Jesus seemed very still.
I could imagine him waking up and announcing,
‘I’m back, bitches’
in an indignant, American accent
that would still manage to ring with a cloying purity.

I stayed for a while, expecting correspondence,
hoping to be complicit in his comeback:
humanity’s finalé,
our top ten hits.

Though only a painting,
I had believed him.
I don’t feel tricked at all.

1626 c/o Ben Brooks

2011-04-12T16:44:00.000+01:00

Würzburg

I really think you are a witch and I am scared that you will eat me, my wife said.
I wont eat you, I said.
She turned on her side, facing away from me, and pretended to snore. It sounded like she was birthing foals through her mouth.
I sat up.
You don't believe me, I said.
I'm sorry, she said.
And she fell asleep.

I couldn't sleep. I smoked a cigarette and sent the same text message to everyone on my phone (except my wife, her mother, my dentist, and Shanghai Palace). The message said:

Have you ever suspected me of being a witch?
If yes, why?

Replies dripped in slowly through the night. In between each one I played Snake 2 but never once managed to climb above my lowest high score. My fingers were upset. They wanted to sleep. Some of the replies I received were:

hi falk. wer u been? want 2 get a beer on sat?

dont think ur a witch m8

idk

yh in the woods that time there wos purple ravins on ur sholders

gay

haha u freak go 2 bed

I didnt reply to the replies. I neatly copied them out onto my wife's back in red pen.

In the morning my wife was in the kitchen making risotto. My favourite. She had woken up early and gone out to pick mushrooms in the wood. When I came downstairs she pushed one into my mouth and kissed me on the head.

Sit down, she said. It will be ready in a minute.

We ate calmly.
I smoked two cigarettes while my wife cleared it away.

At eleven, two men in duffel coats knocked at our door. My wife let them in. We all sat around the kitchen table sorting out paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork. I signed everything and didn't make a fuss. My wife was very proud. She squeezed my thigh several times.

At one, we all ate tiny, triangular blueberry sandwiches.

At two, my wife jumped on my back, kissed my ears, and watched the men lead me away.

They led me to a balding croft where I burned for six thousand days. Fireworks broke out of my eyes. I cried a little. I disappeared the way I had been taught to. It was abrupt.

1625 c/o Buster Jones

2011-04-12T08:32:00.005+01:00

Vocklamarkt

1. I am an Austrian farmer. Here I am.

2. We cannot believe exactly what you want. It is true we haven’t tried but then again we cannot believe exactly anything. Here we all are then and we are each of us unable to believe. Now then. What now.

3. We have been wondering what other countries are and why they are where they are. People come. I dreamed I crawled across a border. My jerkin is covered in mud still. Imagine if they killed us. We are going to be killed.

4. 16 rabbis are walking in a line toward my farm to trample my peas. Rabbis. I don’t want to die and I don’t want to attack the rabbis. I don’t want them to have wives who cry when the rabbis get thrown in jail for destroying my property. And who told them to be rabbis. And where did they all find rabbi’s wives.

5. They’ve built a bigger cliff to hold a heavier cross to look down on the water. The earth is stuffed with birds. We are Austrian farmers so what would we care. Maybe.

6. I keep dreaming of fishermen sat around that fountain with their lines resting on the surface. I think it means something. Their faces are each covered in gold leaf or lace and there is a fat dark body sunk quiet in the water. I really think it might mean something.

7. What is the bottom of mountain. Imagine it and I can imagine something deeper. What is the most distant memory. We are it. We are being killed soon enough either together or alone. We have found this out. We are Austrian pea farmers.

8. Domes are covering the buildings until people don’t pray any more. Look. I am not trying to rebel. I want to grow a million peas. Is that a lot.

9. How many colours are there. I can think of six colours of house, and three colours of fruit. I remember seeing two colours of sky. What then. Are colours about to come out of me. Is this like sea-sickness. I’ve been dreaming about my neck covered in rope. I think it means something.

10. The cathedral was underground so they carved the earth and made a mountain and here we are with our arms out looking down at the water. This isn’t my torch and I didn’t light it and I don’t want you to kill me.

11. I saw a woman in the town square carrying four fawns tied to a stick. I threw a pea-plant at her. A small pea-plant. There she goes running away. A waste of a farmer’s last pea-plant.

12. I should have put more breadcrumbs on the meat my wife spat out. Now I’m being killed. I should have done things for my wife. I should have done everything. I should have done more of everything for people. Farmer’s tears are on my face.

13. Remember Turkish horses running towards us. We have grown tired. I have had my last breakfast. I have missed my chance to lie down in front of a horse. I won’t be killed by a Turk. I won’t be killed by a horse. Did I mention I’m crying.

14. I can’t even imagine leaves. Where would colour even fit on our trees. Where would leaves go apart from beneath the earth. Or a pile of them burying a clifftop cross.

15. One of us says “Inside of a war there is a war”. The rest of us imagine the largest crow. The largest eagle. There is no middle size of creature that is flying above us here now in the last moments.

16. We’ve grown tired. So. Now. There he goes. There she goes, here we come. Here we go. Here they come. There we go. Here he comes. Here he comes. There he goes.

1624 c/o Nichole Ortiz

2011-04-01T10:51:00.007+01:00

Peaceful Ruler from the Bowl

The Laughing Cavalier (1624) is a famous painting by the Dutch Golden age and Baroque artist Frans Hals. The top right of the portrait is inscribed with "Æ'TA SVÆ 26/A°1624" in Latin, meaning the portrait was painted when the sitter was 26, and in the year 1624. The identity of the man is unknown.

Haarlem The Neterlands, 1624

His face was as red as the wine in his glass. Lord Fritz Van Der Komp was a chatty young fellow and quite animated. He had not sat still the entire time I painted him. He told many amazing and outrageous stories and would continually get up to roam the room grabbing objects and telling of how he acquired each of them from his travels. Yet he never took his eyes off me, as if to make sure I was caught on his every word but still working for my pay. I, in turn, felt frustrated and on several occasions politely asked for him to sit, but he continued to perform.

He had requested that I paint him at his home, which is unheard of, for my sitters always travel to me, but Lord Fritz Van Der Komp insisted I travel to him, and I now see why. He loved to put on a show. His home was his stage, his possessions were his props, and I was his audience, there to capture every moment.

"More wine, dear sir Hals!" the young Lord roared as he clumsily filled my glass then dropped heavily back into his chair smacking together his wine-stained lips and twisting the ends of his mustache.

He was a boisterous presence, dressed in the finest silk and lace, which impressed me very much. Conveying the beauty of these fabrics was no challenge to me, it was his face, his personality that became a struggle. In fact it was proving quite difficult to capture his status and nobility when he behaved like nothing more than a drunken fool.

"Thank you, Lord." I said as I lifted my glass and took a sip. I dipped my brush once again and gazed at the space on my canvas where the Lord’s face should be. If I were to paint what I really saw, I'm sure the Lord would not approve the next morning after the wine had worn off.

"This has taken quite longer than I imagined, Sir Hals." The Lord slurred, pushing back his large black hat that had fallen over his brow.

"I perhaps am enchanting you so much with my tales that you can not concentrate on your work? Please do tell me if I am too much." He laughed loudly, hiccupped, then quickly covered his mouth, unknowingly spilling a bit of wine from his overflowing glass onto the beautiful rug at his feet. If you wish to know more about how he came across such a lovely rug, I'm certain he would love to tell you the fascinating tale, just as he told me...

I needed to capture that proud nobleman who was hidden under his flustered, drunken features. So I chose my words wisely. "You are most intriguing, my Lord!" I said honestly.

Lord Fritz Van Der Komp placed his glass on the table beside him with a pleased expression. He was ready to let me speak, as long as the subject was about him.

"Your fascinating life and your majesty… Well, if only all the people of Haarlem could be so lucky as I to be in your beautiful home and hear your fantastic tales. I wish for all to experience the wonder you've shown me this day. I wish to capture that for all to see!"

I watched him as I spoke and almost laughed out loud at the expression growing on his face. His chest raised as he breathed deep and a slight grin (No! An arrogant smirk!) moved across his lips. I could not be sure, but I swear he gave me a coy wink. His blotchy face lifted and at once he sat straight and proud. That’s it! If only I thought to boost his ego sooner, I would have been done hours ago.

1623 c/o Joe Kapitan

2011-03-26T18:20:00.002Z

Nova

A companion ascends; this I watch from afar. Why can I feel no joy? Why must I see all things cast in shadow of their trajectories? I am sorry, Maffeo. I blame my instruments. They have ruined some part of me that was better in the not knowing.

In my telescope I had been watching a star brighten, week after week, surpassing its neighbors. Just when I believed it might consume those near it, it vanished altogether from the night sky. It is gone, Maffeo. I have verified this. From the numbers, I knew of its distance, and from its distance, how long its light had travelled. My friend, I tell you this truth – when it appeared to me at its most wondrous, it held a terrible secret.

It was already dead.

In halls of marble they will whisper to you. They will surround you in golden robes and golden tongues and speak of the kingdoms and peoples that are now bound to you, and you will resist what they say until you have grown accustomed to the gravity of your thoughts, the pull of your words.

You will awaken one morning in the warm fingers of dawn and believe that you commanded as much from the sun.

It will feel no different to you, that first day of your undoing.

To distant lenses, you will still look magnificent.

1622 c/o Kirsty Logan

2011-03-22T20:33:00.004Z

Anchor of the Suburbs

It was halfway through the spring of '84 when Sandra decided that she was going to become an anchoress.

'I am going to live,' she announced one evening during the advert break of our nightly TV soaps, 'in the crawlspace beside the laundry room.' She warned us that being an anchoress included refusing all contact except food in the morning, removal of her bucket in the evening, and the weekly updates on the TV soaps.

Our mother was displeased: 'I did not buy a house at this address, complete with jacuzzi and wide driveway, to spend my time emptying slop buckets. Oh no, little miss anchoress; it's a long time since I stopped cleaning up your do-do, and you won't catch me starting now.' The row was postponed when Sandra realised that she was missing EastEnders, the most vital of the soaps.

The next morning, Sandra lined up her anchoress supplies in a row outside the laundry room: a bucket, a selection of Danielle Steele novels, a blanket, and a refillable water bottle.

'You won’t make it to the end of spring,' I shouted through the crack of my bedroom door.

'I hope you catch the swine flu and die!' Sandra shouted back through the wall of the crawlspace. She seemed to remember the live-and-let-live philosophy that had sent her to the anchorage in the first place, and added, ‘I take it back!’ Her outburst was understandable: we had all lived together at the same address for thirteen years, and old habits are hard to forget. I watched Sandra potter about with the rest of her supplies, but I refused to help; if she wanted to be fragile and holy, she could do it herself.

That evening Sandra put out her bucket of refuse, complete with its neat cling film lid, for our mother to empty. I arranged my desk chair so I could see it through the gap in the door; I knew there was going to be a row and I didn’t want to miss it. My mother had a variety of ways to address issues with her children, and none of them was pleasant. I settled into my chair, ready to spring up and join the fight if it looked exciting enough.

'If this is the way we must live,' said our mother cheerfully as she picked up the bucket and went to empty it, 'then so be it.' I waited for an hour, still sure that I was going to catch Sandra breaking her anchoress rules of quiet reflection, but the crawlspace stayed silent all night.

Every day I tried to catch Sandra cheating on her anchoress duties, sure that she was too weak to stick to them. I even glanced in her refuse bucket to make sure she hadn’t been sneaking in contraband: Twix bars, gossip magazines, or notes from friends. She didn’t even come out in May, when the TV soap awards were live on Channel 3. Mum and I had a row over whether we should put the TV nearer the door so that Sandra could hear it, but then Sandra just sang hymns loudly until we turned the volume back down.

Spring soon turned to summer and Sandra was still living in the crawlspace, still leaving out her refuse bucket, and still missing the TV soaps every night. In August, a man from the newspaper telephoned to ask if this was the address of the Anchor of the Suburbs.

'Anchoress,' said my mother, and confirmed the address. The newspaper man said he wanted to write a flattering piece about Sandra, but mum was sure there would be a catch: with newspaper men, she said, there always was.

'Will he spring for all these new dietary requests she’s having, that’s what I want to know,' said mum as she boiled a dozen eggs, which was all Sandra was eating that day. When the newspaper man showed up, I knew mum wouldn’t refuse to give him whatever he wanted. He had teeth like a movie star, hair as curly as worms, and gold rings in a row along his knuckles; just like the man who runs the local pub in EastEnders.

'Is this going out live?' asked mum, which was a silly question because he only had a tape recorder, not a camera.

'I, and my readers, are just dying to see how you are all living,' said the newspaper man from between his icy teeth, 'with The Anchoress.' He said it just like that, the words all starting with capital letters, as if this was the Queen’s address and not just 19 Greenwood Drive. The next week the article was published in the middle pages of the local newspaper, and I knew that mum wished she’d put up more of a row. The article said Sandra was quiet, fragile, and utterly dependent: the perfect catch for today’s modern man.

'What rubbish!' shouted mum, 'Refuse and rot! My Sandra doesn’t care about any silly boys; she's got far more important things to think about than cooking dinner and sweeping the floor.' Sandra agreed: she stayed being an anchoress all the way to the next spring, whispering her meagre requests through the laundry-room door.

There was no row, or shouting match, or final straw that finally made me break down the door to Sandra’s anchorage: I just couldn’t live with her silence any more.

1621 c/o Jefferson Byrd

2011-03-19T19:43:00.004Z

1621, Connecticut

"Mohimbe. Alamohimbe!" said Grandfather. This was Indian talk for come over here, pronto!

Grandfather was pointing to a couple of tiny owl pellets on the forest floor. "Alamohimbe. Mohimbala." I wasn't sure what that meant, but it sounded like more Indian talk. Grandfather knelt down and picked up one of the black, speckled pellets. He squished it between his thumb and his index finger and gave it a sniff.

