yeah no,
That it goes from all
shall be well to oh
well
Knock knock
It is its own intelligence,
Though here must be a bad vortexx
Which is to say
“eo rovs peoy ci meou wahr t boiru,” which is to say say,
NORRTHOW ! OOOHMEE ! NOG LITE ! NOO
KHRAHRR ! TEEMOWW !
eem now ooh-nohh
THEE OWW OHH
grahoored to waking gowwr
which is to say,
nnoam
trouse
clud
age
girer, plancher
sask jaw, grire,
plote
throatqh
narn serie
surnce
brurnal
lengthqer,
sleech,
Norah Maki, Vanitas (oranges with death mask of hair), 2014. Graphite, ink, hair. Jace Clayton, The Great Salt, 2018. Detail. Modular synthesizers, cables, marímbulas, aluminum, speakers, salt replica of silver salt container. Jumana Manna. Wild Relatives, 2018. Film still. Photograph by Marte Vold. Savannah Knoop, Screens: A Project About “Community,” 2019. Installation shot from the outside of Essex Flowers. Photo by Marina Winther. Installation view of Alicia Kopf, Diary of Conquests at La Capella, Barcelona, 2014, ink on wall. The relationship between an author and their translator can take myriad forms, including a large, glowing, white cube emergeing from a stadium-size pool of water. “When it was no longer funny, it became profound.” The art of animation and automatons. The setting is our reality, but. The characters are happy, but. The plots are straightforward, but. Take the lithosphere: 193,000 human-made “inorganic crystalline compounds,” or what you and I might call “rocks,” now vastly outnumber Earth’s approximately 5000 natural minerals. Which is to say, someone is not looking in a mirror. Or rather, a mirror is not being looked in. Instead, “the head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes the feeling glass. But what does it feel? The position is for body balance during the brushing of teeth and the washing of face neck arms and torso”. “But who feels what?” “Does steel or glass or napkin or ground or earth or universe feel?” Things worsen. She has a couple of falls; “the author collapses, into the character again”. A table with wheels is bought, to make things easier, and it causes a raft of new difficulties. Mozart, Beethoven, Athena and Christ are nothing but shadow and light on stone. Nothing much happens, other than “the armchair, the world.” It is a question of dialogue. “Who’s talking to whom?” But the other thing that happened was much more important. I had a very serious illness, lost a kidney and had a very long convalescence. I fell into a semi-trancelike state for a long time. A fly straddles another fly on the faded denim stretched over the knee. Sooner or later, the knee will have to make a move, but now it is immobilised by the two flies, the lower of which is so still that it seems dead. The fly on top is on the contrary quite agitated, jerking tremulously, then convulsively, putting out its left foreleg to whip, or maybe to stroke some sort of reaction out of the fly beneath, which, however, remains so still that it seems dead. A microscope might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy in its innumerable eyes, but only to the human mind behind the microscope, and besides, the fetching and rigging up of a microscope, if one were available, would interrupt the flies. Sooner or later some such interruption will be inevitable; there will be an itch to scratch or a nervous movement to make or even a bladder to go and empty. But now there is only immobility. The fly on top is now perfectly still also. Sooner or later some interruption will be necessary, a bowl of gruel to be eaten, for instance, or a conversation to undergo. Sooner or later a bowl of gruel ... Around the same time Jakelin died in CBP custody, a man stood waiting at the cruce, an informal stop for all buses turning left toward Raxruhá from south in Guatemala. The man stepped on every bus, calling out, “Is anyone from Candelaria?” Finally, a cautious voice responded, “who wants to know?” The man explained that he was in Port Isabel Detention Center with Pedro for weeks. When he signed his deportation papers and prepared to return to Guatemala, Pedro asked him to get a message to his father-in-law in Candelaria: he was detained in Texas and did not know where his 10-year-old son was. Please send help. Shortly thereafter, I received a new contact request on WhatsApp. Pedro’s family did not know what an Alien Number was, what political asylum meant, or how to find a lawyer. Nobody in Candelaria had spoken to him for over a month, because he didn’t have money to make an international phone call. They were glad I could put money on his account, and hoped I might be able to visit. Then, they were surprised to hear how far away the state of Texas (where he is detained) is from the state of Washington (where I live). Pedro left Candelaria for the United States because he, like over 50 other men in his rural community, lived in fear of capitalist criminalization and prosecution as state racism in land grabbing for ecotourism. While the person who stole land and sowed conflict in the community was a foreigner, he was only able to illegally seize land through racialized privilege tho Guatemala legally recognizes Q’eqchi’s as an Indigenous people in its constitution, and the government legally recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to territorial autonomy (such as through ILO 169). Rather than recognize the Candelaria community’s legal property rights, the state has framed the people who live there as criminal trespassers on their own land. This is why traveling north with a 10-year-old son who does not speak Spanish is the choice Pedro made. It’s probably needless to add, but now that Pedro has a transnational WhatsApp team, money in his commissary account, and has claimed his rights, not much has changed. He has talked to his son once, but the boy cried the whole time; they’re both still in detention ... and so on and so forth and scooby dooby dooby ... which is to say that the problem with making Earth Moon System in a comparable size to Selfie is the moon would be almost invisible. But what doesn’t come across online with either work is how both pieces are really black mirrors. This is why the first piece, which is of the Earth alone, is called Selfie. The Earth is tiny, the viewer huge. And the same is true with Earth Moon System, though here, the viewer fills the void between the two masses. As a species, we are indeed egomaniacs. So I’ve also been buying all the self-published books I can find titled ‘My Life’ and thinking of them as my autobiography. I’m not sure yet how to present this work but it’s in the pipeline. Regards, Mishka. “And who is not a borrower?” However, I have a redeeming quality: I was gifted with a sunny disposition. I have tried in my own work to free myself from my own head. I would hope that people would take the opportunity to do likewise. With some kind of transparency and even a certain simplicity. The world is a dark place. The world already has the dream of such a time. As to how I utilized the other lines, my recollections are less precise.
luminous effects
some kind of transparency
where is the gate to paradise?
my memory fails me
my recollections are less precise
everything we do is music
I put my fingers to the glass and bowed my head and cried. A narrative hinders no one. Can a narrative succeed? It’s that simple. Anybody can nearly see what I mean. Alone and terrified. Engaging with the terrain. The most marvelous overlappings. Empty spirit in vacant space. There are voices but no words. At the edge of audibility. We hear it but choose to ignore. The machinery of process. An awareness of other possibilities. Language of a blinding clarity. So much crumbled stone. Along the face of the sky. Millions of facts of distributed light. But meanwhile I am to include everything. I took a deep breath ten times, facing the morning sun and held it as long as I could possibly hold it. Orchids appeared in front of my eyes, then a voice spoke to me, “Don’t forget to breathe out, my dear, it’s important.” I looked around but only saw a thin white dog. My tooth suddenly began to ache. I’m now quite sure the white dog is below the earth, in a secret chamber, having followed a mole, her dear friend. In my own childhood I spent hours folding colored paper into small birds and animals. Yesterday I thought I was watching some letters spell out “a girl in red shoes has gone with a blue-eyed alien” on the wall of my room although there was nothing on the wall but a small black spider with red legs. This morning, on the way to the noodle shop, a small French man made an abrupt halt in front of me and asked if I had ever seen him before and I replied “non.” Suddenly he leapt into the air, spun around, and raced off, a bushy tail dangling from his butt. Dogs and foxes have the power to foresee the future, but humans barely understand their languages, which we need to start learning no later than the age of five. Likewise, they will develop a dependency on music and the whirring of locust wings for guidance through life. I went up to the roof of the building and found there a pile of ashes still smoldering and a strange-looking lump of melted metal. I took the lump — about the size of a medium-sized coin — and dropped it into my pocket and went home for lunch. A few blocks away from my house is a butcher shop, and