jillison flook

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“The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point.”
― Ptolemy, The Almagest, 2nd century AD.

—

“I hope you love birds too, it is economical. It saves going to heaven.”
― Emily Dickinson, Letter to Eugenia Hall, 1885.

—

My father and I watch a flock of finches flying around the fallout shelter. Their orbits are slow and worn in, they make it seem like the hours outside are smaller than ours.

My father tells me if we wait long enough one of them will be Mercury, one will Venus, one will be Earth, one will be Mars.

Even then, I could tell his astronomy was clumsy and domestic, a way of keeping track of dinner manners and developed etiquette. A way to make sure an elastic band is all he’d ever be.

Waist high though, I believed him when he said, “there are breadwinners and there are bird feeders. Jillison, you are a bird feeder.“

—

And if the Earth is flatter than we ever gave it credit for, and if the Earth is already a dead bird drowned in mid-air.

—

When we first met I was living in a blue house (as it grew out a red house).

When I was tired I slept in spare shelves or scatter points. When I was awake I tried to keep track of the birds.

It was all a cradle to collapse, and then the candle came down.

—

The curtains were as thin as shedded snake skin. I tore them off to get a better look at him. He was walking with his mother. Her legs were made of grey and brick, her head was twice as tall as his.

It looked like there was a tunnel dug underground between the two of them, every time she moved a foot one way, he would follow a foot behind.

They had been walking that way for a while and then she stopped. She shouted something at him that I couldn’t hear. He shouted something back at her.

It felt like there was a family of field mice sneaking through me. I was already nervous.

She reached into the sack she carried and pulled out a piece of wood with a nail at its head. I hadn’t met her yet so I couldn’t have known what was coming.

She swung the wood with both her arms and he crumpled. Like a mannequin who’d been up all night.

—

her gunpowder horoscope

—

“A beauty is not suddenly in a circle. It comes with rapture. A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.’’

― Gertrude Stein, “A Circular Play”, Last Operas and Plays, 1920.

—

“I see better things, and approve, but I follow worse.”

― Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1st century AD

—

Memory smelled like pennies and batteries.  Seven years, almost eight years now. I could barely see how backwards the days went.    

This year too.  I’m still not going home.  

Missed opportunities, specific routes, the speed at which light attaches past and present tense.

It’s always the same.

—

Children when they use grammar incorrectly it can be cute, almost to a destructive degree. 

To pose an alternate order where the coherence between language and reality no longer hold.   Paradox becomes the norm and the structuring rule.

You get suffocated by wordless potential. Nonsense.  Babble.  

Linguistically it is sickening. So over the edge it is unpleasant.

—

There was a time when there were ten suns.  This is what we did.

Cut our way through the eye socket, from behind.

Gut the creature, leave commas of flesh, use the remnants.  

Another revenge performance and then another.  Displaced urges often become primary means of gratification.  

There is a Lamprey River in New Hampshire.  In the beginning, it was where you’d find us.

—

—

Spent all summer running away from the back-court of an air conditioned car.  Defending against larger, longer, taller men. They are just stronger.  

Costumes were left over from repeated performances: Ghosts in the wall.  Giant immobile organs. We all too often confuse bulk with certainty.  

How obvious now. The size makes a difference, to be frank.  That’s what they kept telling me.  

I am still not interested in men.

—

Some argue there are biological roots to our recognition of cuteness. 

Big eyes. Full cheeks.  Cues sculpted to trigger or release caregiving behavior in adults. 

If only.

Rarely do monsters appear in folklore without some kind of warning or social message. 

If only.

—

Facial structure:  I often imagine myself without my jaw.  Without any jaw. Jawless. You can feel another row of teeth growing, just by being overly aggressive with yourself.

Forcing an eye to the future. Should have lost a lot of years.  Probably lost a lot of years. 

Tales of transformation all tell the same thing: The true form is the one that appears at night.

Finally, all ten suns slowed down and she came up to my room alone.  

“Is that all you are.” she asked?

“Aren’t you anything else?”

Let’s see. 

—

—

On the inverse of flesh: Jam the knife in.  Remember to buy in bulk.

Animals are mostly just bags of juice.  Sugar water. Milk. But states of matter are not fixed features of the universe.  