"Ahh. Mohimbe!" said Grandfather, a frown creeping across his old man face. He stuck his blackened, greasy finger out for me to smell. Reluctantly, I bent down and gave Grandfather's finger a good long whiff. It didn't smell like much of anything. Grandfather pulled his hand back and greedily took another whiff himself.

"Alamohimbe," he said solemnly. The owl these pellets had come from, Grandfather explained in Indian talk, had just died. Grandfather wiped his greasy finger onto his pants and stood up, gazing off up into the trees. Somewhere out there, he told me in Indian talk, the spirit of the owl is struggling to escape the mortal world. Liberated from its body, the soul flies off, but it cannot be truly free until it breaks away from all this... Grandfather gestured to the trees, the ground... all this is the mortal world, Grandfather said.

"Mohimbe. Alamohimbe. Mohimbala," he said, explaining the process by which souls depart the body and fight against the elements before passing on to the realm of spirits. He made it sound like a sad thing, this struggle that the soul must undertake before going to the spirit realm. I didn't want to imagine the ordeal my soul would have to go through trying to get out of this crummy mortal world. But Grandfather reassured me that it was not sad nor was it happy. It is all just some stuff that happens.

Just then, a distant rumbling. Grandfather sprung forward, his brow creased. He looked over to the lake where our people fish and make camp every harvest. The rumbling grew louder and louder until we finally saw it.

"Mohimbe..." said Grandfather. The white man.

Dressed in strange clothing, the white men stood around talking to each other in a curious language I could not understand. There were six of them. One of them cracked open a cooler and began passing out beers to the others. Some of them already had opened beers, which they chucked into the lake so they could each enjoy a fresh one. I leaned closer to get a better view when I saw the great beast that had made such a mighty rumbling. It was an off-road vehicle with four-wheel drive, V-6 engine and a luxury interior. I had never seen anything like it before. The white men were unhitching a jet-ski from the back of their sports utility vehicle. Grandfather motioned for me to hurry back to our camp by the green fields.

"Mohimbe?" I asked. White men?

"Mohimbe.” Grandfather replied. Assholes.

1620 c/o Emma J Lannie

2011-03-16T12:52:00.002Z

Making Oxygen

I’d have it a different way.

I’d have it just the two of us.

And I know it doesn’t work without the oarsmen, and it’s cool that he’s made them wear blindfolds and all, but if it were up to me there would be just me and him. I like the idea of that. I don’t need for this to be moving to be impressed by it.

He has eyes so dark and in this light they look almost black. He holds the pan above the flame and I feel a clearness in my lungs, like the air around him is different, better. I let him kiss me but only for a while. His lips taste of juniper berries. His mouth is wet. And all I can think of are the twelve other men down here, rowing blindly, their ears attuned to every single breath. I can’t let my breathing get heavy, or quick, or slow, deep. My breathing has to be just breathing. Not the breathing of the kissed or the kissing.

On land, we are barely ever together. It’s hard to be in the same space when that space is the whole world. Here, under the water, in this tiny enclosed thing, he can look me in the eye and make it mean that I am his and that he is mine. Even with the heads of the twelve other men bobbing to the left and right of us, working those oars, even then, he can make me feel like it would be okay to do things with him. And I don’ t do things with him. But a part of me wants to, a part of me has been made to not care what the other people might think.

He tips the pan and its contents swirl and he tips it again, the other way, and I watch. I watch his hands. The way his fingers grip the handle, like he could let go at any minute. As though the holding on is no effort. There have been nights when he’s held me that same way, with an unknowable ease, and I’ve felt safe, felt that there would be no letting go.

I was afraid of the water. Of it getting in. Of being trapped and no one knowing we were down here, no one knowing the water was inside as well as outside. That the river would leak in, and still be the river, but be the river inside our lungs. And it would displace all our oxygen. But still I let him bring me down here. It was something to face.

He slips his hand to my neck, his thumb slowly tracing a line down and back up again, lifting my face to his. I open my mouth. He kisses me again. The men row. They can’ t see anything. I am quiet. I am barely breathing.

In the world, this doesn’t happen.

In the world, he has his life and I have mine.

1619 c/o Derek Piotr

2011-03-13T17:32:00.001Z

the defeat of the Jaffna Kingdom

listen king: you'll hand my girl to me soon (with withered hands) and suddenly die. your kingdom was beautifully weak, you were holding a damselfly in the rain. this ends now. my goddess won't understand you in years time, she'll wake one day to rain on the palace walls and look at the empty air and leave. your guards have mostly died, we killed them because you have her. who will keep her from leaving when she wants? she belongs to me.

my soul falls through the sun without her. a searing journey. your pearling season at Putalam distracted her from your imposed beauty. now she holds the one pearl she managed to save, close. observing a clouted reflection of herself. a beautiful vision. herself in milk. let me bring that milk. you are too old and soon shall expire. you look at maps and you don't exist. when i look at maps these months, i find the areas which link up, jacob's ladder block and ribbon leading to matrimony. let me know my goddess, king. bring her here.

1618 c/o Andrew Worthington

2011-03-10T00:48:00.001Z

defenestration is quite bohemian

A: "I want you to take me by the scalp and slam me as hard as you can into that window over there."

B: "No."

A: "You're such a sadist."

B: "The glass might break and you could fall. Of course, the fall wouldn't kill you."

A: "That's what I hope."

B: "I don't get it."

A: "I want to suffer for my art."

B: "Oh. That's quite bohemian,."

A: "Yes, I know."

B: "Could you get me some tea?"

A: "Certainly."

1617 c/o Madison Langston

2011-03-08T00:06:00.005Z

We Are Partially A Wellspring

June, or conception

Flora dumps her boyfriend and prays about it. Flora has not slept in two weeks. Flora thinks, no one is perfect and it's disgusting. Flora writes, I am so uninteresting! and falls onto her bed miserably. Flora imagines the branches of a tree smashing her kneecaps and feels motivated. Flora has sex with three men and orgasms once while imagining herself having an orgasm.

Flora's professor writes her love letters about the time they made love. Flora writes back, Last month was so hot I could die.

Flora grabs her hair and pulls it. She thinks, no one would notice if I pulled all my hair out. She thinks, I want to fucking kiss myself. Flora spends weekends with the professor who frequently talks about his headaches and does not frequently make Flora orgasm. Flora imagines taking naps inside her sister's throat while the professor makes his headaches orgasm. Flora says, Your bed is fucking comfortable. Flora says, Look at me now.

Flora watches her sister have sex and falls in love. Flora thinks, everyone is my soulmate and we are all so fortunate. Flora says, You are my sister, my soulmate. Flora's sister says, Flora eats lunch every other day but she has never seen a kitchen.

Flora touches her navel and feels a small sickness growing inside of her. Flora writes, I am a bellyful of bones. Flora coughs up a closet and puts her clothes there. Flora says, Everything is empty until we put ourselves inside. Flora says, This closet isn't big enough. Flora feels like a sidewalk but beautiful.

October, or the roof of the mouths are formed

Flora has a nosebleed and feels something which she calls a quickening. Flora writes love letters to the quickening. Flora says, There are so many people inside me.

Flora taps on her stomach while the professor talks to her. She thinks, I'd rather fuck my sister than listen to you. She says, I think I'm sleepy can we take a nap? She says, Are you in love with me or not? Flora feels anxious and goes to sleep. Flora dreams about an opening. In the dream the professor says, You are a little mountain. He says, Let me in your insides.

Flora thinks, someone is smashing my kneecaps and I am feeling motivated. Flora says, I hate you. Flora thinks, I hate you. Flora says, I hate watching you eat in public. Flora thinks, I want to occupy the faces of people I know and not feel redundant. Flora paces her bedroom and falls into the hallway to feel a change. Flora says, We are all accidental.

March, or delivering

Flora wakes up and thinks, something is happening. Flora finds the professor and looks at him as if something might be happening. The professor says, Oh! You are really delivering. The professor says, I can't wait to see what we made. Flora spreads her legs and lets her insides fall out. Flora says, Let me see it. Flora looks closely and says, I really don't understand the arrangement.

Flora thinks, This really isn't funny. Flora laughs and says, Goddamnit. Flora walks into the bathroom and sits on the floor. Flora says, It was like they were unfinished. She says, One of them looked incomplete.

Flora carves the words 'lusus naturae' into her thighs and then on the surface of her stomach. Flora lifts her arms and prays about it. She thinks, no one is perfect unless they are giving me an orgasm. Flora's blood leaves the body in straight lines that later become a circle. Flora's sister says, Our last image of her was formed so beautifully. Flora's sister says, we named the mass of it Lazarus.

1616 c/o Chantel Louise Tattoli

2011-03-05T11:18:00.008Z

Rebecca née Pocahontas

Backstory:
At twelve she saved Captain John Smith’s skin. First the Western title princess grafted onto those high cheek bones. Later a baptism and a new name given her, white like powder brushed on bronze. Rebecca. She married John Rolfe, this is certain, but we don’t know if she wanted to. A son came out the color of honey mixed with milk, like he got the best of both worlds. (He would do well for himself.)

1616 now:
Pocahontas is 21. She—with some others like her, a holy man among them—is voyaging to London to the royal court. This is a PR stunt. Look, look. They finger her whited cheeks. The New World is being colonized. Come. Invest! It’s safe, civil. “Civil” they say handing blankets to the natives. The smallpox virus nuzzles in the fuzz. Thank you for the corn and the squash. Here, have a blanket.

Pocahontas doesn’t know John Smith is alive and in England. They don’t meet, but he writes to Queen Anne: For God’s sake, Annie, treat her like a princess. So when Rebecca is presented at court, by all accounts they love her. And if you’re a proprietor the thing to do is rename your tavern La Belle Sauvage, as backhanded of a compliment as they come. She meets James; him so understated she has to be told afterward that he is King.

Pocahontas sits for an engraving. The portrait doesn’t get the exotic femme across. She looks butch. Her hair pulled up high off her forehead, crowned with a kind of velvet top hat; in the embroidered jacket and wide point lace collar of that time. Someone in the future will adapt an oil from this engraving. They will soften her, but worst of all, they’ll plumpen her high cheeks to look like a British lady.

It’s 1616, and next year she will die.

1615 c/o Barry Grass

2011-03-02T17:31:00.006Z

Bier mag weer gezien worden
(Beer may be seen again)

A city under a green tree shield.
Groenlo. The Netherlands. Nearly
Germany. Green tree under siege.
Green grass under Spanish foot. A city
In need of a Green Knight.

Green glass shimmering. Light strike.
Reinheitsgebot. Dip the yeast stick, let
Pils malt bottom-ferment. Lager anger.
Lager nationalism. Cold-store it all.

Grolsch; of Grolle. From the green, of
The green, is the green, is rejuvenation.
Swing-top bottles. Bottle up everything.
Porcelain crown. Pressurized seal.
Defend. Defend.

Abeyance. Wait for the moment. Spain
Will one day weaken. Then: pop the cap.
Emboss in green

1614 c/o N. God Savage

2011-02-27T19:13:00.002Z

The Siege of Osaka

Akane has been outside his apartment since the beginning of November. That's twenty-six days. She is not there continually; that would be ridiculous. But she is there most of the day and some of the night. She sits on the wall opposite, looking up at his bedroom window, or maybe, at night, she will be in the manga cafe across the street. He wonders what she does in the cafe. Googles him obsessively, he suspects.

She is always there in the mornings. As soon as he wakes he rolls over and looks through the glass. She is standing on the pavement, her arms by her sides, staring back at him. She makes no movement when he appears at the window. She doesn't wave or smile or look away. She simply stares at him, doleful, like a guilty dog.

One afternoon, she left for a few hours. When she came back she was loaded down with shopping bags, mostly clothes and jewellery. She had probably gone to Shinsaibashi. That was always her favourite place to shop. He missed her when she was away. He kept watching for her return. When he saw her head among the crowd he darted back from the window so she wouldn't see. He must keep up his veneer of indifference until the summer.

And in the summer, he will let Akane in. He will stop using the back door – the one she obviously doesn't know about – to come and go. He will have a long shower and dress well; he will put on aftershave and style his hair. He'll walk down to the front door and open it slowly, and when she sees him he will simply stand back as if to say, come in.

Akane will walk slowly across the road, scared and unsure. She will know that this is but a small step. Getting into his apartment is the most minuscule of victories. Getting him to forgive her will be the real fight.

1613 c/o Jason Lee Norman

2011-02-25T22:07:00.005Z

First Born

On the day you were born we had been waiting for so long that we didn’t mind waiting a little longer. Those of us who were nearby looked at you and said, where have you been all our lives? We’ve been waiting for you for so long.

Your mother and father thought of what the perfect first thing to say to you would be. They wanted to say something loving and welcoming. The nurse brought you to your mother and all she could manage was saying I love you a million times through tears and exhausted laughter. When you began to cry a cry that sounded like a song they handed you to your father. As you squealed and raised your tiny fists in the air, your father just kept saying I’m here, I’m here. These were the first words they said to you and would remain true for the rest of their lives.

When the rest of us saw you for the first time we just kept saying, where have you been all our lives? We’ve been waiting for you for so long. Another of us remarked that you would not grow kneecaps for another two years. We all looked at you and wondered where your kneecaps would come from.

Before you were born, those of us who were available sent out invitations all over the world for our friends and family to come visit you. Six months before you were born we left invitations in their houses. We left them under stacks of plates in the cupboard and underneath the fridge and behind the stove so that the next time they had company or were doing some spring cleaning they would find the invitations and realize that you had already been born and that they suddenly felt very lonely without you in their lives. Others would wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of the toilet left running. They’d remove the lid off the tank and find the invitation floating near the bottom, inside a plastic sandwich bag.

