even though i dont know how to claim that from my impoverished roots
so maybe i can be a Twinkie witch
do you have mermaid fantasies?
some women are mermaids because they don’t think they have vaginas
and then they go through a lot of pain to get one so they can get fucked by a prince
transformation/deformation/invagination
i think that is coming into adulthood for a girl
at least it makes sense to me because i have lost many tongues
so i can get fucked and turned into sea foam
i was thinking how sad it is that i can only claim Wrong Life (adorno and theory i don’t actually read)
but maybe i can have a witch life
i will come up with weird healing concoctions
the only thing i believe in is an ethics of care
i am a bad naturalist a bad academic
a bad woman and a bad human
with a bad attitude
because nothing that has happened so far is good enough
the beastie bay game i play on my android is a cute version of colonialism :(
a history lesson as i capture beasts and make them build my civilization and fight for me
to make tourism possible
i watched a movie about bougie old french couple dying slowly
there was “exquisite humanity”
but all i could think about was how absurd the desire to extend life for its own sake
when it is already Wrong
why would you want to do that?
the ends of capitalism is so that rich white people can die excruciating slow deaths
surrounded by medical equipment and shame because the Body Exists
while the other people that are not in the picture live a life of slow death
because of neoliberalism? because you have to stay alive for the one other person?
because World of Two?
because there is no one else and you can’t let go?
sex and death are both affective labors
surrounded by classical music and art they turned the apartment into a nursing home
i refused to feel bad while watching the death
i don’t want dying to be something people turn away from or perceive as horrible
that we have to cover with drapery
in the end the old man did the right thing
and i left the theater thinking about whether it is possible to have a world
in which such a movie wasn’t necessary
in which museums die without dignity instead of people
when you have to give someone a dignified death their dignity is already lost
the movie is about who deserves to be given it
i don’t know
im not a witch yet
i’m not as ruthless as jesus christ
who left his family behind
how can i leave my wrong life
what do i become next, after having become a mute female/monster?
i don’t want to be sea foam
i live in minneapolis
it is cold here
i hope the birds visit your basic bird house
but even birdhouses are not exempt
and your birdhouse is not even middle class
it doesn’t have tinsel pine cones
maybe i can cast a spell on it?

what touch/is

the body reconfigures
the sublime/linal
in living, continual opening
wound cultures
no commonness between firsts and thirds but in the compost of decomposition

here,
somatic poetry
of the body as a site for inscription so
deep it becomes fracture, decay as the only
social body, the limitations
of understanding as it comes from the body
as the body is written it bleeds

how does my “work” relate? why do i work and how
does anything work
i am amazed at this force that drives without us
i keep submitting

please accept my submission that it is easy
to dissolve as a nonentity
the educated postmodernist undoes
unwrites the body into revelatory fields
flat as the midwest where i was born
so what do u give a fuck about
i made my arm bleed
and now it makes a line on progressively infinite skin
this is somatic poetry i have exceeded nothing but feel erotic

feelings intense
feelings intensity

clarity: the dead fold into munnies

i seek Princess Abandoned as i abandon her/self

the encounter of another / the sincere gaze / even of things /
what exceeds the self is not opacity
opacity is self without others
solitary confinement is worse than death
in death you are joined with the collective of the dead

you become munnie

but what about me
i’m made of plastic
i am more collective than a chinese worker

“collective social” not “impenetrable” but my being completely penetrated/porous/invaded, open to the accumulation/collection of others to the obliteration, not exclusion, of self
to become filled and turned inside-out
figure
collective social is a Y axis and the self is an asymptote
all eros a banging towards invisible barriers
and visible barriers, a ruptured skin/skein

___

appearances do not make an appearance to me

because notes do not denote

my past forgets itself i cannot remember present past myself
to place myself

so i displace
even the in between is not good enough

it is

psychotic to imagine the real
apparatuses that kill
so far away from death
lost
the art of dying

things are stupid like this

the beginning of poetry in the secret kernel that is stupidity
a stone
a snail
a riddle
an illumination inside a rectum

am i giving you the experience of your life?