King Henry the First died from food poisoning after eating a lamprey pie, in approximately 1600.  It doesn’t matter the date. It’s not important.  

The point is unexpected medical costs are the worst kind of surprise.

—

I still have bruised tissue around each eye socket from an assault seven years, eight years ago.  

You can still see depressions and cavities around the orbital bones.  Little gray rings sunk around each eye.  

A circular play.  It always reminds me.

rainy day in an amphibious house / letters

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Nevada / 16 May to 14 June

Dear Jillison,

There are two kinds of half-life (blood loss, sentimentality) and they can both kill you quietly. 

Me?  Myself? I suffer from a lack of generative imagery, imaginative capacity.

An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out of-the-way New England village cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar.

Oblivion lurks in the immediate neighborhood.
Said Thomas Bailey Aldrich of Emily Dickinson, 1885. 

—

I’ve tried to prepare an explanation for you the best I can:

Nosebleed, ear ache, stomach cramps.  Highly derivative ways of forcing back weight.  Slow. Sluggish. Already lost more than arms and legs.   

I’m pretty sure we both can’t keep using exhaustion as an excuse.

—

Julin / 15 June to 15 July

Dear Jillison,

Consider.

Most hummingbirds are continuously hours away from starving to death and consume the human equivalent of 140,000 calories per day to compensate.

They enter an mini-hibernation mode (torpor) each night just to survive the suspension of calories.

Jillison, This is how I imagine it must be to live the way you do.

Incurable, without sleep, not dead enough.  Still scrambling to write your same zero-sum diaries.  Childless too, obviously.

This how I imagine it to be at least.

—

Castle /  16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

OK, so what did I actually actually see? These days?  It wasn’t much.

Gray splotches, dust storms, pale clouds.  A disconnect between patchwork and puncture sites.

You told me once, every scar has to have an origin story.  Do you remember that? You said, “a cautionary tale is just culture (however you choose to to define it) designed to improve our survival rate.“

Scavenger’s daughter was right.  I wasn’t going to last.  

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

Before proper mirrors, the ocean or lake was the looking glass, the reflective world.

Lacking semantic or declarative memory, many of us, we still mistake this metaphor, we have a hard time remembering what lap we are on, we mistake denotation for connotation.  

Even when the differences are glaring at us right in the face.

—

The act of predation can be broken down into a maximum of four stages: Detection of prey, attack, capture and finally consumption.

What I mean is? We have been adapting to the afterlife as if it were a normal error.  Everything has slowed down. Completely.

Jillison, have you considered? Many hereafters won’t belong to humans at all. 

This should come as no surprise to you by now.

—

Plowshare / 16 January to 12 or 13 February

Dear Jillison,

I said I was going to stop writing you these letters.  I should have.

We often fail to appreciate this critical aspect of the natural world: it’s brutal.  Even apex predators are very often constantly on the edge of starvation.

Emily Dickinson’s complete refusal to sit for a photographer.  In the end, unwilling to leave her bedroom, hiding from all visitors, even in her own home.

—

What is here since you left?  

Some days are like hummingbirds in plastic bags and some have some have been so long and flat they may as well have been laid out on a stretcher.  

Every one I thought of you at some point or another.  

—

Why are there so many myths and folklore where humans are punished for wanting better than their present lot in life?

It’s because you can’t have it.  Ultimately.

seven forgetting / letters

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Trinity /  16 July to 15 August

Dear Jillison,

Let’s start over.  Let’s somewhere maybe we can agree: every creation story involves water.

I miss you.  Eight blackouts in four days. 

Shipwreck’s here and sometimes the shoreline already looks like it’s been struck through, another storm of white noise in a waiting room.

—

But not always.  Sometimes my lungs are bent upward and blushing and I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

I tell myself, this time, on this continent, and just put another tomorrow away and then another tomorrow away. 

 I tell myself, it doesn’t matter the difference, all diaries are the same day.

—

Hurricane / 16 September to 15 October

Dear Jillison,

No one ever thinks about how you need to stop when you want to be in a place. Deceleration is often crucially ignored or overlooked.

I wonder how your days are, what sort of materials and fabric have grown too loud, what shapes you sleep in when the sky is quieting down and the landscape is a surrendering thing.