Your parents wanted to tell you about how important it was that you were the first born. The first born is so important that a long time ago, in Egypt, the Pharaoh ordered all the first born sons put to death because he was afraid and superstitious. Nearly every U.S president was a first born child and every man that ever walked on the surface of the moon was a first born child. They wondered what the first piece of advice they would give you would be. When should they tell you that there is more than one truth in the world and that it’s possible to be in love with two people at the same time? That happiness can make you cry more than loneliness. When would they tell you for the first time about what taxes paid for or what a murder was? What would be the exact date that they say goodbye to you for the first time / for the last time? Your parents thought of all these things and more as they held you and let you squeeze their thumbs with your tiny hands on the day that you were born and we all had been waiting for you for so long that we didn’t mind waiting a little longer.

You were the first one to read a book without moving their lips. First one to break all our hearts. First one on the moon. First born in this country. Where have you been all our lives?

1612 c/o Amelia Foster

2011-02-24T00:00:00.003Z

Alice Lights the First Match to the
Admiration of All Beholders

I was weaned on moonmilk pap. Mother
buried my caul with bloodmeal in the yard.
My hair, a shock of coarse, black rice.
My skin, diffuse like light in water,
a moth against the glass.

In the light I am quick and quickened.
I said the Lord could come and get me
if He wanted me so bad. My breath hemmed
the window shut, a lace of tined frost.

With a mouthful of spitting seeds, I was
invited to tea on the riverbed. They prayed
I’d sink like teeth in sweetmeats, tossed
me in the water. A hawk plucked me right out.

1611 c/o Lisa Marie Ackerly

2011-02-20T23:38:00.007Z

A "Tempest" Stage (1611)

A chaste sky,
love at all will

Ariel serves
pure the black staff
enchanting
Prospero:

Air enslaved with-
in chastity
Shakes majestical
calls forth,

Light bows
a pen dried merci-

fully

1610 c/o Frances Dinger

2011-02-14T22:28:00.004Z

The Sphere of Influence of the Attraction
Which is in the Moon Extends as Far as the Earth

In January, Galileo is suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder but they don’t call it that yet. He is sad and awake very late at night in his lab and he is looking through his telescope. Just idly looking, it is not an active study. He feels he has not been active in months. Since August and the commercialization of the telescope maybe. He hadn’t felt productive since his new telescope was deemed successful. His girlfriend Marina Gamba doesn’t understand this. He had been making more telescopes; the telescopes were a money-making invention. “You’re being entrepreneurial, babe,” she said to him at dinner that night, but he doesn’t like that word.

(He remembers when he turned 18 and realized he was running out of time to be called a “child prodigy,” or had already run out of time.)

January has been a sad and unproductive month for hundreds of years, Galileo thinks.

But then suddenly there are spots of light that can be seen through the telescope. Galileo discovers three moons of Jupiter. A few days later, he proves the orbit and finds a fourth. This seems significant. Galileo feels like a fraud for the discovery because it didn’t come about in a careful and contemplative way. But everyone around him seems proud and excited. The discovery generates some buzz. Someone from the church comes by to gently remind Galileo that, just because he found some objects in orbit, he still doesn’t have any right to start talking about Copernicus again. Galileo doesn’t invite the clergyman to the dinner gathering his girlfriend is planning.

At the party, his girlfriend and children are there among the wine and hors d'œuvres and they look proud. The girls are wearing bows. The oldest one made a model of the planet with the four moons and painted it in unrealistic colors and everyone appreciates it.

Galileo takes a cracker with cheese from a tray and accidentally bites the inside of his cheek and tears up. Guests think he is overcome with emotion and this endears them to him. He feels sad and deceitful but doesn’t brush off the hand of a colleague when he puts it on his shoulder and squeezes with all five fingers.

Years ago at university, Galileo had a problem with always speaking up in class, which meant his instructors loved him while his classmates’ attitude toward him varied from patient tolerance to quiet contempt. An artist friend of his told him to just be quiet; that way he would appear brooding and contemplative.

“No,” Galileo said. “No, it doesn’t work like that in the sciences.”

It still doesn’t work. Not even as a party trick. So Galileo walks around and tries to feel like a visionary (an altogether different party trick, but still a trick).

In January while Galileo suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, he observes four moons of Jupiter on a night when he can’t sleep. He thinks maybe the sleep deprivation has finally gotten to him and looks around his lab to see if pink shapes had appeared anywhere in the air. This is what he has heard happens when people are especially sleep deprived. He doesn’t see any pink, so he cleans his telescope and looks again and the moons are still there and he feels warm or accomplished and stays awake for several more hours.

Now, weeks later, he sleeps too much. When he feels the least bit tired, his first inclination is to take a nap. He jokes he learned this habit from the cat he keeps in the lab. He doesn’t feel motivated to work sometimes, especially to do menial tasks like sweeping or repeating experiments to check for repetition/regularity of events. Galileo’s girlfriend suggests he hire an intern for the little things.

Galileo hires an intern who sweeps and wipes down counters and remembers to fill the cat’s bowls with food and water. Sometimes Galileo lets the intern do small experiments under his supervision.

Galileo’s intern observes that buttered bread almost always lands butter side down when dropped and cats (except elderly ones) always land on their feet, so what if we were to attach a piece of buttered bread, facing upward, to the back of a young cat and drop it from a certain height and see what happens, har har.

Galileo soon fires his intern.

He misses having someone to talk to while he works. The cat sometimes leaves the lab to hunt mice and birds outside. He entices the cat to stay by allowing her to play with the pendulums he was using in experiments related to gravity.

Sometimes he tries to pet the cat and she does not want to be petted. She looks at him and he imagines she is thinking, “Weirdo, what are you thinking? I’m going to space to hang out with the Jupiter people and not you. You feed me and feel affection for me but you haven’t yet figured out how to love me right.” This is what all cats mean when they appear aloof. He devises a series of experiments to determine which places on the body the cat likes to be scratched best. He discovers four places: the spot on the back just before the tail, the cheeks, under the chin and the top of the head. These are universal rules.

He wonders about other universal rules relating to animals. Do animals have a concept of god? Does Galileo have a concept of god? When did people/scientists/Galileo/god stop thinking of humans as animals?

What if the cosmos was once all contained in a big bag? And one day the bag was emptied by a tear or great shaking. This is like believing in god, Galileo thinks, everything contained in one smaller thing. That is god, that is a year or an hour. Eventually creation goes beyond its bounds.

Hundreds of years from now, people will sail in arcs across the sky and sometimes the arcs will end in terror and the breaking of glass. Young people will communicate instantaneously and imagine it is like telepathy. Galileo closes his eyes and imagines this and does not understand and realizes his lack of understanding does not matter.

Laying on the floor, Galileo feels everywhere at once. Elsewhere, sea venture survivors are getting off a boat and entering Jamestown; babies are being born and dying; not exclusively babies are dying but babies exclusively are being born. So much is happening everywhere all the time.

From the floor, he looks at the shape of the cat’s eye and wonders again about pink shapes and also color. The cat’s eye is a different shape than Galileo’s, so does she see color differently? He wonders if color exists in any real way.

This would not be an idea he expressed to the church, which was very attached to its colors of the liturgical year.

A professor had once told him, “let the answer come in a nap.” There was nothing he would rather do than curl up in a patch of sun and sleep.

He is learning what the animals have known all along.

1609 c/o Chantel Louise Tattoli

2011-02-13T12:40:00.004Z

Because of Him, the Tulip Boom

His name is Charles de l’Écluse. Most know it in Latin, science’s language, so anyone can identify him like they do a flower, maybe one of his flowers. Carolus Clusius.

During parts of the year, the reason you see large tracts of color when you fly over the Netherlands is him. A bright quilt of red, yellow, orange, white, pinks, and purples, so if the plane went down it wouldn’t be that bad—just a white bird folded in and suffocated. That’s all. Color rushing up, then nothing.

The Ambassador to Constantinople is a friend. He brings Carolus the bulbs because what do you give a horticulturalist? Flowers, flowers! It is 1593 in Leiden.

Carolus spins one in his palm like a wooden top and wants to know about sketches. Are there any sketches?

The ambassador shrugs. Tulip from the Turkish for turban. He’ll see.

Carolus grows them and gives them away and it is his greatest failure to love the plants more than the women he gives them to. That’s what they say. But honestly, some women just want the flowers. They have their servants sell them on the sly—thus they unburden debts, those clever women.

Carolus lives in a glass house with warm breath. In there he discovers a tulip-specific virus which “breaks” petals. He doesn’t know what it is exactly, but he likes this effect, like someone has stirred in cream. Flamed feathered whited. He believes people will like these.

And they will. Decades later they will in fact go mad from tulipmania. Carolus won’t be around to see it. When tulips drop out people's mouths. When you are somebody if you have some. Nobody if you have none.

Believe the first economic bubble on record. It speculates in unborn flowers from a loamy belly. Sold before you can even see the head.

Their price will rise from the middle of November 1636. And in February. One bulb? It is costing the yearly income of most men. Then up goes down and the bulbs fall. Fast to the price of onions and by May of that year, done.

When Carolus dies in 1609 his students cold-shoulder the understood meanings of colors. Each of them—picking their favorite color tulip (Carolus loved them all) and resting it at his tomb—can you see that? At least one poor boy steals expensive flowers for one poor girl, and those boys don’t know it, but the dead man would’ve been okay with that.

1608 c/o Jemima Louise Johnson

2011-02-09T00:25:00.007Z

Apple mists

Both of them were puffed out with the pride of Friday evening on the other’s arm. The street,
not friend of such a naked show, made sure to offer all the incongruous mess required to
equal if not overpower the soft-stuffed-plush display. His sour manufactured sent intended
as a paragon of manly strength leaned heavily against each mucus membrane met along
their half blind limb entwined and weaving way.
Sex echoed in the lento fall of her eyelids, her noseholes stretching wide to suck his smell. If
not for the ash-confetti thrown up by a faceless and unthinking coat sleeve, grasping for its
equal portion of the city air, her curling spine might have finished tracing that arc which
seemed to pull the past up through her abdomen to graze her engorged air sacs. Longing
for a red man to hold them captive so as to indulge in a public display, instead she falls to
contemplation of the thong biting with playful insistence at her freshly showered crack.
He had chosen this place as a means of escaping the well worn groove they had settled into
and, though it was his younger brother’s find, he judged, since discretion is the better part of
valour, he might let her speculate as to the plan’s history. Following behind her satisfyingly
formed thighs peeping through the slitted dress he half trips his forgotten foot over the step.
For a dazed moment he fights to regain his full height and tear his gaze from the vulnerable
softness of her crooked knee-pit. A woman with purple hair spilling over a guitar sings that
she doesn’t believe in everlasting love. The friends that have come to see her are happy
and the rest of the room is at least polite and waiting for its turn to watch and play.
Sweet fluids have settled into now congealing pools on the mosaic of the bar. A gruffly
attractive young man takes his turn at the microphone and opens with a showy cover of
‘Grace’ which barely registers with our pair who toil with eyes and elbows for the round that
he will win the fight to pay for. A harassed, grey looking barmaid meets their eyes straining
for her attention. She asks them who was first. They smirk. He orders their drinks.
God! Sometimes I think I could just rip into his face with my teeth, she muses, and perhaps
only the familiar pain at the ends of her stretched and strapped-up arching feet means that
she can dispel her gnawing lust. Her straining fingers grab at his hyacinthine locks.
“For fucksake, Evie, are you trying to pull my hair out!”, starting back massaging his scalp.
God! Sometimes those eyes shit me right up!
In a shake she fingercombs her blond tresses and leans against his manly bulk to stare up at
him.

1607 c/o James Chapman

2011-01-26T08:40:00.003Z

1607, Wales.

“The cause of the flood remains disputed, insofar as contemporary explanations blamed God.”

     The names for love dissolved the world.

     Lord, the names for love dissolved you. If you only could have loved us. We offered ourselves.

     But when we forgave your wrath, we were dying in you.

     When we trembled, we were dancing away from you.

     When we dared not speak your name, we were dreaming of love’s body.

     When you built heaven and hell, and suspended us between them, you taught us hovering.

     When you created time and shaped its edge into a sword, you taught us hovering.

     We hovered in each other’s arms, stopping time.

     You can’t defeat us. You’re a name, a story, a limit. We won’t be limited.

     You can’t scare us into obeying. Obedience is never love. We’ll only love, we will only love.

     You made an earth with creatures desperate to love. You made us more powerful than yourself. Lord, we’ll kill you if you try to keep us from touching.

     I love him.

     You tried to destroy him. It took a flood. Yes he’s drowned now.

     You’ve robbed his soft skin to cover your footstool. I can’t stop your vile hand from reaching into flood and sewage, stealing beauty. But my love will go to my husband. To him, not to the night thief.

     Because you’re wrong. Death is not beauty. If you throw me into the black sky, and revolve me around a red star for a million years, so I start to feel the curve of eternity, I’ll still dream of the skin behind my beloved’s ear.

     You plucked his eyes, but I’ve seen into them. If I have a soul, it’s made of his eyes.

     You float in the dark, bitter, and boast of your infinitude. Leave us, we’re too small to give you love. Love between equals, love as love is.

     You create eyes like my husband’s so you can threaten to destroy them. You want us scared of you. You demand we love you, lest you take your gifts back.

     You’ve only taught us to do without you. His eyes are eternal.

     I hate you, they are eternal, you don’t exist.

     His eyes are God. His face is God, not you. I worship his body, not yours. I praise his voice. His hair tangles your universe. His breath swamps your starlight. His voice outwarms your sun.

     In my life he was a flash of light, but I see him. His smile’s vanished but I feel it throughout me.

     My fingers and feet are at the two ends of eternity, quivering in his kiss. No other creation exists. He’s our universe, I’m our creation. He’s the sky, I’m the earth. He holds me everyplace, he floats me in his airy hands.

     There’s no room here for your flood. We’re busy. Don’t stand in our light. You didn’t create this light.

     I tell you all this and you’re silent. Rushing waters. Your filthy silence.