the butcher, who was usually busy chopping meat, was acting funny without any lump of meat on the chopping board. With a knife in each hand he was beating the board like a drummer and singing at the top of his voice. The song was something like this: “Flowers in summer never last, and the azaleas are nowhere now. Come back, come back, my sweet azaleas!” and suddenly I became worried about the shiny rainbow insects in my closet, the party, and the dogs the tornado had blown into the air. I was absolutely destroyed. People at different times in my life have told me I’m scary. When angry I make myself ridiculous and jump up and down, but not to intentionally scare. Usually I’m just frightened and upset so I holler and yell. It’s difficult to get used to one’s own failure ... So I got into this industry because I wanted to find out, “What is life about? What does it mean?” And I still don’t know. You go to your little zafu and all of a sudden the heavens open, ears smoke, eye balls spin, and belly button vibrates — “I got the answer! Been broken free!” You run off to the teacher who says, “Oh that’s nice, now go mow the lawn.” And you can see that we have fits of elation (and anger) and break through the veil, but of course the veil comes back when we look the other way. People need to sit down, that is my program, sit down and stay there until you find out, “Why born? Why die? What does the predicament of being in the body mean? What does, ‘Beyond the physical body’ mean?” Can’t be “out” until thoroughly “in” — the “inness and outness” thing. And how to do laundry? I got a whole lot of dead underwear waiting in the washer upstairs. All we know is mush — all we know is
The goose drank wine, the monkey chewed tobacco
on the street car line. The line broke
the monkey choked. And they all went to heaven in a little row boat.
Clap Clap. Clap Pat Clap Pat Clap Pat Slap! Clap Pat!
Clap your hand, Pat it on your partner’s hand ... Right Hand.
Clap Pat Clap your hand. Cross it with your left arm.
Pat you partner’s left palm.
Clap Pat, Clap your hand, Pat your partner’s right palm
with your right palm again.
Clap Slap, Clap your hand, Slap your thighs and sing a little song.
I was a medic. Delivered 465 babies.
Baby and mother feed together.
There is a last exchange of blood after birth while
they are still connected thru placenta.
Don’t severe the placenta until it stops pulsing.
Orange poppies all over the place.
Lungs, livers, hearts, stomachs, brains.
We depend utterly on each other.
Stones. Rocks.
Alpha bird dinosaur.
And where are the wheel barrows?
Lungs, livers, hearts, stomachs, kidneys, spleens, brains.
I went to the kitchen to peel potatoes.
When Miyo Vestrini was born
In 1938,
Cesar Vallejo was dying.
Dust must be kept well away from camera equipment,
But it is deeply photogenic. It’s late Spring, and the spiraling
Sun leaves a glow across the thriving earth
And eight million reindeer head north
Loose through dark snow
To mate with eight million zombies on ecstasy
Who will not eat you because they are not hungry
To mutter of old men’s voices,
these urges overspilling into emphatic proclamations of love, such as in section II of ode 2, where for all the time you wait and break or mend to die will only make the memory of difficult passionate love still more occult and tender faces disappear as lost mist leaves a mirror clear to vanish permanently diminish not so passingly as love must in a slighted head shut up in dreams admired instead of shed like jobs to multiply the way out by the inward cry for fleecy care or finny drove or feather’d youth or all my love or scaly breed since with that shit Iraq in general must grit its icy core of heart and mind in not just spectral abstract rind but profit for the vested rim who mass produce the phantom limb rip open markets in despair mock cannibals who bite the air rinse spit and flush their sacred founts and “a life aflame in the shark shit a haptic rose, my dead the body viewed thru a cell window where he lay / Not breathing.” Readers however will not have access to the “big picture,” since it does not exist: there is no panoramic viewpoint, only one mediated by socio-technical devices (an online chat, data collected by a smartphone app, a sex tape released to the web and emailed spam). Please RT. Her vision is to mine the basic questions of brain biology but ’Toya thinks unicorns improve her ability to model real species, making fish swim toward the Arctic —causing genes to interact. Is she ageless? ’Toya has a new therapist so she is free of stress. Tell your doctor if you have side effects, which is to say that
when ’Toya’s father, Sven, lost his job at Theranos®