—

Every object in our solar system operates/orbits on a relatively flat plane because it was all formed from the same original stellar accretion disk 4-5 billion years ago.

Maybe this just one defensive posture against peaks and valleys.  Just a deep flat line of naive enthusiasm, infected by fragments with varying levels of success.  

Nevermind the the vanishings, the empty lenses you expected me to forget.  

It may be true that the earth is flatter than we ever gave it credit for. 

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

Do you remember: You kept telling me how unreliable eyewitness memory could be. 

You said, don’t try to tell me you don’t know me by now.  I set my watch just to tick in time with your pulse.

—

It’s hard when your senses are ready for everything next, and the rest still resists, like cellophane wrapped too tightly over a windowsill.  

But still.  Things might not get worse.  We might start having to define ourselves differently. Have you considered that yet?

What then? What kind of ghost, what kind of hiding in the attic, what kind of forgiveness and future potentials?

It’s there.  Just a beginning, solutions ankle deep, birth marksmanship.

—

Jillison, I don’t know how to say it honestly.  I can only say it honestly.

It was real for me. It was real for me. Is there really any point in telling someone on hormone replacement therapy, “no hard feelings.”

Come home.  Come home?

—

—

Plowshare / 16 January to 12 or 13 February

Dear Jillison,

In the men’s bathroom in the office building I’ve been working at, I listen to old men straining to shit while I do my brows in the mirror.  

I am so incredibly embarrassed by my face.

Just keep hoping, maybe by the next room, maybe by the next room.

Time then, is it always a form of anticipation? I am still slow to outgrow the tyranny of framing attention this way. 

—

On the unreality of time, this multiverse, etc:  

Shotgun surgery?  Consciousness causes collapse?  I keep feeling something terrible is about to happen.

I have to get better at making fun of myself.  Do you miss me? It’s all collapsing.  

“I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.”

― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, 1936.

—

Manhattan / 15 April to 15 May

Dear Jillison,

Here is what you told me once: There are only a very few basic parameters contribute to what makes a face attractive.

Averaging. Symmetry.  Effects of hormones. Our wounds are just geography.  

Four years on and I remain your unthought known, I remained dimly off limits, barred from the conscious minds of most people. 

Especially you?

—

Cupio dissolvi.  Literally, I wish to be dissolved.

The phrase has acquired more secular and profane meanings and uses, expressing such concepts as the rejection of existence and the masochistic desire for self-destruction.

—

Nevada / 16 May to 14 June

Jillison,

“It scares me how many things I’ve got to learn. How will I learn them?”

― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993

—

Julin / 15 June to 15 July

Jillison,

 There are seven types of forgetting.

annulment
repressive erasure
prescriptive forgetting
planned obsolescence
structural amnesia
formation of new identity
humiliated silence.

plague water worships / hospital 1

—

Some built it up as a burning thing, a combustible thing, but I knew it as a pierce through the window.  There were too many small bites to let the heat show. I lost track. The bones inside kept moving.

Jillison had a red incision and a face with various backings.  Chalk, gypsum, pigment, or any combination of these. 

The room was in linear form, the interior was cut out of dark paper.  The walls offered advice on how to distinguish between a drowning (water in the lungs) and strangulation (broken neck cartilage).  Jillison read them in front of me.

You start to hate yourself and you don’t even know it.  A crow storm at the corners of your mouth. A silhouette split open with an ice pick.  It becomes every day.  

Head wounds (zygomatic fracture, nasal fracture, orbital floor fracture) matched perfectly with a piece of wet paper they kept in their pocket.  

The room went from cold to bone level in less than an hour.  I don’t know how. 

They told me to wait, so I did.  They said it would hurt and it did.  

I tried to sleep, six blankets on top of me, it wasn’t enough.  I tried to put the skin back on. In the dark, with only my open veins.    

A cornered animal must create their own cage.

empty hell theory / hospital 2

—

Once, there were rumors in hell that human beings were happy. So Lucifer sent some minor demon or other up to see if these rumors were true. 

They weren’t.  Yes. We can zero in on that a little bit.

Children think their imaginary friends know more than flesh and blood people do. It seems ingrained in our mental programming that a mind without a body will know more than a mind within a body.