1606 c/o Benjamin King

2011-01-20T22:09:00.006Z

Otherwise Known as Guido Johnson

When Nigel Gooch, the wicketkeeper for the Blubberhouses Cricket Club (first team), gets bored, he tends to eat or drink too much. He feels sad. He dwells on his failures and the disappointment that he has caused his father over the years. To avoid these self-destructive behaviours, Nigel often consults the "Fun Things to do When Bored List," which can be found at http://web4health.info/en/aux/do-instead.htm. He began with "Borrow books in a library" (his favourite was "Gooch," his father Graham's autobiography) and has worked his way up to "Go out in the countryside and botanize."

While botanizing in the countryside, Nigel makes a gruesome discovery. Alongside the River Washburn, hand in hand with Anne, his fat wife, slightly upstream from the cricket ground upon which his childhood dreams have stagnated, Nigel comes upon a pair of atrophied and long since pickled testicles. They are firmly sealed in a Victorian cranberry pickle castor that Nigel has plucked from the muddy riverbed.

"I'm pregnant," says Anne, oblivious to the curious treasure that is now being examined by Nigel.

Several days later, in the confines of cricketing legend Graham Gooch's (Goochy's) private library in central London, there is a gathering that includes Nigel, Anne, Goochy, and Linda Colley, FBA, FRSL, CBE, the famous historian. Goochy is needling Nigel about his inability to grow a full and hearty moustache.

"Been licking the Marmite jar again?" Goochy digs.

"I've only been growing it a couple of weeks," argues Nigel. "We can't all be instantly good at everything we do."

"Well, if there's one thing you've proven over the years, lad, it's that for you, nothing is possible."

Goochy chuckles.

On the plush leather fainting couch, Linda and Anne chat.

"Do you know what gender it is?" Linda asks.

"Boy," answers Anne. "We're going to name him Graham."

Nigel interjects. "So what have we got?"

"It's Guy Fawkes," says Linda. "In January of 1606, having been arrested for his part in the Gunpowder Plot, Fawkes was sentenced to death. Prior to being hung, his genitals were to be removed in front of a mob of spectators, along with his heart, liver, and bowels. But before the scalpel was drawn, Fawkes leapt from the gallows, broke his neck, and died."

"So how did his balls end up in a pickle jar in the mud by the river?" asks Nigel.

"King James was somewhat miffed at Fawkes' final 'fuck you' and he so ordered Guy's cadaver to be immediately dismembered and burnt," explains Linda. "Fawkes' torso, head, limbs, and various organs were thrown upon a faggot of sticks and set alight. But just as the crowd erupted into a wild chant of 'hip hip hoorah,' a masked man dashed into the flames, swiped the testicles, and took off by foot into the woods.'

"A testicle thief?" asks Nigel.

"It was Guy's stepfather, Dionis Baynbrigge," says Linda. "Dionis was so moved by his son's courageous attempt to blow up parliament in the name of faith, and by his strength of character throughout his subsequent torture, that he wanted something to remember Fawkes' bravery by," says Linda.

"Good old dad," says Goochy.

"Dionis removed the balls from their sack and had them pickled," continues Linda. "He placed them upon his mantle next to a sketch of a tuberous bushcricket and a plaque that read 'We've got the biggest balls of all.' The testicles were passed down through a few generations, however during the 1800s they were gambled away and have, until now, been completely out of the public eye."

"Amazing," exclaims Nigel. "They do seem rather big, too."

"Depends who you are comparing them too," laughs Goochy. "How much they worth?"

"They'd probably go for close to a million pounds at auction," says Linda. "I'd be happy to manage the sale if you'd like."

"No thanks," says Nigel. "I'm going to keep them."

Linda now fiddles with her phone and within seconds two burly men burst through the door.

"We've come for your balls," one of the men says.

"Do you know who I am?" screams Goochy. "You can't just come crashing into my house making demands like this."

"Maybe you can autograph my fist," says the second burly man who proceeds to punch Goochy in the face.

Blood streams out of Goochy's nose, through his great wall of a moustache, and into his mouth. "Take them," Goochy says. "They're right over there."

But Nigel isn't having any of it. He unscrews the pickle jar, removes the testicles, and squeezes them in his hands. "You guys are pathetic," he says. "This whole macho man routine is boring. You want my balls? Why don't you just ask for them?"

"Give me the fucken balls," says one of the burly men, lunging forward.

"I was going to work my way up to this one," Nigel says. "But now seems like an appropriate time to 'Take on a difficult task.'"

"Give us the fucken balls," says the other burly man, also coming at Nigel.

Nigel ducks a punch and falls to the ground. He quickly tunnels between the legs of burly man number one and makes his way over to his father. "Open up, dad," says Nigel as he forces his father's jaw open with his free hand.

Goochy, stunned by the situation, goes limp. Nigel now manages to stuff both testicles into Goochy's mouth and then proceeds to force them down his father's gullet.

The burly men look to Linda.

"Just go," she says.

Goochy gives his son a bewildered look.

"Thought you might want a souvenir of my bravery," says Nigel. Then to Anna, "come on, let's go. And by the way, I just thought of a better name for baby boy."

Seven months later, little Guido Johnson Gooch is born. He is a healthy boy with rather large hands and slightly oversized genitalia. Graham "Goochy" Gooch is present at the birth.

"Gonna be a wicketkeeper like his old man," says Goochy with a smile.

Nigel smiles, too. And then he consults his newly renamed "Fun Things to Do When You're Trying to Repair Your Relationship with Your Dad" list.

"Hey dad, want to take a double-decker bus and sit on the upper level with me?"

1605 c/o Ian Sanquist

2011-01-19T20:43:00.002Z

The Terrorist From La Mancha

People come here to be imagined. People come here to be beautiful, ruined. He sees the gears in everything. He sees into the near future—two minutes from now. He wonders how the city will be in twenty years. The showed bodies on TV, pictures of the carnage at the shopping mall where the terrorist’s bomb went off. He wants to be alone, recursive. His genitals hurt. Another bomb went off in the courthouse, they showed pictures of the carnage. He could be a hangman in five minutes, he could fight with giants, or fall into their arms. He can live without perfection, he can take love or leave it. He can spell his own name. Love feels like something vestigial, a sign of what we once were, like graffiti. He’s masturbating to pictures of the apocalypse, he feels tired and depraved. He stares at himself in the mirror and wonders why he’s so self-absorbed. All he can do is wait it out. He thinks about films with clearly defined heroes and villains. Briefcases of hundred dollar bills, lines of cocaine. Syringes full of death, needles dripping with desolation. A row of taxicabs, a desert of windmills. A dog with blue eyes, a child wearing an eyepatch. Everything covered in dust. All the kids who don’t know the slang they’re using is outdated. The woman in his dream goes out in a rainstorm to stare into outer space. She’s waiting for the light from dead stars, light that will never reach her. The rain turns to snow. Outer space becomes invisible. He’s out looking for her, he’s calling her name. He’ll tell you all about his post-adolescent years if you want to hear: a procession of shit jobs for the minimum wage. Movies by Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick. He’ll talk to you all night if you’ve got the time. All his silences are pensive. He asks nothing but loaded questions. Another two bombs go off in the city. Everyone’s afraid to go outside. Atrocities are common. No miracles or wishes will be granted. Nobody told him this place was a war zone, full of people who think they can see into the future. Diviners, saints, silent and invisible. He uses a payphone to call a powerbroker from China. He wants to put his money into the stock market. He looks at his watch. He has somewhere to be.

1604 c/o J. Bradley

2011-01-18T23:25:00.000Z

Telescopic

I always ask first before reenacting an astronomical phenomenon with her.

“Thank you for not wanting to pretend that you're light to a black hole”, Lindsay says. “I might be easy for you, but not obvious.”

If I'm patient, persistent, she will watch a star die on the galaxy of her left cheek.

1603 c/o Sully Sanchez

2011-01-18T23:13:00.004Z

Uranometria

(no feet) Bird of Paradise is a star
(the pan) on the earth on the floor + lion (chameleon) is a star
Bluefish is a star
Crane is a star
male water snake is a star
is an Indian stars
flies a star
Peacock is a star
Phoenix (boat) is a star
the southern Delta is a star
Toucan is a star
Flying fish is a star

1602 c/o Terrence Slumgullion

2011-01-16T18:35:00.007Z

Prayer house

(Click to embiggen)

1601 c/o Chris Taylor

2011-01-03T17:25:00.002Z

Johannes, remember:

I will go, and you will estimate the swiftness of my passing. You have the means to do so: the numbers and the quadrants, the maps of the universe circling our wives’ throats with gold.

You must decide for yourself the shape and nature of it.

I do not miss the smell of autumn ambling toward me. I do not miss my father or the enfolding shorelines of that first observatory. When I die, let the shadow of the moon wheel along my face slow enough to measure.

Yes, we will falter in our orbits. Retrace our footsteps. Err predictably.

It’s true that my only friends all had that dizziness. The elk, staggering to his four-toed death. The dwarf, spinning our dinner plates under the table.

It’s true my eyes could judge your worth to the minute. If you are heavy, mercury. If you are light, the cube between Saturn and Jupiter.

But now I grow confused. This fever hurtles through me, neither uniform nor circular.

Listen! In China, the first white man is entering the home of the Emperor. The gold bricks are learning psalms from his footsteps.

Listen! In Russia, two million people are about to die. Their bones will rub together but make no music.

The air is full of ash this year. My sight becomes brittle as crystal. And so cold.

Remember, Johannes, these spheres are pitted. Imperfect. We will pass back and forth between them like missionaries.

No, Johannes. Like comets.

1600 c/o Rachel Lieberman

2010-12-31T17:17:00.003Z

Steps for Demagnetization

William Gilbert's girlfriend contemplates distance.

Fact: When the opposite poles of two lodestones are brought together, they are attracted as if the space between them is so unforgivable they can't abide it.

William Gilbert used to pull grapes from a bowl and pop them between his girlfriend's lips, allowing his fingers to linger in the moistness a bit longer than necessary.

William Gilbert's girlfriend notices distance often lately.

She notices the distance between them increasing. When they sleep together, she swears he lies farther and farther away from her on the mattress. When they go out together, he stands farther away from her, sometimes hesitating to even touch her fingertips with his.

So she begins sneaking into his office. Even when he isn't there, it is comforting to know that there is some closeness between the two of them. By reading his notes, she absorbs his knowledge, and through that there will never be infinite distance. Over time, she notices the shrinking distance of the words and lines in his notes.

Fact: There is a natural position under which two lodestones will attract each other, and an unnatural position under which they will repel.

Through her secret office affairs, she comes to realize that “natural position” means the exact distance of two objects most preferable for favorable conditions, including the distances of all of their appendages. She sets about rearranging the furniture in the house day after day while he locks himself in his study, desperate to find the perfect positions for each and every object, including herself. Including William. She pushes the armoire to the left and turns every object on it counter-clockwise. She rearranges all of the dishes and utensils in the kitchen, stacking them in different sequences. Every day, the foyer rug moves an inch or two north.

There is a pull that she feels from the man, and yet the distance continues to expand at an exponential rate.

In bed, there is a universe between them. No body parts or clothing touch. Even their pillows remain completely separate of each other. She dresses in increasingly thinner garments, but it does not make him feel any more attraction to her. In fact, he seems further away. She reaches out for him in the dark, but her hand falls onto nothing but the cushioning. She hears him move, but it might as well be in the house next door, it seems so far away. She can't even feel him when his body shifts.

She continues to reposition the chairs at odd angles, which become increasingly bizarre every day. He does not seem to notice them. The loudest noise she hears from him is when he slurps his soup during dinner, which is in fact maddeningly loud. She makes the soup herself, in the hopes that it will create a theoretical closeness in the absence of physical closeness, but it has not helped. She taps her fingernails on the table. Every time they come in contact with the wood there is a satisfying clack. It is the closest she has come to any sort of satisfaction in some time.

Fact: Magnetic pole shifts can occur spontaneously.

How many times a day can it happen? Can you be sitting around, reading a book, and suddenly be propelled upside down because the poles have shifted? Is it a more subtle change? Could it be happening right now? Could it be happening all the time?

She finally decides to bring her own work to his attention. “I've rearranged things a bit.”

“Oh?” He looks up from his soup and glances around the room. “Oh, yes. Lovely.”

“What do you think?”

“Lovely.” There is a slight smile. His ears must be trying to attract the corner of his lips.

“How does it make you feel?” she presses.

A shrug. A mere raising of the shoulders. Then the slurping. Again.

The pole shifts could be happening when he's locked in his study. She could have found the natural position dozens of times, and she would never know it because it shifts before he comes out for the evening. She taps her nails.

After all, there had been natural positions before. Attractions so deep that he could scarcely stand to be away from her for a moment. Times when his hands couldn't decide which part of her to spend the most time on. She remembered being tantric with him; they might make love for days at a time.

Fact: Demagnetization is entirely possible.

If that is the case, she realizes, then there is an unmistakable loss and tragedy to it.

Fact: One way to demagnetize a lodestone is to heat it at an extreme temperature.

There was heat. More than a few times, when they would entangle limbs and her obsession was with how things would bend. She learned much about the flexibility of herself, of William, of objects. Perhaps her obsession should have been with temperature instead, so she would know to keep track of it, to make sure they did not overload themselves. But she hadn't.

His office is a sanctuary, and she has never thought to disturb the sanctity of it while he is there, but she must know now. Without knowing for the rest of the day, she doesn't know how she can bear it.

She opens the door without knocking. A sin in itself. Flesh touching metal instead of wood.

She peeks her head through the door. She tries to say his name, but the word gets lost in her throat. He hears the clearing of it instead and turns around.

“What are you doing in here?” he demands.

She walks towards him, and with every step, he looks more confused. It's as if the shrinking distance between them troubles him to his deepest point. Her confidence wavers.

“I asked you, what were you--” In infinite boldness, she kisses him, grabbing the front of his shirt so tightly she thinks that the fabric might have fused to her hand. She tries to force her tongue through her lips and then through his own, the way the grapes used to move so effortlessly. There is a barrier now. He shoves her away, and she struggles to maintain her balance before righting herself, trying to pretend like none of it had just happened.

