to be a woman is to be that thin casing in which knowledge is embedded in thick knots of sausage-wire that coils against fair skin, sweet skin, kempt skin. kept thin and malleable bruising and tearing and fit to burst.
Hecuba died a mother because once new life had seen the inside of her, the messy sprawling tubes and wires of her, it was all she had left to be. oh, the towers of troy crumbled around her but she keened a cry for her children alone. let the men play at war women only play at bodies.
but she was a just caricature of a womb, wailing the wide walls down. and I have seen the woman knowledge of my labyrinth of cell-swelled cords, and I have seen the woman cries of those who no longer have a choice.…
I. Waste-whipped, we climb— facing away from wind impossible when wind gusts from every angle eddying tiny tornadoes a white out winter. This isn’t winter though; it barely was. One storm then gone but the air keeps dry and silent and bone joints crack. What was once flexible has stiffened like a starched bleached board.
II. It had gotten better. How is it now much worse.
III. Back in ’02 hurt seemed precious, longing a hobby, and loving a vice. Now we measure time by decades to save what little we have left.…
Pictures of me as a small boy show very short hair, cut in a burr, often jet black in contrast to my brother John’s blond. My mother, a harried woman with four boys, often did all our hair at once, and waited a long time between cuttings, either because of the work involved or laziness, I could never tell. I remember baths as particularly painful because she would dig her nails into my scalp in an effort, I suppose, to pull out the crud I had accumulated during the day. I’m pretty sure the conventional wisdom was to get each child to near bleeding. Later in life, when I saw the shampoo commercial that would declare, “The tingle means it’s working,” I thought, “That would be great if Mom hadn’t killed my nerve endings.”…
A man offers us directions in French, vowels and consonants served on a platter of smiles. Trains click past. Stations are cards shuffled, threshold after threshold offering its chance. We count the stops to Champs-Elysees. Mornings are commuters with strollers and briefcases. Paris afternoons are smoked down, crumpled cigarettes dropped in gutters. We trudge back to Montmartre through placards for braided hair, a smell of coffee and piss, young people crouching in doorways. We buy bread and cheese at the boulangerie. At Du Vert au Vin, wine winks from the walls, fish in an aquarium. I keep thinking of that corner of the Metro, subterranean and damp, where a Syrian family begged from a blue tarp. The woman behind her veil, the man lying on his side.…
When they opened/ the tomb of the Chinese terracotta army/ supposedly they were brightly colored/ armored in red and turquoise but only for a moment before the newly introduced oxygen ate away the paint
The way the old men who live on the plains will talk so casually about drowning surplus kittens/ alongside, when it’s going to snow, and which barbed wire fences need mending
This is the kind of thing/ one would always seek to recapture, don’t you think? The airlessness, All those colors, the ghost escaping into the sky
Perhaps no one has phrased this better than Michael Burkett, also known as “Fat Mike,” the lead singer of NOFX and co-founder of the San Francisco-based indie label Fat Wreck Chords. “I signed a fucking band; I didn’t sign an artist!” Fat Mike is quoted as saying in the last chapter of Dan Ozzi’s book Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy that Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994-2007).
“If I’m gonna give you hundreds of thousands of dollars, help me sell the fucking records!” The punk singer and businessman is describing his frustration with Against Me! (the Florida band known for songs like Sink, Florida, Sink and Baby, I’m an Anarchist!) and their choice of album artwork for Former Clarity, featuring a black and white photograph of a single palm tree, which according to Fat Mike, was not a cover that would sell records.…