Dreaming up gods that don’t exist yet (but maybe should soon?). This is how the afterlife comes to devour actual life.

—

December.  Dotted lines across the eyelids.  Hair and teeth gives the illusion that there is more body there.

A tenth less atoms.  Many times our memories are very low resolution and highly suggestible.

It would be unsettling if we didn’t have all these other identities and read throughs to fall back on.

—

What are the other possibilities before us? Another tired light hypothesis? The entire framework is much more fallible than we think.  Flawed. 

We humans are descended from a need.  This need. I don’t think there is any use in trying to hide it anymore.

false martyr cartography.

—

“The malignant self-obsession and childish vitriol only scratches the surface of the man’s flaws. His compulsions aren’t hidden or covered up. They are broadcast for the entire country to see, for hours on end, every day, late into the night.”

—

Never underestimate temporary paralysis. It only takes one lifetime to forget all of human history.

The oldest burial sites and artifacts suggest such a belief in an afterlife goes back more than 50,000 years.

Can the dead talk at all?  Leave the afterlife alone. You open a door only to find a fire inside.

—

Petulant borderline (including negativistic features): Negativistic, impatient, restless, as well as stubborn, defiant, sullen, pessimistic, and resentful; easily feels “slighted” and quickly disillusioned.

Hollow, small, sunken, confused, jealousy. It just dominates so much of my thoughts. Intensities of abandonment or reckless abstraction. It doesn’t ever go away.

Everything was poorly communicated and treated as disposable. Identities. Aspirations. Jobs. Relationships. People, in general. We didn’t hang on to anything for very long.

Entropy was common and collective. Maybe we had more to learn from it than we think.

—

Days were sharp and light, and the afterlife did both things. I had shingles in my breath and a throat stacked with wood to burn. We often lit a fire just to remember what the world felt like before.

She carried bags of ash and gray air. We had good seasons and bad seasons. More choices did not necessarily make either of us happier. The afterlife highlights the lack in each.

Causality is murky and hubristic. Causality is irrelevant. Falling masonry offers little refuge.

—

Impulsive borderline (including histrionic or antisocial features): Captivating, capricious, superficial, flighty, distractable, frenetic, and seductive; fearing loss, the individual becomes agitated; gloomy and irritable; and potentially suicidal.

Hospitals were on their “worst case scenarios.” Every bird was made of metal and plastic. The weathervanes couldn’t tell the difference between wires and waves. There were too many angles to count. I think I was just tired.

We counted backwards from the crash site. There were few basic signifiers to indicate anything inhabitable. I used to hide survival tags in my room at night.

Chin, jawbone, brow, mouth, hairline. There wasn’t much I would choose to keep.

I wanted to cry, to feel my face wet and shallow and weak.

—

What kind of nightmares are the easiest to nail down? The ones that already know your name.

I was short, stumpy-bodied, big nosed. My skin looked someone was trying to kill the color pink. I had wrinkles, my teeth were cigarette yellow and crooked and disorganized.

She preferred an affectionate cloth to a wire frame.

—

Self-destructive borderline (including depressive or masochistic features): Inward-turning, intropunitive (self-punishing), angry; conforming, deferential, and ingratiating behaviors have deteriorated; increasingly high-strung and moody; possible suicide.

The barometer kept saying: chance of apocalypse. If only.

Big veins. Low self esteem. Not a risk taker. The center could not hold.

Peak-end rule. You pick apart the cemetery dimensions, go over the outline in your head. You make no payments to the future and repeat the same mistakes. You wear makeup and paint as if it will feel any safer. Just goes to show, the past you bleed is just the past you know.

For worse or for worse, felt like another afterlife was ready to fall.

once upon a meteor riot / letters

—

Prime / 16 March to 14 April

Dear Jillison,

Have I given you my reasons yet? I wanted to tell you, no one else has to know.

A meteor riot may last as long as there are still mistakes for us to learn.

When we I started sending you these letters, I should have warned you:  Sutures. Yes. Always hungry.  Yes. Never, ever, ever, ever, going home.

—

You can collapse a sky by coming too close to it.  Even if the past has yet to make its impact, even if you wait there, waiting for it to crash.