He is speechless. She thinks, he might at least say something, might at least just turn around and we can forget about all this.

Then he wipes his mouth. He wipes all traces of her from his lips.

Fact: A demagnetized lodestone cannot be restored to its magnetized state.

1599 c/o John Minichillo

2010-12-27T13:11:00.003Z

Hamnet’s Ghost

William Shakespeare reads a borrowed book in his furnished London room. He is part-owner in the company now and he needs a play. He becomes aware of the room, no longer immersed in the Amleth legend, and he remembers his son, who would be fourteen. What would the boy have thought of the new plays? It’s been three years and William Shakespeare wants to feel proud.

The advice of everyone, of Will Burbage and Thom Pope, is to divorce. Despite the Queen’s church and the national feeling, William Shakespeare is still too Catholic. He sees the Scandinavian tale updated and he crosses over to a foggy night at Elsinore with a message for his son: Amleth, Amnet. Hamleth, Hamneth. Hamnet, Hamlet. He needs to write.

He imagines his boy older and in anguish, at Elsinore. He remembers the hole at Stratford, his son in the ground. With his elbows on the table, William Shakespeare holds his face in his hands, and he returns to the book. He wipes his fingers on a kerchief and turns the page, the stiff paper of the volume lifted, the page flipped, and the suggestion of silence as the page comes to rest. The morning light through the open window, the river breeze. He reads and feels at peace. But halfway down the page William Shakespeare loses the sense of the sentences. He is restless. The chaos of London below his window, the breach of memory, the injustice of loss. He needs to write.

What is the password! Hark!

Have you seen the King tonight?

William Shakespeare saw his son, Hamnet, in a dream he can’t forget. William Shakespeare is the father-ghost and he doesn’t know what to say.

He closes the book and places it on the shelf. There is no poem, no play, no utterance for the feeling and he can’t write it.

He takes his jacket and his hat from the peg . His arms return to the sleeves of the jacket, accepted into the familiar cloth. He is the fanciful version of himself, the walking-around William Shakespeare. The air by the river will do him good. He will eat. The flag of his theatre is flying. From the balcony, he will watch the crowd.

1598 c/o Wes Schofield

2010-12-24T12:50:00.004Z

Notes Concerning the Night Sky

Jepp fell asleep every night counting the stars. He would count them on his fingers and his toes, his mouth, two eyes, two ears, and his nose. Twenty-six was the largest number he knew, so after counting his nose star, he gave them names instead.

Astrid, Anne, Ariel, Ashley, Betty, Bonnie, Connie, Cara, Delilah, Denise, Gertrude, Penny, Polly, Wauneta, Yola, and Zoe, names of all the girls he once knew. Then having run out of human beauties he would count the sky’s brightest lightest by his favorite foods. Spaghetti, Chocolate Cake, Scrambled Eggs, Ice Cream, Coffee, Lamb stew.

Once he had turned the hottest suns of the universe into an earthly smorgasbord of tasty delights, he counted by shades of green he had passed earlier that day on his way into town to buy a stack of fresh paper. Deep green grass, Fresh leaf green, Fallen leaf green, Baby bud green, Caterpillar green, Mossy green, Painted green fence green, Darkest black dirty pond green.

He counted by games he knew, he counted by cities he’d been to, by the rhythms he could dance soft shoe dance steps to.

It was around a quarter to three in the morning when he finally had wracked from his brain every possible notion, entity, name, or miscellany he could use to tally up the points of fire dotting the endless black of the night. It was also usually around this time each night he would be sent by his master to brew a fresh pot of coffee or tea. So, once having set a steaming mug on his master's table, being most careful not to spill a drop on one of the sheets filled with precious calculations, he would reclaim his spot in the tumble of hay below the massive tube containing the lens and other fine instruments capable of refracting from deepest darkest depths of our universe a small dot of visible light, and return to his sleeping ritual starting this time with pure nonsense gibberish.

Bock, Tock, Wick, Wock, Spic, Spoc, Trink, Zock, Zum, Grum, Plim, Trum, Voe, Koe, Krue, Cho. He rhymed like this, in a sing-song way, as a warm up to more complicated bit of meaningless twaddle. It was too difficult to carry on with monosyllabic rhyming gabble for more then five minutes without repeating oneself.

Chinto-soramorainian, Yegaldinarin, Togosh-myincantarue, Flimall, Duckrald, Nickra, Waza-ra-ra-ra-ru-hingto-clo-clu-bymaruchybabou.

Now although Jepp - a simple, uneducated, midget-servant-jester to master astronomer Tycho Brahe - had no precise way of knowing it, Waza-ra-ra-ra-ru-hingto-clo-clu-bymaruchybabu was also the last entry in his master’s catalogue listing the positions of 1,004 stars published early that year.

Tycho Brahe gave star one thousand and four the name three-k-Centauri, noted its location as two hundred and eleven degrees, three minutes, zero seconds and marked it’s dimness as a five.

Jepp noted the location of Waza-ra-ra-ra-ru-hingto-clo-clu-bymaruchybabu as 'two hand spans next to my nose over the biggest Fresh leaf green tree'. Its colour was that of a stack of fresh clean paper delivered on a Wednesday. He also made note of its twinkle, something Tycho Brahe had not. A very pretty blue sparkly twinkle, not as dim as Scrambled Eggs, but not quite as bright as Ashley on a dark snowy night.

1597 c/o Carrie Lorig

2010-12-20T08:33:00.002Z

Hideyoshi’s army brings back 38,000 ears and noses
from Korea and receives payment.

We are trying to meet the demands on the back of the cereal box. “Send in as many ears and noses as you can carry, and we will give you a grain of rice that can decode messages from the Gods or a new Samurai helmet with detachable X-ray goggles,” says Hideyoshi, who has been the voice of Tony the Tiger on TV since the end of the Seongoku period.

*

Men lay on the deck with their headphones on in the cool air before sunrise. Could I get a Korean princess instead, I wonder. A she of spidery language, peppery soups. I don’t know what kind of extra UPC codes or shipping and handling that would require. In the ship’s pantry, I begin ripping off soup can labels and disguising box tops as prayer cards.

*

A farmer tries to run in galoshes. One or two of the words he shouts to his wife I recognize from the subtitled Korean dramas I’ve left on while absentmindedly writing poetry.

Che-song-ham-ni-da. The more intense version of I’m sorry.

The paddy is cold for July, and I shake while we take a picture with the dead bodies. We smile and hold our fingers into enthusiastic Vs as bits of rubber floats around us. Mori makes scissor motions near the farmer’s nose.

We leave them propped up like scarecrows, so the plants will continue to grow unharmed.

*

As I clean my share of the body parts and pile them into banded stacks, I remember my last game of skee-ball in Tokyo. The alarm sounded. Everyone watched as the tickets exploded into my arms like bats flying out of a cave. I clutched their lightness until I slid them across the counter and received something much heavier in return.

1596 c/o Roy Scarbrough

2010-12-20T08:31:00.002Z

Hamnet's Ghost

Having lived in Stratford-Upon-Avon all her life, Molly had seen each of the plays at least once, including Coriolanus. When there were unsold tickets available for donation, someone at the home would take her in the van over to the Royal Shakespeare Company theatre. She liked them all.

Some mornings Molly would skip her meds and put on her sensible walking shoes, then slip out of the home on her own, usually during shift changes. She didn't always go to the theatre. In the peak tourist season, there were hardly ever tickets. Still, Molly enjoyed talking to the tourists gathered at Shakespeare's grave in Holy Trinity Church.

Molly struck up these grave-side conversations by asking, "How many of the plays have you seen?" That was the ice breaker. And then, a little later, she would say, "Oh, I know a whole lot more that just what's in the plays." Sometimes her voice rose inappropriately. "I know all his family, and its secrets, and there were some good secrets too. " It was true. Molly knew the secrets behind the names in the genealogy, the dates, births, deaths, marriages, the brothers and the sisters, the children, the jailings, the fines, what was in the documents. Molly was what they called a prodigious savant. That's how they had it down in her chart notes at the home.

"You know, William hated his father," she would say after she had their attention. "The worst of it came out when Will's only son of sorts died. Poor little Hamnet." Next, the rest of it would start pouring out. "The boy was eleven then. The year, 1596, August, a busy, busy time too for Will, who was in London working on Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, parts one and two. He came up from London for the funeral."

"Come with me," she would say to the tourists. "I'll show you the sights. Have you been to John Shakespeare's house on Henley Street? Will was born there, 1564, and this is where Will's wife and children were living when he was producing plays in London, all under the same roof as John Shakespeare, the father Will so hated."

The Vicar and his staff at Trinity knew her ways. They would cut her off when she was too much of a nuisance. "Come Molly. Time to go. We'll call the home for you. How about waiting outside for the van like a good girl?"

Molly didn't always wait for the van. Sometimes she walked over to the river at Avonbank Gardens to visit the swans. When she arrived, she noticed two men were sitting on a bench overlooking the water, one older than the other, possibly father and son. Ages 60s and 30s. Not talking. The younger man sat with his arms folded at the chest, the older rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands. Molly saw none of the usual back and forth conversation one would expect among friends or family on an outing. Molly decided that these men didn't like each other, but some sense of obligation must have lead them to go on this outing together.

A small herd of swans climbed the bank and waddled past the bench toward Molly. "Hello my babies!" she said. "Hello, Gertrude, Judith, Will, John, Mary Arden, Susanna, Hamnet and Anne Hathaway."

"Look, she's named them," said the father. "They seem to know her. Pretty funny, huh?"

The son didn't appear to find anything remarkable or amusing about the lady and her swans. He continued to gaze across the river, his eyes following a couple in a row boat. "Maybe it's time to go, Dad." By that time, Molly had already started walking toward the bench with the swans following her. "I really think we should go now," the son insisted.

"No, lets stay." Now it was father who was insistent. "I'm sure she's harmless." Then turning to Molly, "Which one is Hamlet?"

"Not Hamlet," Molly said, "Hamnet. He was only eleven when he died. William had to come all the way up from London for the funeral, August, 1596," The son crossed his legs and angled away, keeping his back to his father while pretending again to be engrossed with the boaters.

"Are we going to go or not," said the son without taking his eyes off of the river.

The father ignored his son, and then egged her on some more. "Well Hamnet sounds pretty close to Hamlet. Do you think there's a connection?"

"Oh, my yes!" said Molly. "It is the key to the family secret and the secret is the key to the play. The play's the thing." Molly glanced about, checking to see if anyone else my be in listening distance. "You see, Will left his wife and children behind when he was in London. Anne Hathaway lived in John Shakespeare's house. His father's house. Under his thatch. John liked them young. Need I say more?"

"So that was some family secret?" said the father. The son rolled his eyes, and slid to the end of the bench to sit with his back to them.

"Yes, and as surely as one can prove a thing by algebra, one can prove that Hamnet was both Will's half-brother and his stepson, and that Anne Hathaway was both his wife and step mother, to whom he eventually left his 'second best bed', like it says in the will, April, 1616."

The son unfolded his arms and pivoted back. "Look, this is preposterous," the son said. And then, addressing Molly, "Now I suppose you'll claim this has something to do with the play? Seriously?"

"Why yes," said Molly. This is were she talked about how William Shakespeare played the part of Hamlet's father's ghost. "See, a year after Hamnet died, Will was the ghost, and up there on the stage every night addressing his son. "A grieving man is a ghostly man," she said. "Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold," Molly said, ghoulishly reciting the lines, forcing her voice into the lowest registers.

"That's it. I'm leaving," said the son. The son had already walked twenty paces toward the edge of the park, when the father finally rose to catch up with his son.

"Goodbye, Swans," the father said. "Goodbye, Madam."

Molly's attention returned to the Swans. "Ok, ok, my babies, lets see what's on the menu today," Molly said as she lead the swans to the nearest trash bin. She lifted the lid and retrieved a half cucumber sandwich. The swans jostled about her feet as she separated the slices. She tossed them their broken pieces. Heads wobbled over an ensemble of white question-mark necks.

1595 c/o Nicolle Elizabeth

2010-12-17T23:26:00.004Z

Puck gives you the finger from the future because he is in the middle of being written in 1595, also in 1595 January 29 or January 30 William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet is probably first performed. May 24 1595 the nomenclature of Laiden University Library appears - which is the first printed catalog of an institutional library. Later William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet will sit in that library so will Puck duh, bitches.

It was the foreshadowing that got to me. Who knows what length are the depths in these murky waters? I will tell you this: It was cold and there was algae everywhere. What do we have here in this Romeo and Julieta? We have the hero the heroine we have the seer, we have some villains, we have some outlying characters, we have some legends. (Queen Mab, for example.) This is she. I rode a gnat to your pillow so I could whisper nightmares into your ear and wow are my gnat’s arms tired. But what is it you’re wanting here? Our hero and heroine spent the entire love story worrying about the foreshadowing. Every two pages it was all, What trouble befalls this worried mind? Tonight in the stars I see some misshapen events not yet played, etc. What is the point of all the yadyadyada? Be like, me, get the finger from Puck. Comedy drums: BADUMCHING. *cue lights, thank you, thank you.

-or-

Some worry befalls this troubled mind I know not yet what instances will occur but I am certain there will be days when I have failed you.

1594 c/o Marta Q.

2010-12-17T23:14:00.004Z

MAN

Sometimes MAN kills his sons. At one point, MAN has a lot of sons, but later he has fewer. At one point, MAN has two hands, but later he has fewer. GIRL is the only daughter of MAN. At one point, GIRL moves around and is in love. MAN kills GIRL too eventually. MAN cuts off one of his hands to save two of his sons but his sons die anyway. The person GIRL loves is killed and GIRL is raped. After she is raped, the tongue of GIRL is torn out and both her hands are cut off. This is done by the two sons of WIFE. MAN kills the two sons of WIFE and cooks them. He serves them to WIFE and HUSBAND. WIFE and HUSBAND eat them. MAN screams in the face of WIFE and tells her she has eaten her children and kills her. HUSBAND kills MAN. MAN’s last remaining son kills HUSBAND. END.