he moved the family to Brooklyn
where Walgreen’s® hired him to give flu shots
and to check the blood pressure of homeless men
tho when ’Toya thought like a dolphin she had a mind of her own, proving that pets are good for people if they come home safe. The truth is, ’Toya wants to be happy. Then the speaker is waylaid from an errand to buy fixings for mimosas; he inexplicably finds himself not in the aisles of Whole Foods but in the land of the dead. Alone with no Beatrice, heavenly light, celestial spheres or bars on his phone to guide his soul, his brain scrambles and doubles back on itself. But his doubts are put to rest when he hears, “Yeah, we’re dead motherfucker.” That settles it. Instead of the Bataillean accursed share, irrecuperable and catastrophic, there is a give-and-take, a dynamic pulse, from heart to hand, mouth to ear, an intuitive cadence without counting. From swimming holes on the Yuba, to a National Park on Big Sur, to the Kansas City of the speaker’s youth, to Minneapolis, where “five Black Lives Matter protesters were shot by white supremacists in bullet-proof vests,” the corporeal enters the poem like a string quartet: bladder, teeth, asshole, knees, all playing their minor fugues. We are transported to “a field of hedge crickets with AK-47s” like a “deep wet pond.” In other words, the Keatsian line, “and full-grown lambs bleat from hilly bourn” rings out its five iambs like a lucky charm in a dice cup filled with “crazy glue and everyone I’ve loved.” You know, I bet Henry James really did think “summer afternoon” were the two most beautiful words in English. In other words, if an official wanted to describe the reign of the first Inca, Manco Capac, and say that before him there was no king, chief, or religion and in the fourth year of his reign Manco Capac subdued ten provinces, and that also the conquering of these provinces cost him a certain number of warriors and in one province he seized a thousand units of gold and three thousand units of silver, and that, after conquering all these provinces, he had a feast of thanksgiving for his victory and to celebrate the honor of the Sun-god, the Quipucamayoq, the keeper of the quipus, would use a black cord, the color that indicated time, as the central string to hang the others from. Then he would suspend from it a lot of uncolored strings with many little knots tied in them. When he reached the center of the cord, he would make one large knot and run crimson thread through it, this is the color of the Inca. The reader of the quipu, seeing this system would read it as saying before the first emperor (crimson thread) for a very long time (many threads and knots), the people had no ruler (no scarlet threads), no chiefs (no deep purple), no religion (no blue threads), and no administrative departments (no variegated threads). In the scarlet thread would be made four small knots to say that the events being recounted took place in the fourth year of that ruler; and to the middle knot he would attach a gray thread which he tied with ten small knots which indicated subdued provinces. Each of these knots would have fastened to it a green thread on which he would indicate with knots the number of enemy killed and would add little strings to name their native province. In this same way he would add a red string, which is the color of the imperial army, to describe the number of men killed and the provinces they came from. To describe the nature and amount of the treasure gained a string of yellow for gold and white for silver would be suspended from the thread of the province it was taken from. On this thread knots would be tied in the yellow thread to indicate one thousand and on the white thread knots would be tied with knots indicating three thousand. Last, he would add a twist of thread with the colors of blue, white and yellow to indicate the god who resided in the sky (blue) and made silver (white) and gold (yellow) and to show that a celebration had been held to honor him. I wonder what this one, by Cecilia Vicuña, which appears to be made of PVC-coated electrical wire, says.
I imagine it’s something akin to how Harrison Ford, speaking of world leaders who ignore climate change at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, put it: “I’m the ocean. I covered this entire planet once, and I can always cover it again.” Take that and shove it up your quarterly reports, fuckers! Glub, glub glub,
plew, ilmls,
lottle, briar, “eroica”
hormer, beads
brar
sprill’s, locix
clells
plam, (-y),
cent-ats
thoi,
perq, tracted, immathace, atipiques
errit, hist
o#
“nimr”
“decker,”
“eyeds, / dreg,
/ daint”
bo.nes. to. a. pause.