I should have told you, “OK, you know all of this about me already.”

–Mostly melodramatic, maudlin, under-imaginative.  

-Pock marks on top of pock marks.   

-Track marks on top of track marks. 

-Craters of cartilage, itching or missing or mostly gone.

—

Nevada / 16 May to 14 June

Dear Jillison,

“The assumption is you’re drunk… When you drop things like that, when you walk like that, when you act like that.“

“Oh.”

“It is an act though, right?“

—

I know you don’t remember.  I’ll tell you again. This is exactly what you told me:

Stubborn. Engages almost exclusively in all or nothing thinking, delusional, frequently “injured.”  Anti-patterns in each pulse. Irises sinking like sacks in a lake. Black eye permanent. 

Voice like this.

You said, “That’s how you know it’s me.”

Is there a lesson here? A moral? A point? 

Fragile as ash fall and anyone could be just like you. Anyone could be just like me.  

—

Hurricane / 16 September to 15 October

Dear Jillison,

What is the opposite of wisdom?  Folly? Ignorance? Fatalism? A type of tooth?  Should I know by now?  

When it comes to the mortality, it seems we are not often encouraged to look at the details.

What a difference a couple months make.  I had a very different story I was trying to write before.  The thing I’m afraid of, is change. The thing I want, is stagnation.

When it comes to the mortality we are not often encouraged to look at the details.  

—

“Blushing.  The most peculiar and most human of all the emotions.

― Charles Darwin, Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, 1871.

Transcendental anatomists in the 19th century theorized that the bones of the skull were “cranial vertebra“, or modified bones from the vertebrae. 

The theory has since been discredited.

—

Grable/ 16 October to 15 November

Dear Jillison,

Firecracker’s dilemma.

Honestly, Jillison.  A lot of the time when you dare someone to leave… they will.  That has to be scary to know. What if you turn into the things you hated all along?

Most of the time, when you dare someone to leave…they will.   That has to be comforting to know? An explicit reinforcement of causality.  At least on a larger level the classical laws of physics still hold? General relativity has not caught up yet?

 I tried covering my throat in cut black cloth.  I tried to forget how easy it is for an afterlife finds its mark.

“I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated.’’ 

― Grace Paley, The Loudest Voice, 1959.

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

Do I ever look like a girl to you? Do you ever think of me as one? Kind of? Not at all? I never ever know.

She has this complete and rigid dedication to this spiteful creation, this spiteful self-conception.

Very stubborn, obscure, confrontational in her own overindulgent way.  And aesthetically, still quite pedestrian.

Don’t forget Jillison, I get letters from you too.  I’ve taken what you said as truth.

There is a time we all fail.  We pause our own disintegration just long enough to explore the wreckage of a warmer person.  We dig out the hidden teeth in each other.

Jillison, if you still think you don’t know me like that?  Trust me, you know me like that.

—

Plowshare / 16 January to 12 or 13 February

Dear Jillison,

Here is what you taught me to remember.

Atoms against atoms, all light is the afterlife of mass.  No impact left to tell, we are hardly here at all.

Suns out of socket, sky out of socket

Skin separated by serrated angles

Spine like a torn white string.

—

It was a makeup year.  A mechanical year.

The oldest recorded love poetry is 4,000 years old and describes it exactly the same as we do now.

Melodramatic, maudlin, under imaginative. 

—

We were twin signs, kept making the same mistakes.  But if we’re this close, call it a miracle, call it a mirror kill.

Call it every meteor riot couldn’t we couldn’t run away from in the end.

aurora nervosa

—

On an ancient sundial in Ibiza: Ultima mvltis.

The last day for many.

—

Our town was glass domes in a row. Crates and conveyor belts replaced cars and roads. Every horizon was high density sprawl.

Jillison was the only one left who still paid any attention to me. She was a shortage of a girl. Raw wire shadow, skin off white, washed her hands twenty to thirty times a day.

It was hard to tell what was real, what was projection. There was little way to make any of it last. We were losing track. Jillison kept checking dirt lines on the window. We did our best to make sense of the background noise.

We lost light every day, atmosphere was worthless as toilet paper. Might as well have been no windows. There was a long way to go, or maybe not, I didn’t actually know. We had a hole in our bucket, dear darling, a hole.