1593 c/o Jess Dutschmann

2010-12-03T00:40:00.009Z

siege

I've seen something, maybe,
but now
under the subway chandelier,
can't remember anything.

I think I was--

before
called to the western end

before
the pyramid stood
above
my collapsed breastbone.

1592 c/o Alice Kirschbaum

2010-12-01T23:27:00.015Z

Caravaggio paints children. Caravaggio paints fruit.

Caravaggio paints himself arriving in Rome, naked, looking around. He lies on the ground for a while, gets up and looks around, shouts and coughs, finds someone, asks where he can go to paint.

Caravaggio paints himself walking to the gallery every day. He walks into the gallery, says "good morning" and goes to his corner. He is paid to copy famous paintings so the copies can be sold. He walks into the gallery and goes to his corner. He faces the canvas and closes his eyes. He thinks about his life getting smaller and smaller. Sometimes the monsignor walks over to his corner and Caravaggio quickly copies the paintings he is supposed to. He goes to his corner. He paints fruits and flowers.

Caravaggio paints himself being given money to paint things he does not want to paint. At night, he returns to the gallery and paints things he does want to paint. When he has a day off, he sells his paintings in the street. He looks around.

Caravaggio paints himself alone at the gallery, looking around, pouring paint out of a window onto the heads of policemen below, saying “scum” to himself.

Caravaggio paints himself getting to the gallery in the morning. He does what he is told. He looks around. He paints quietly when the monsignor is near. The monsignor tells him to paint more. He paints more. His heart becomes a bergamot. He thinks about painting a bergamot. His heart is being peeled by a child. He looks around. He thinks about black moths emerging from his pockets, trying to fly. He paints hungry lizards hiding in bowls of fruit.

Caravaggio paints himself painting, getting bored, painting over it, getting bored, painting over it.

Caravaggio paints himself working every day for a fortnight and then being paid. He takes his money and leaves the gallery. He goes and drinks wine and finds people to fight. If he has to paint himself killing someone he will.

Caravaggio paints himself waking up, lying on the ground, getting up, looking around, naked. The monsignor has given him a slave. When Caravaggio is naked, his slave carries his sword and some paintings to sell.

Caravaggio paints a man making a joke about Caravaggio’s footwear while looking into the eyes of the woman Caravaggio is with. Caravaggio cuts holes in the man’s cloak, pushes over a table and runs away.

Caravaggio paints himself being given nothing but green food by the monsignor for one month. He paints himself eating nothing but green food for one month. He paints himself slitting the monsignor’s throat. He calls the monsignor ‘Mr Salad’ very quietly. He paints himself putting a pitchfork through the monsignor’s neck and screaming in his face. He goes to the gallery and paints flowers and fruit and eventually he can leave.

Caravaggio paints a young boy peeling fruit. He paints people dying and being killed or tortured or beheaded. He does this until he is the Pope’s favourite artist. He drinks wine and paints himself painting himself slitting the Pope’s throat.

Caravaggio paints himself throwing a plate of asparagus at the head of the waiter who is walking away from his table.

Caravaggio paints himself slapping his own face, saying "I work in a factory, I work in a factory, I am going to die." He punches himself and says "wait, what am I doing?" Caravaggio looks around and smashes his hand through a plate covered with green leaves that has been left there for him to eat.

Caravaggio paints himself painting children. He paints himself carrying a sword beneath his shirt. He drinks wine. He paints himself having sex with his slave. He paints flowers. He paints himself playing tennis and losing and stabbing someone through the heart and he paints that person dying slowly.

Caravaggio paints himself never preparing to paint, crying, quietly saying “my life still doesn’t exist”, and then painting children and flowers and fruit. He paints over the same painting again and again until it is time to go home until it is time to come back.

Caravaggio paints himself falling sideways off a stool, lying on the ground, standing up, looking around, being told he cannot buy any more wine, being asked to leave, a guard grabbing his arm, Caravaggio slamming a fork through the guard’s cheek, the guard screaming, Caravaggio screaming and running, his slave screaming and running.

Caravaggio paints himself working solidly for a fortnight and then drinking wine and playing tennis until he runs out of money. If he has to paint himself killing someone he will. Caravaggio paints his slave carrying his racquet. Caravaggio walks from place to place and screams at his slave for two months.

Caravaggio paints himself returning to the gallery. The monsignor is there. Caravaggio is tired. He paints himself never preparing to paint. He paints the monsignor walking slowly around the room. He paints himself looking around and then painting children and flowers and fruit until it is time to go until it is time to come back.

1591 c/o Zachary Whalen

2010-11-20T00:42:00.001Z

1591

This year started on Tuesday

Eight hurricanes this year

I swallowed so much air

Like, shitloads

1590 c/o Shiona Tregaskis

2010-11-13T03:25:00.002Z

Blood Filled My Mouth When I Spoke

i) Agnes Sampson was the first one in, tufty scalp bleeding, already in the image of herself reoccurring. A white dress with a red cross painted on. I followed her. At one time, I thought I would have followed her anywhere, but this was itself a dead end. She sat down, told me they'd shaved everything, they'd shaved her cunt, everything. I could believe that. I peeled an orange. I gave the orange to Agnes. She broke it, sweeping zest where her long hair was now gone. I kept the peel, it sweated my palm as if the pith were flesh.

ii) Gelie Duncan arrived, took the last empty seat and spilled someone's tea. Then we all had to introduce ourselves, even though we knew each other, and say why we were there. My tongue was shredded dry by the witches' bridle so I couldn't speak but they said it was the rules everyone had to participate so I did. They asked Gelie if she'd kissed the Devil's arse cheeks, if she'd kissed them in the pulpit. She said she had not.

iii) Later that day, Gelie wore thumbscrews and changed her mind about the Devil.

iv) It is natural how we lie. As I listened I wished I could take myself from then, be absent from now, be missing from then. What if I raised myself a ghost in some former world past the smudged curve of memory. What would it be to return to possibility, if such a thing existed. To track the rib and tip of time and come back intact. It is essential how we lie.

v) Blood filled my mouth when I spoke. There was so much blood in my mouth. I could only hear the questions from a distance. It was King James, the actual King James, who was asking the questions. He asked what is the best type of cow and what is your favourite food for a picnic. He came closer and asked more questions, on wig-fitting, fakery, midwifery, beekeeping. Each question made every person in that room feel that life is always what it's like, never what it is.

vi) The king had great forensic skill.

vii) It was like the time this one card came unsigned on that birthday I was ill with the pox. I said to my husband, here, look at this one: the picture on the front reminds me of the sea, even though it's definitely very far from the sea. There was one blank card each year thereafter.

viii) While Gelie rearranged all her furniture when she heard we were accused, I let the safe edges of my home be still. I used to lie in the room made up for night with pictures on the walls that were set so I could see them clearly from the bed. These pictures illustrated everything I knew about love and solitude.

ix) Eventually Anges told the court the king's private wedding vows. She whispered them, verbatim.

x) Which is how the whole thing really took off. They garrotted bald Agnes, and burned her to ashes. Then there was a huge storm, suddener than ever, that lifted off roofs, closed off streets, drowned all the crops. A sinkhole took Gelie's house into the earth. That is the constancy of water. Once in the water you are alone. After the storm, awnings dripped.

1589 c/o Chantel Louise Tattoli

2010-11-12T00:37:00.003Z

Whatever It Takes Is Said

In Africa, they accuse. You listened under their heat with their textiles leaning into you, so heady, so you could believe in this magick, too. Societal tension, it is handled by such sharp ﬁngers that the pointing out of a fall guy—a witch—that’s the actual craft here.

The video you show is very bleary, but anyway, who wants to watch a person set on ﬁre in HD? It’s like the camera ﬁlmed through its own tear-ﬁlled eye, and if anything, those who have not objected to watch will know it is really real because the industry only acts in perfect conditions. But this—that, a victim—is real. That person burned. Of all the questions to put to you, professor, the one you get oftenest is about the smell. And smell, implicated as it is in tasting, it must be that the thing they wonder about is the taste.

You tell them how deliciously human meat grills, as beef and fatty pork do together on the same grid. That blood, of course, is metallic. Skin crisps, looking and smelling of charcoal, and if they’ve leaned into a candle and singed those 60s-mod bangs they thought were what-a-good-idea, they know for sure that hair goes up smelling its sulfury way. Spinal ﬂuid does land mustily ﬂoral on the palette. But—the smell of the human body burned, overall—it isn’t likeable. And it stays with, phantom as the formaldehyde from their dissections, how they smell it days later in the street and then kissing their great aunt’s cheek, their noses mistaken and wrinkled.

No different—this, what happened in your ﬁlm—than historic burnings. The Burning Times in Europe were 1550-1650. In 1589, some 130 witches burned in the German town of Quedlinburg. In all—and the archival evidence is doubtful—perhaps a hundred thousand, 80 percent of whom were women. Some call it a holocaust, and it was. Gendercide. Woman-hunting. The old poor unprotected single women or widows, the non-church-goers who paid their way doing herbal medicine, they were easy. So much of it was economical—the redistribution of wealth that came with socio-cultural shifts, the regular threatening of status quo. Or if the crops failed, then some were pointed to.

Some would burn.

You look at the faces of students you’re losing. Today, you say, today, stomachs grumble in sub-Saharan Africa. And people hiss. Witch, witch. You’re a witch.

1588 c/o BL Pawelek

2010-11-10T22:16:00.001Z

1587 c/o Buster Jones

2010-11-10T00:09:00.010Z

On what remains of the demolished theatre, The Rose.

Philip Henslowe, John Foxe, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Francesco I de' Medici and Otomo Sorin enter, sharing a packet of biscuits.

PHILIP to himself, breaking away from the group, dancing with gusto: My body is here to incubate many, many shits. Yeah! He attempts to high-five TOYOTOMI, who ignores him.

TOYOTOMI to himself, shouting in the face of a Matryoshka doll: You’re so fucking full of yourself.

The audience laughs. Toyotomi hurls the doll into the audience. It hits a child in the face. The child bursts into flames. His neighbours catch fire but sit patiently.

JOHN to himself, stripping off his t-shirt sexily: The Gospel having spread itself into Persia, the pagan priests, who worshipped the sun, were greatly alarmed. To the audience. Do you like that, guys? Huh?

FRANCESCO to himself, holding a snail’s shell: You see, I thought that if I pulled this off, the little guy would be able move faster, but it just made him more... sluggish. Curtsies to audience, winks and lays down. After a short while he proceeds to hump a crack in the stage.

OTOMO to himself, looking in his satchel, panicked: Where is my wife?!

The audience laughs. A time machine appears on stage, tinkling.

TOYOTOMI to himself, punching his palm: How many times has a semi-colon even been used in a text message outside the context of a wink?! He pulls at his hair, walks aggressively towards the front of the stage, screams, jumps into the audience.

PHILIP to himself: My body is here as a vessel through which money passes! Huzzah! He attempts to ‘bump fists’ with JOHN, who ignores him.

Mary, Queen of Scots steps out of the time machine, drinking a beer, smelling of old milk.

JOHN to himself, chewing gum wearily, absent-mindedly removing his pantaloons: The first persecution of the Church took place in the year 67, under Nero, the sixth emperor of Rome. Mmmm. He puts his hands behind his head and rotates his hips while addressing the audience. Do you like that? Oh yeah.

OTOMO to himself, weeping gently, watching as hair pushes itself out of his palms toward the ceiling: I am a gigantic chalk rabbit. I need my wife. I am afraid. I need my mother. I am afraid. I have no wife. I am a Buddhist monk. I am a Christian.

MARY to herself, in a monotone, drinking a beer: These guys Jesus what the fuck

FRANCESCO to himself, standing slowly, blowing kisses down at the crack in the stage: I am the tallest clock tower. My family are murderers. My child is a changeling. My first wife died. My second wife died. I am about to die.

Francesco dies of malaria or else he has been poisoned.

TOYOTOMI to himself, trying clumsily to climb back on to the stage: I would like to hug someone or else kick them through a window. Whichever. Probably kicking them would be better. He finally scrambles on to stage but screams and jumps into the audience again where he is torn to shreds and then eaten by three teenage girls in school uniform.

MARY to herself, bored, patting her various pockets. Her confusion is followed by a flicker of recognition: That fucking Stegosaurus. She walks over to the time machine and steps through the door cracking her knuckles.

OTOMO to himself, curling up, becoming an ever smaller ball of wool: Where is my wife? Every time I would say something purple and gentle and she would punch me until I became a stone windmill. I need my wife. Only that. He begins to cry more violently. His face rolls off his skull down into his hands, his body becomes a skeleton.

JOHN to himself, now nude, pouting, penisless: Many eminent persons in the church and state fell martyrs to the ignorance and ferocity of the pagans. To the audience. How about that, huh? You like that? A huge timber moon falls on John and crushes him quietly.

PHILIP attempting to ride a unicycle: I am the emotional centre of this play. I am here. I am the most important part. I am alive.

Exeunt.

Several billion years pass.

The sound of a didgeridoo.

The end.

1586 c/o Jason Lee Norman

2010-11-03T20:45:00.002Z

Voronezh. Samara. Tyumen.

They have a saying in Russia: Live in Voronezh, work in Samara, die in Tyumen. In honour of Saint Rose, born on the banks of the Voronezh, fed the hungry and the poor of Samara, torn apart by wolves in Tyumen on the exact date that she had herself predicted.

Saint Rose, born in Voronezh, the city on the river. The city built by Peter the Great. Saint Rose, who was called Rose when her nurse swore on her life that she witnessed Rose’s face turn into a flower before her eyes on the day of her birth. Saint Rose, raised like a flower in the pot of dirt and dung that was Voronezh, the diamond on the river Voronezh. Saint Rose, patron saint of Russia. Rose with the beautiful singing voice. The nuns swooned and thanked God for sending them the voice of an angel. They begged her to stand up for solos during Sunday service. Saint Rose, who could not stand to be desired, filled her mouth with sand and drank scalding coffee and finally took a vow of silence.