I mean, “All reification is a form of forgetting,” as Adorno puts it.
[Note: Sources: JBR, With the Noose Around My Neck 91, at ZS, the relevant portions of the source note to which reads “Jane Gregory, Yeah No, and Ryo Yamaguchi, quoted in Yamaguchi’s “Notes Towards Jane Gregory’s ‘Yeah No’”, at Michigan Quarterly, 14 Mar 018 ... David Melnick, PCOET, quoted in Steven Fama, “A Polished Apple (for David Melnick)”, at the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica, 8 Nov 09; JBR; Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras, quoted in Janice Lee, “Ghost Tantras by Michael McClure”, at HTMLGIANT, 16 Sept 013; P Inman, Ocker, at Eclipse”; bits from BOMB that came into my RSS feed, Jan 10-31 018; Julia Adeney Thomas, “Why the Anthropocene is not ‘climate change’ — and why that matters”, at Climate and Capitalism, 31 Jan 019; JBR; Ali Smith, and Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End of, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Christine Brooke-Rose Life, End Of (2006)”, at DC’s, 29 Jan 019; Christine Brooke-Rose, Out, in The Brooke-Rose Omnibus; Megan Ybarra, “Why Are Indigenous Children Dying At The Us Border? Transnational State Violence and Indigenous Erasure in Asylum Bureaucracies”, at Socity and Space, 16 Jan 019; Sly Stone, “Everyday People”; JBR; No Sounds of My Own Making (the original source note to the complete text reads “John Cage, Philip Whalen, Pablo Neruda, Van Morrison, Maureen Owen, Eleanor Antin, George Harrison, Marcel Duchamp, Guy Debord, Raymond Roussel H.P, Lovecraft, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Jorge Luis Borges, Bob Dylan, Frederick Sommer, Walter Benjamin, David Sudnow, David Mitchell, Donovan Leitch, Alex Ross, Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Czeslaw Milosz, Oskar Loerke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pete Townshend, John Ashbery, Arthur Cravan, David Hockney, Ernest Toch, Ted Berrigan”); James C Hopkins and Yoko Danno, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “James C. Hopkins & Yoko Danno: From ‘Scrolls,’ an experimental work in progress (installment two)”, at Jacket2, 22 Jan 014, except for one line, which is from Hopkins’ and Danno’s “Scroll 34”, at Ikuta Press; Philip Whalen, “Zen Talks”, at Lion’s Roar, 1 Nov 02; JBR; Jennifer Birkett, Heart Bones: The Evolution of a Spew, at dPress, with some additional lines from Kay Werner, Sue Werner, Lincoln Chase, “The Clapping Song,” as performed by the Belle Stars; Miyo Vestrini, “The Call”, “One Day of the Week I” (trs. Cassandra Gillig and Anne Boyer), at Granta 145; “The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver Presents a Handful of Dust, Curated by David Campany”, at Hyperallergic, (?)4 Feb 019; Keston Sutherland, and Rob Halpern, quoted in Ed Luker, “Poetry in Crisis”, at Jacket2, 28 Jan 019; Jean Boîte Éditions, “February begins in love <3 with de l’amour by franck leibovici”, email rec’d 8 Feb 018, approx. 2:13am PST; Clara B Jones, Poems for Rachel Dolezal, at Gauss PDF; JBR; Chris Tysh, and Brandon Brown, quoted in Tysh’s “Brandon Brown’s ‘The Four Seasons’ Reviewed”, at Tarpaulin Sky, Jan 019; JBR; Louis Baudin, A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru (tr. Katherine Woods); JBR; image: Cecilia Vicuña, “Quipus”at Cecilia Vicuña; Harrison Ford, quoted in Ed Pilkington, “Harrison Ford: leaders who deny climate change are ‘on the wrong side of history’”, at Guardian, 12 Feb 019; JBR; P Inman, and Theodor Adorno, quoted in Ryan Gato, “P. Inman Written: 1976-2013 if P then Q, 2014”, at Tripwire 10]