—

The sun came out in halves or less, rarely for long. Eclipses came in the shape of rectangles or squares. We helped each other, the two of us there.

We kept ourselves on steady behavior authoring programs. Clouds were gray and on repeat. Jillison held a script against screen molds and I spread the movable press.

Most people, if they could, were still playing pretend.

Anxiety became another bill we received daily. Scattered randomness became static disappointment: Sky was still expensive. Trees were expensive. Oxygen was expensive.

My mental health was mostly just arranging voids in a row. Is trauma walled or unguarded? Does it matter?

You can’t defeat yourself into a success. The hole only gets deeper, only goes way.

the curtsies

—

               They weren’t birds and they weren’t people, so we didn’t know what to call them at first.  They had feathers on the front of their arms and who the hell knew where else.  My husband was one of the ones who was afraid of them, but I didn’t marry him for his bravery, I married him because he knew more about the weather than I ever could.

             I remember it all too well, we were half-young and all-married and living in a town known for its toothlessness, it made me feel like I was in a cartoon sometimes, the way everyone walked past us, smiling with their big blank gums, and all those pets they pulled along with them too.  Big pets and little pets. So many fucking pets.

             I wasn’t a detective by any means, but I could tell as soon as we moved, something was going on there. The sky was loud in all the wrong places, the days were short and long and everybody said the sun could do all sorts of other things if it wanted to… I didn’t get what they meant by that. Again, I was no Sherlock Holmes.

             When they showed up we thought they might be some sort of new pet too, but as soon as we got a good look at their faces we knew they couldn’t possibly be, there was too much action behind their eyes, it was obvious they knew better than to be leashed around. 

            While I’m telling you about their faces, I’ll tell you this too, they were round and slightly pink, and sharp in the middle.  They didn’t quite have beaks, they looked a lot like people.  Maybe seventy-five percent like people.  I think I liked the way they looked, avian and mammalian and big eyed.  Like children.

             My husband would take a big breath whenever we saw one on the street.  He’s always been a fragile man.

         There had been a break in the summer and we weren’t expecting anything special.  The garbage was piling up in the kitchen, the mannequins were on display on the street, I was trying on new ways to be mad at buildings.  I used to wear my frustration on my sleeves, but then I was doing my best to cover my contempt under my clothes.  As deep as it could go I guess. 
            My husband would tell me to take the elevator to meet him for lunch and sometimes I did.  He ate a lot of salads and chewed quietly, one day he found a butterfly in his lunch bag, its wings were blue as a baby boy’s room, we laughed as it waved away.  Summer was when we got along best, I bet it’s like that for a lot of couples, I don’t know. 

            Anyways, we were closer to black and white living than I’m letting on, it was pretty boring for the most part.  I was working in a field I understood too well, sharpening equations and balancing ledgers for people who had grown up taller than me.  I didn’t have a fling with my boss despite what my husband says.  My hands were just too tired to get into it, even though I could’ve.

         Maybe I was waiting for something larger to walk its way all over me.  One way or another, I was just waiting.

         My husband started to call them bird people after a few days of calling them, “them” and “they.”  I kind of felt that name was disrespectful to birds and people both, these creatures were something new, and needed a new name of course, not some hackneyed mashup of their most accessible characteristics. 
            I tried on a few names, “flickities”, “koo koo karoos”, “laylas”, before I settled on one I liked, “curtsies” (after the ways their legs bowed when they walked).  I never thought to ask them what they wanted to be called.  Sooner or later they’d tell me I guess I imagined. 

         The big question we had to begin with was whether or not they could fly.  They could, but not very high and not very far.  They were better at gliding, but even still, they didn’t take to the air too often, not that I saw anyways.  Every once in a while when I was driving around in my car (it was yellow) I would see one up perched in a tree, but I always assumed they just crawled up there to get a better view, it barely occurred to me they could be flying around all the time when I wasn’t looking. 
            I barely ever saw it happen, I don’t have a terribly good sense of my surroundings sometimes, that’s all I’m saying.