Saint Rose worked in Samara. Samara, the city of industry, economic capital, financial capital, transport hub. Samara, the jewel on the river Volga, where Saint Rose fasted thrice weekly and fed the poor and the invalid. Rose who as a young woman became even more desired for her shape than for her angelic voice as a child. Saint Rose, who smelled like fresh cut flowers and men would lust after her as she returned home from her works of charity. Men would fight in the streets over Saint Rose, who hated to be desired, and the men would cut each other’s flesh at the hopes that she would stop to dress their wounds or to pray with them as their blood that smelled of vinegar soaked their shirts. After some men proposed marriage to her in the streets as she returned home from Sunday services, Saint Rose took a vow of perpetual virginity. Saint Rose the chaste, the pure, who could not stand to be desired, became desired even more. Saint Rose, who covered her face with pepper and lye and suffered the searing burns and boils that would never heal so that she could continue to feed the hungry and the injured denizens of Samara.

In Tyumen, city of exiles, frozen city, city of the forgotten, Saint Rose came to live in solitude. Emerging from her self-imposed exile only for the flowers in her garden, to receive the sacraments, or to sell her needlework, giving most of the money to the church and spending the rest on only a little stale bread and hard cheese. Saint Rose, the only woman in Russia who could make anything beautiful grow from the frozen soil of Tyumen, whose needlework and intricate embroidery grew more popular every day, became an object of desire one last time. Word spread that Saint Rose was sectioning off pieces of her beauty and selling it at market. One Sunday, as she had predicted, they came from as far away as Samara, as far off as Voronezh for a piece of Saint Rose. When the flowers and the needlework ran out they began to take pieces of her. They started with her toes. A man sliced off eight toes with a sausage knife and ran some silver thread through them in groups of four. They cut up her calloused hands and peeled the skin from her back to patch holes in their clothing. They took everything, even pieces of her wrinkled and scarred face that resembled the surface of an asteroid-battered moon. When all that was left was a small pile of cloth and bits of hair and teeth they all went back to their cities on the river, to their frozen houses, to wait for a day when another saint would be born and grace their lives with her beauty and kindness.

There is a small church in Tyumen that claims to have the skull of Saint Rose on display for members of the congregation to venerate and gaze upon. It is rumoured that upon the skull lay a crown of roses.

1585 c/o Xiena Saeed

2010-10-16T19:57:00.003+01:00

[Click to embiggen.]

1584 c/o Brad Nelson

2010-10-15T23:58:00.003+01:00

Musashi's Blade

I’m forty-five inches of cold, uncaring steel, and I love the taste of blood. Well, that’s not exactly the truth. I am forty-five inches long; I am made of steel, sometimes cold, sometimes not—depends on the weather, really—but I don’t particularly care for the taste of blood. In fact, I hate it. And since we’re being completely honest here: I’m also a little squeamish.

“What?” you may ask. “How can the blade of Miyomoto Musashi, arguably the greatest samurai ever to step foot on the field of battle, not like the taste of blood?”

That’s easy for you to say. Have you ever tasted blood? I’m not talking about cutting your finger and holding it in you mouth while you go get a Band-Aid; I’m talking buckets of blood on a daily basis—rivers, lakes, oceans of blood, blood the likes of which even Stoker never imagined. Salty, rusty, iron-flavored blood overwhelming your senses, engulfing your being.

Many people puke or faint at the mere sight of a little blood. Imagine being bathed in its warm, viscous—ugh, just thinking about it makes me feel a little woozy. Blood cools quickly, getting sticky, turning a deep merlot; it’s best to get it off quickly. Not so easy when you’re me. I have to wait until He’s done slaying every crazy, sword-wielding maniac in sight, and by that time, it’s not just blood. There’s bits of flesh, hair, gristle, and bone caked to every inch of—oh God, oh God. Breathe. Breathe. Okay, moving on.

What’s worse is there are things out there even more gruesome than blood. I remember this one time: He was walking through some random bamboo forest, on the road to the capital, when He was attacked by a small, locally-well-known group of brigands. I have seen many men stand—and fall—before Him. That this ragged threesome even dared to approach Him astounds me to this very day. You could see by the look of these three that they were, more than likely, down-on-their-luck ronin who hadn’t seen honest work or a real fight in quite some time.

The first two charged, swords raised above their heads, screaming like banshees, bloodlust in their eyes. The third held back to see how things would play out. It played out exactly as I expected it to: with me flashing in a dance of martial poetry through the midsection of both men. The offal that poured from these two was such that it caused the third brigand to flee without thought of recompense; I think I even heard Him gag, though He would never admit to something like that.

You see? Being the blade of the fabled Kensei, the Sword Saint, isn’t as glamorous as you thought, now is it? Most people assume it’s all glory and honor. They seem to forget that there is a gritty reality behind glorious war—death.

1583 c/o Brian Oliu

2010-10-11T00:05:00.002+01:00

Dyrehavsbakken

At the top of the hill were deer that blinked more than others—they ate apples with vigor, they tasted windfall. These fruits will make you younger, they said: there is something in the water. In the spring in the spring we let our legs dangle, let our feet paw at the water as if testing glass—to scrape something from the top, to take the water with us somehow, to blink more, to taste more. We came here to stay young, our days of our parents dropping us off at the entrance over—we have our own mode of transportation—we have our own way of getting into the park. We do not need our fathers to swing the mallet that launches the frog that wins the prize. We know about timing, about stiff rims, about strength. We are not scared of the pirate ship, the twists in the dark, being upside down. We tease those who are in hopes they will hit us on the arm so we can grab them, pick them up, hold them like a stuffed bear. On the way home, our car hits a deer. We check to see if everyone is all right, not letting anyone know we are scared. As we circle the vehicle we think of our mothers, our fathers. The deer looks up at us like a cooked fish.

1582 c/o Richard Chiem

2010-10-07T23:12:00.004+01:00

1582 love in the club

There is an interesting way the water gathers on the window from the rain outside, where a young couple is kissing and pressing their bodies against the windowpane, and a small insect drowns against their passion. Little squirms and it dies easy. The water droplets make the shapes of boobs. Outside the sound of traffic grows hallow and faraway, just like how Los Angeles would sound years later in the future. Girls drink to see into the future. Hernando is very tired. Love feels like a thing people eventually learn to live without, like tonsils or god. The bar is not a bar. The bar is a place with a big mouth with some big teeth and a smart tongue and if you are willing, everything is willing, the bar will touch anything if you would like. Will do more, if you would like. The people that come here are terrible and angelic, and so the place is a void, somewhere imaginary to fuck or be existential, to be away. People come to come. Here is heaven. Here are angels with genitals. Here they sit, half delirious, on platinum dance floors, and the room fills with people in tight clothing, fancy shoes and serene faces so to talk and talk and come hither. Opium in syringes. Scotch and ice and thin saliva, swirl inside glass cups with lipstick. The halogen light is yellow and thick and alien enough to make you feel nauseous or invincible. It depends on how the girl looks at you, he thinks. Hernando returns from the dirty bathroom back to the dance floor, after vomiting out an entire universe. He wipes his mouth. His body aches. When he woke this morning, all Hernando could feel was his head, all big and pulsing like a tumor, and there is nothing left to do but to stare at himself in the mirror, until breathing became an art form, until art becomes bullshit. Someone pretty and perfect is asking Hernando if he would like to dance but he doesn’t say anything to her and he pushes her away, and she falls down over easily onto the beating crowd behind them. If someone doesn’t react quickly and retrieve her from the floor, there is a cold fear that she could be trampled to death or maybe punctured alive by dancing queens, or the latest craze of the latest pop song. The beautiful pop song. Hernando waits too long before he finally feels guilt, like true guilt, and when he does turn around to apologize to the girl, she has already gone away, departed for someplace else. Some place better maybe. Sound vibrates through Hernando’s body like echoes in a tunnel and despite everything, Hernando cups his hands together and screams out sorry into the crowd, but no one can hear him. He screams and screams at the top of his lungs, standing there, but no one can hear him, because the music is playing so loudly and the DJ is very hot tonight. He asks about what time it is?

1581 c/o Louise Norlie

2010-10-03T17:00:00.002+01:00

November, an Anointing

The squeal of pigs. The yap of curs. The smell of mud-matted skin. The greased fur on his son’s boots. Richly patterned carpets bunched in the corners, tripping him in his rage.

Ivan the Terrible lifts his staff high in the air.

YOU, MY OWN SON he screams.

The metal point of the staff presses into his son’s skull.

It moves at an incredible velocity.

The skull of Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich cracks. A dark circle on the head of the Tsarevich, leaking red.

Ivan the Terrible splays his fingers in surprise, dropping the staff. There are fissures in everything now; these strange, malignant lights. Kneeling on the floor, Ivan the Terrible covers himself with the body of his son. A torch hovers in the air, held by a hand with stumps where the two middle fingers should be.

Ivan the Terrible thinks there is a way to plug every gash. One hitherto undiscovered way to replace a severed head so it seals with its former neck to create an illusion of wholeness.

Even if the person is dead. The head, back on. With the staff, rolling away. And the torch, wavering in the smoke.

Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich groans in his father’s arms. Ivan the Terrible prods his fingers into the softness of the wound, filling it, stopping it up.

YOU, MY OWN FATHER his son whispers. Dark, beseeching eyes. A voice begging with love.

Ivan the Terrible kisses his son’s dank hair. A taper drips hot wax onto his hand, anointing him with a pleasant burn. He tastes something metallic. It could be blood, his blood. All the blood is his.

Ivan the Terrible concentrates. The muscles on his forehead tense, pushing down his eyebrows, gathering thick wads of skin in folds. A fissure opens on the head of Ivan the Terrible. He reaches through the fissure into his skull and pinches his eyeballs from behind. The eyeballs bulge like ripe fruit, the arteries thick and red within the white. Now he will not close his eyes. He will watch what he did, what he will do. The pupils cringe in the centers of their webs.

1580 c/o Sully Sanchez

2010-10-02T21:18:00.005+01:00

The Book of Concord

It is OK to fantasise about being a tortoise wearing Ray-Bans.

Smelling yourself is the same deal as yawning if people see you doing it.

If a woman with one crutch gets onto the train with you, it’s fine to give her a minute or two to hit people on the legs with it before you offer her your seat.

It is OK to be an assassin but it’s a pretty interesting career choice.

Affecting a facial tic probably won’t make people think you are truer of spirit.

When drinks go flat it’s OK to think that humans are pretty easily impressed.

Hurry up and make a decision on your number one favourite vegetable.

Always find out how a person reacts to having their new shoes stepped before you go to bed with them.

It is OK if you want to stare at the crotch of someone you find unattractive because why not, it's the 90s!

Hurry up and figure out a way to hug someone properly while lying on the floor.

It is OK to imagine that somehow the human race has survived another ~12bn years and now the universe is shrinking.

Imagine that.

Yikes.

The crowning professional achievement of a teenage vandal is probably throwing a lampchop through a skylight.

It is OK if you dream of a racehorse that has drowned in a Jacuzzi.

It is OK if you don’t want to eat that scorpion for whatever reason.

Figure out what is the furthest you’ve ever rolled down a hill.

Go out in the next 6 months to try and beat that record because why not, it's 1995!

You can wear a scarf for as long as you want, it doesn’t bother me.

Hurry up and figure out what hairstyles will be like in the future and place a thousand dollar bet (there will probably be a lot of hair extension).

It was probably an overreaction when you punched that piglet hard in the face.

Wait, what is that ninja doing in a bakery?

1579 c/o Erik Svehaug

2010-09-29T00:14:00.003+01:00

Drake's Cook

Eagle must have made the Golden Hind, with its massive wings stretched across bones of wood, its hold full of strange smells, clothes and implements. The white men, that sailed it in from the sunset, must have come straight from Coyote. Odd, agreed the old Miwok men in the sweathouse of the village nearest the beach, and surprising, that the passengers in Eagle's basket with wings seemed to have forgotten so much about life, unacquainted with the simplest things, like atole, black eggs and pinole.

The seamen brought gifts, but demanded food and supplies of water in great volume in a rude way. They impatiently sucked their teeth or rattled beads or copper pieces, as if to say: “Right now!” Their speech reminded the People of duck quack and squirrel chatter and many shouted in a loud, coarse way. The strangers that were sick and losing teeth, hair and body fluids were nurtured in the village.

One day, the People noticed that these visitors weren't mingling or courting the single women. They weren't staying! During a daylong sweathouse meeting, it was decided to hold a feast and offer a dance directly to the aloof Admiral Drake, as though to Coyote and Eagle. This might evoke pity for the People's loneliness. Single women could do a flirtatious dance and entice at least some visitors to stay.

Young men set up the fire, with heaps of extra firewood. Boys and girls spread mats over the rocky path all the way from the village to the feast area between the boulders. The women cooked for hours and used many of the village's reserves to make this feast spectacular.

The late afternoon waves lapped against the shore during a long silence that followed the food. The murmuring of each group reached the other as an increasingly repulsive sound.

An elder, who had encouraged the feast, stood and sang an age-old welcoming song of reunion and reconciliation whose melody was quick and light and warm and whose words were full of respect and a reminder of mutual loves and history together.

The mood shifted. A popular seaman stood in place and sang a bouncing song about chasing French and Spanish ships at sea and women on the shore. Sensing a positive shift, the elder signalled the women's dance leader to begin.

Six lovely young women had been chosen. They had practised their dance for several hours each day for several days. The girls had fasted to purify themselves and passed through the smoke of an herb fire.

They danced somewhat inwardly, with small gestures, gradually collecting life, then with more outward expression and broader gestures celebrating life. Then they enticed, suggested, offered to share life.

They danced beyond themselves, rhythmic and undulating, sweat drenched but shivering occasionally, chilled by the wind off the water. The spirits that guided the girls held them at a pulse that reached out to these sailors. The dance invited them to forget what they knew of hard ship life and home.

Up jumped a seaman. To the rhythm, he began to pump his hips toward the girls. Another got up and copied the other. They faced each other and advanced, thrusting. They bumped each other forward and then reversed and bumped buttocks, then one reversed and thrust at the other's bum. Attention was now divided.

The warm spirit turned cold. A girl picked up two large smooth rocks from near the fire pit and clacked them together with the rhythm. The dancing seamen slowed and turned toward the sound. “Sit down!” she commanded them, continuing to clack the rocks. They sat, though not understanding her words. The girl clacked the rocks and twirled. Another picked up two sticks from the beach; others grabbed single sticks and large shells. The pace increased; their movements swift. They no longer made eye contact. The music had no words, only open mouth sounds, which increased in intensity. A girl began to alternately hit her thigh with a stick and then strike her two sticks together. Then she hit her face and the side of her head. Others followed, alternately clacking and striking themselves, rocks to both temples, sticks to the cheeks and nose, shells to the forehead, sticks against breasts, throwing their bodies down into brambles and onto jagged outcroppings. The beat maintained somehow. Scratched and bleeding, the girls tore their faces with their fingernails. Both groups of onlookers sat silent as the trees. The sounds became a wail, not of pain, but of reproach and shame and mourning.

The shaman of the village was terrified. This dance of pain was new, but instantly, unmistakably, now part of their tradition and he had been chosen to witness its creation. Trembling, the old man stepped from the group of men and began the dance of Mountain Lion, his most powerful ally; slowly, undulating, his shoulders rolling, at first humming, then chanting low barely audible tones, then words, then suddenly, with a scream of a lion denied its prey, he shook the beach, startled the guests, dropped the villagers to their knees and snapped the girls from their trance.

Impatient during the dance, and using ivory buttons for bait, ship's cook Hedricks had enticed a young village woman with tattooed chin ribbons to go with him along the beach. They passed a downed tree that harpooned into the water. As soon as they were out of sight of the crew and natives, his hand was under her skirt of rabbit skins like an ecstatic fox. She got the buttons and the giggles.

He had learned about the value of his buttons from a pock-faced tar on board and had brought the buttons ashore with him, hoping to work out a trade of this kind.

Side by side, face-by-face in the starlight, each was scared of the other, but even more excited. Speech had been useless. He found her plump, round and ready. When she laughed at the tickle of his beard, it took him back to Connaugh Street at home and he could've been with Meg or Sara or Bonnie. With a hand on each shoulder, he pushed her back to the sand and put his leg between her knees ready to mount her. With a twist, she rolled away with her back to him.

“Be strong,” she murmured, and backed toward him, now more than ready to receive him.

“Teasing, are we?” he said, chuckling, and pulled her with both hands to face him. His hands moved to her thighs.

“Right now!” she laughed and rolled over to make her mood clear. No more hands and beards, she wanted all of him all at once.

“Here now!” he said, exasperated. As he forced her over, he tried to penetrate her, her legs tight together in reaction.

“Ow!” she said. “Other side. Other side!” and rolled, her buttocks up, even backing toward him to make her mood clear, tired of his pushing games.

Hedricks pulled her head up and hit her hard now with a scarred right fist, mad. She complied with the alien skunk.

He gave her seed with which to start a family and a share in the disease he had picked up in the Sandwiches.

While the shaman was yet dancing, with the eerie scream still clinging to the hairs on the back of their necks, two seamen jumped to their feet and began to prance and jump and beat time on their thighs, with open palms. A fife began to play and they went into a hornpipe and another pair joined them. With a word, an old man rose and led the villagers up the hill to their shelters.

Two days after the feast, it was clear that the sails had been repaired with fiber and gut, not feathers. The hulls and masts were bolstered with wood, not bone. The canvas that filled with wind appeared dirty; the ship puny and weak. When the shaman watched the ship sail south, he knew that whatever stayed from the ship was not from Eagle or Coyote, but from the People's own terrible pale kinsmen.

Hedricks' button girl was cremated at the ocean beach, twenty-three months after the feast. Her mother and sisters blackened their faces with blood and charcoal mixed, cut their arms with shells and smeared pitch in their hair. They shrieked their grief. The whole tribe prayed her to the West, to the island beyond, the land of Eagle and Coyote. Her body was entrusted to the sun-like fire, which consumed, last of all, her necklace of precious ivory buttons. Her husband and two children followed shortly thereafter.

Eighteen months later, Drakes' cook, Hedricks, drowned during the sinking of a different boat on the Thames, just miles from London, his body lost. His shipmates clinked their glasses and muttered his name for the last time.

1578 c/o Belle Crawford

2010-09-21T20:51:00.004+01:00

The Whispers

It’s an old memory.

You know the feeling that rises up from time to time? The one that comes on like a cold and last hours, sometimes days, seeping in through the tiny holes in your skin and swelling up, clogging the brain with the unshakable impulse to do things?

That’s what it is.

That’s what it was.

There were no white faces before. The humid stretch from here to the Atlantic was only Ashepoos and Kiawahs. Wandos, Combahees. Edistos and Westos. We spoke Muskogean. She didn’t understand them, Francisco de Vaca and his fraternity, their thin lips, tongues moving inside like fish struggling, dancing holy O’s squawking murder chants. Or maybe it was prayers, who could be sure? And the hair! The way it moved on their faces and around their eyes when they made demands. It was enough to make you want to laugh.

She liked looking at them. (We all did.) She made her body like a hotel. She gave gifts. (Our gifts. Our things.) Pearls, arrowheads, corn cakes. Then she gave more. (Her gifts. Her things.) One by one, they shared her, their sweet milk-fed stink coming in from everywhere, disguised as nothing. Their sounds like tortured animals, but also like babies. She couldn’t not, if you know what I mean. She was under their hypnotics, their creamy pull to destruction. But when they found out she didn’t have what they were really looking for (fat money nuggets they could sink into their pockets like extra dicks), they exploded and ate up everything we loved. They took her as a prisoner (Did I see her smile?) as they went to search other tribes, other troves, other flesh hotels.

When she came back she was alone. Thin and empty-eyed as a dead raccoon. Pregnant as a hot September rain cloud. And she’d forgotten how to speak.

"The Whispers" we called it, her new kind of talk. They’d replaced her tongue with one of theirs, defunct. (A goldfish bloated, upside down.)

The Whispers threw her off balance, turning her footprints into drag marks in the sand. (Dizzying, really. But kind of pretty, if you forgot what they were.) She circled and circled all night, The Whispers working their way into our rooms like a breeze, making us dream fucked-up dreams. Horses with human faces where their teeth should have been. Ravens with pussy-bows round their wings. Fucked up.

It was autumn when they found her body on the shore of the Savannah, her stomach ripped open like one of their berry pies, the breathless baby curled in her hand. "The Whispers" we explained to ourselves. "That feeling that rises up from time to time. That fills your head like a fever and last hours, sometimes days, clogging your brain with the unshakable impulse to do things."

That’s what it was.

That’s what it is.

1577 c/o Sue Miller

2010-09-20T22:35:00.001+01:00

Superlunary

In describing certain relationships—
say, the rate of passage
of a flame-tailed accretion of ice and rock
through the cross hairs
of an earth-bound scope—
precision's contingent on the acumen
of one's instruments.

Picture the passage
of time, of celestial events,
without ability to articulate
distances with satisfactory granularity,
where the most distinguished observer,
after a long day of fishing,
thanks to a former blacksmith
cum horologist whose need to mete
out increments impels him
to add a hand to the face of time,
to break it down minutely
enough to express logarithmically
that the sweep of a particular spherule's
observable height across the firmament's breadth
remains constant across a continent.

Understanding is breached;
courts applaud and appoint
as, significantly, an atmosphere
is observed to skew away from sunward.

Imagine a race, today, run without
a stopwatch. Imagine a scientific observation
that waits on the day's catch.
Imagine a future unfurling
beyond capacity
at a pace navigated,
stargazing.

1576 c/o Ryan Vance

2010-09-13T23:32:00.003+01:00

The Record Shows I Took My Blows

Read it aloud, Whythorne says, trying not to caper.

William Byrd holds the first chapter of Whythorne’s legacy in one hand, a Pepsi in
the other.

This is just one big ego massage for you, isn’t it? he says.

You can’t think of it like that, this is an entirely new genre. Have you ever
invented a completely new genre, William? Have you ever birthed a gamechanger?

The temptation to caper is so strong; the full deal, knees-high-arms-in-the-air.
Whythorne is so pumped.

This, he informs his flatmate, is an entirely original representation of identity.
This will not only change history, it has within it the potential to single-handedly
retroactively reconfigure how we-

Okay, okay, shut up. Right, here we go. Once uponne a time there was a manne called
Thomas Whythorne and he travell’d to Venice and he mette fellowe scholars that
liked songs and sonettes and then he boughte some stockings… they were greene and
he wanted to… penne a recorde of his…

Well? Go on.

Byrd adjusts his ruff and says, It’s a bit pre-school, isn’t it?

It’s only a first draft, Whythorne huffs, stomping to his room.

Byrd sips his ice-cool Pepsi and makes a satisfied ahhhh sound.

***

I don’t get why I have to read it, says Byrd. It’s your thing. You read it to me. I’ll tell
you the bits I don’t like.

That’s not how it works.

Why not?

You’ll see.

Byrd looks sidelong at Whythorne vibrating with anticipation, and begins.

My name is Thomas Whyth… Tom, this makes no sense. I’m not you, why are you
making me say I’m you?

Keep reading! It gets better!

I feel stupid.

Whythorne bounces on the divan, patting the cushions with his little hands.

My name is Thomas Whythorne. Borne into wealthe I have beene afforded the
luxuries of intelligence and culture. Lette me telle you… Tom, I don’t get it… It’s…
weird. The style’s all…

Autobiography, says Whythorne, smirking. I invented it. Well, not really, but I say I
do on page thirty two. It’s okay if you don’t get it first time round. But go on.

Lette me telle you of my travelles to that muche misunderstoode city state of Venice,
a lande of songs, sonettes and fine… blue stockings? I thought your Venetian
stockings were green. I’ve seen you wear them.

Whythorne shrugs.

It’s a risky venture, this new genre business. I’m having to court sponsors and they’ve
requested a few adjustments. To be honest, in this game, the truth is what I make it,
and I don’t think anyone’ll pick up on a simple colour change.

What sort of blue? asks Byrd.

Same blue as this can of refreshing Pepsi I am currently holding, says Whythorne, and
chugs all three hundred and thirty millilitres of tasty black goodness in less than thirty seconds.
Oh. Oh, he says. I think I’m going to throw up.

But he doesn’t.

Sorry, says the Pepsi representative, can we try that again? The gonna-puke market
isn’t all that lucrative, you know?

He pulls a fresh can from the cooler and tosses it to Whythorne.

What sort of blue? asks Byrd.

***

Calle me Pepsi?

Don’t ask, says Whythorne, his head on the kitchen table and his hands on his head.

Will you even have ownership of this?

Just read the damn thing and tell me what you think.

Calle me Pepsi. I posesse absolute claritie about what I do. I selle high qualitie foode
and beverage products. My successe will ensure customers wille builde their business,
employees builde their futures, and shareholders builde their wealthe.

The Pepsi representative marks the dry silence by pointing to where his watch would
be, if he wore a watch.

Tom this is revolutionary. Tom this will change history. Tom you are a genius.

Don’t thank me, says Whythorne. He is speaking to the table. Thank Pepsi.

We need more enthusiasm than that, Mr Whythorne. Can we try again?

Whythorne kicks back his chair. He jesters around the room with a fat rictus on his
face.

Don’t thank me! Thank Pepsi! Their delicious soft drink inspired me to be a
true original! Image is nothing, thirst is everything, obey your thirst! Pepsi!

What was that? says the representative. That thing about thirst.

I was improvising, Whythorne growls.

He feels like a bear in Oxford Square chained to a post.

The Pepsi representative taps his lips with his first and second fingers, deep in
thought. Image is nothing, thirst is everything. I like it, he says. I like it. Stay here, he
says. I need to check in with head office.

We might be able to use that.

1575 c/o Amber Sparks

2010-09-13T00:23:00.003+01:00

Henry III is Crowned King of France at Rheims

He kneels, dizzy in the thick mix of oils and incense, as the procession of monks approaches the high altar. Like all the kings of France since Clovis, he will be anointed with the contents of the holy relic the monks carry.

Another monk won’t be so reverential, seven years from now. A Dominican friar, frenzied and fanatical, he’ll leave a knife in his king’s belly before he goes to his reward. Henri will follow him shortly, the last of the Valois kings. A long line erased by religion, seed exhausted, replaced with sturdy Bourbon blood instead.

When he is born, his Medici mother will know from the first that she loves him the best. Chers yeux, she calls him. Precious eyes. His brothers will hate him for the soft ways he learns from her. She will teach him to read and write, to love art, to be wise and to wage but always despise war. Most of all, she will keep him a Catholic, even as he longs to rebel, to fall into Protestantism. She will keep him a Catholic and it will eventually kill him.

During the Revolution they’ll haul poor Henri from his long rest in the family grave; they’ll molest his bones beyond what death can do. Finally they’ll toss what’s left of him into a common plot, brushing the dust of the tomb from their hands and dreaming away all kings. His spirit, unsettled and lost, will cry for his mother, will cry for the perfumed neck and the warm lap and the sweet, light voice lulling her chers yeux to sleep, to sleep, to sleep.

But now he struggles for wakefulness, wades knee-deep in the blessings of his people and God. Now the archbishop lifts the Crown of Charlemagne from the altar, holds it aloft, sets it heavy and hard on Henri’s head. Henry III of France rises, ascends the throne, waves to the people as the shout rolls through the cathedral: Vive le roi! And yes, today he lives, and he will live until he dies, until the failures of the future come washing down the back roads of time, and he is pulled under and drowned forever.