         Another question is where they came from.  My husband insisted they came from bad families, but I eventually convinced him otherwise.  My theory was they came from some place colder and migrated here for the warm summer weather.  It wasn’t much of a theory, a hog-tied kindergartner could’ve come up with it on the spot.  I liked it.  It was simple.

         I guess it didn’t really matter where they came from, but we were curious of course.  Either way, there they were, a couple of them at first, and then more and then probably somewhere between ten and twenty.  It was easy to tell them apart, some had long, fat, feathers, some had tiny, prickly ones, some had skinny necks and some were stubby shaped. 
             Also, believe it or not, they had numbers on their backs.  Big numbers, like the ones on sports jerseys.  That made a lot of people think they escapees of some sort of experiment, but I just figured they liked numbers.  I liked numbers, I guess probably I was projecting.

         My husband had these horrible glasses then.  We still danced in the living room sometimes, but he was clumsier than ever.  At work someone kept telling him the Earth’s poles were reversing fast (too fast!), that’s the sort of stuff he brought home at least.  Our lives were less than fireworks on the rise, that’s for sure, far, far less, but there was a lot lower we could go too.  My hands were still soft, they didn’t hurt like they do now. 
            I still believed one day there would be a stage in the sky where I would watch something spectacular happen.  I’m pretty sure I don’t feel that anymore.

our nowhere ocean

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Used to scrape off my skin with fingernails and rough fabric. Carved out circles of cheek, jaw, forehead, chin, jaw again.

I was trying to rip the reflection off. I wanted a topsoil of scar tissue, a surface level of red and violent and bleeding through. Raw and bruised.

Am I still angry?  Am I still confused?  Look at all this sweat and syntax emptied out for you. Another nowhere ocean I knew by heart. Another face buried without a name.

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Coincidences of sand. Echo sounders. Ocean worshipers. A connected body of lack and loss.

“All poetry is misrepresentation.”
— Jeremy Bentham, An Aphorism attributed to him according to John Stuart Mill

Human emotions are an unconscious bio-psycho-social reaction that derives from the amygdala and they typically last 0.5–4.0 seconds, although a microexpression will typically last less than 1/2 of a second.

Look at the undertow. You find the prognosis for causality.        

I think of you often.  I go over things I could have done differently.  I try to remember it’s not always about what I could or couldn’t do.  

I know what nostalgia is, it’s a camouflage people cover themselves in when the present tense has become a trap.  

I know it’s a form of depression.  I know we didn’t get here by accident.

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“Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”
– Alan Turing, 1954.

Hedgehog’s dilemma / Lover’s paradox: Despite goodwill, human intimacy cannot occur without substantial mutual harm.

A parasocial breakup. Illusionary experience. Interacting with personas, fictional characters. Scarcity becomes social stress.

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Negative consequences: Body image. Aggression. Wishful identification.

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Stagnation pressure is the pressure a fluid exerts when it is forced to stop moving.

Synesthesia as pathology.

Electronarcosis is one of the methods used to render animals unconscious before slaughter and unable to feel pain. Electronarcosis may be followed immediately by electrocution or by bleeding.

Prohibition against slaughtering an animal and its offspring on the same day.

Uncertainty over insect sentience. Welfare of farmed insects.

Trade-offs between stimulus avoidance and other motivational requirements.

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Darwin described complex behaviors by worms when plugging their burrows. He suggested that worms appear to “have the power of acquiring some notion, however crude, of the shape of an object and of their burrows” and if so, “they deserve to be called intelligent; for they then act in nearly the same manner as would a man under similar circumstances.”

Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation

Animals that have failed: sea lions, giant panda, gibbon, macaque, parrot, crow, fish, octopi.

a constellation of knives / afterlife 2

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And medical knives in Midheaven too, even if Jillison said it was all still preventable.

It only had to be a reminder some form of surgery coming.  An equivalent guilt. They told us possible risks, radiation therapy, more possible risks and a third of the horoscope alone. 

They said accidental catastrophe, including carcinoma, faster than average speed.

Another puncture passed through the undercurrent of your face.  A pain exhibit. Like a constellation killed in slow motion. Almost even carelessly.

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You said you would use whatever your had left.  Lost comets, lines of advantage, sympathetic or contagious magic. 

The discussion was over before it began. Just another reminder of all the things I never learned how to talk about with you.