the claim of others
over property and things
made by other others

then it is stupid to submit to the claims of others

i still am
a piece of flesh dribbling
my wounds speak more than words
i will not assume

and clams
remember when clams became the living things that died
for trade

i am thinking
therefore i am stupid
psychotic
i have a cunt
like a smashed clam
chinese thoughts deprived or lazy of history
designated but empty
let my stupidity and hate
allow the dead the dead
_
___

bored by my own role as depressed heroine i wonder
if i can depersonalize more
the waiting quicksand quickens like a heart
hearts everywhere
a world of hearts

as a poet it is awesome to think about feminine me
trapped in image
to be trapped in the image
of a different register
lyrical absence
abstinent lyric
more or less
than the photogenic sea creature with dark lips
the poem as object
is an agency of waiting waiting to happen
do u want to penetrate me?
abjection beseeches

imagine the stone under water
ungraspable unbreathing millions of years
only a sound
not even a gasp
the labor on the body never ends the crushing atmospheres
so deep

i see
the eye implodes
i see nothing but feelers

the cold center of the earth happens in the future
heat death feels
the call of future within
if indeed relation is impossible and all the attributes of stone are
attributes of the new whore within me still
fuck the numerous
holes
i am
innumerable

The mother goat sent the kid home and to fetch scissors, and a needle and thread, and then she cut open the monster’s paunch. She had scarcely made one cut, before a little kid stuck its head out, and as she continued to cut, one after the other all six jumped out, and they were all still alive. They were not even hurt, for in his greed the monster had swallowed them down whole. How happy they were! They hugged their dear mother, and jumped about like a tailor on his wedding day.

But the mother said, “Go now and look for some big stones. We will fill the godless beast’s stomach with them while he is still asleep.”

The seven kids quickly brought the stones, and they put as many as many of them into his stomach as it would hold. Then the mother hurriedly sewed him up again. He was not aware of anything and never once stirred.

The wolf finally awoke and got up onto his legs. Because the stones in his stomach made him very thirsty, he wanted to go to a well and get a drink. But when he began to walk and to move about, the stones in his stomach knocked against each other and rattled.

Then he cried out:

What rumbles and tumbles,
Inside of me.
I thought it was kids,
But it’s stones that they be.

When he got to the well and leaned over the water to drink, the heavy stones pulled him in, and he drowned miserably. -http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm005.html

I am writing a manuscript possessed. As if by swine flu. As if the swine flew. There is no central image in my project because it is a diffusion, an infection and inflection. Perhaps the porcine trope was planted in me long ago as a child listening to the story of the three little pigs. It was a lesson about hard work and care. The good little piggy built a house of brick that no wolf wind could shatter. Mother says, our people are a hardworking people. Another says, rice is the most difficult plant to plant, and it is in your blood to be as patient as the ox and as productive as the honeybee.

It was also a lesson about fear and confusion. I couldn’t tell the three little pigs apart. Would they taste different? What makes one little pig not the second little pig? And then, weren’t there five little piggies before? And one of them had roast beef? But what kind of huts would these piggies build? In the end, I, the little girl, was the little piggy. The girl child grows up with a plethora of fables and glowing images of how she is to be eaten, her pink skin and supple curls, rosy cheeks and innocent pigtails, swallowed by the eyes and then the howling gut of something big and bad. Now she is grown but inexplicably takes the shape! An urban shape! But she must make sure she is plump and full of money too, money that goes in the slot, into that dark blowhole! And now, my mother’s country, my mother’s red red rose, my father’s blood, splashed all over the media, the next world superpower, if earth doesn’t collapse its plug pulled out, if the giant invisible piggybank doesn’t smash under another fleshy, pink, invisible thing of a magic economy.

Piglet: It’s hard to be brave when you’re only a Very Small Animal.

I did not relate to the little piggy as much as transform. The shame of the pig was logical and it was mine, genetic shyness and cultural submission made me into the most well-behaved little china piggybank. I couldn’t speak in public, pissed in my pants because I couldn’t ask for permission to go to the little girl’s room. More than that, I was linked to others, crushed by machines impossible to understand, crushed by ourselves, melancholy cyborgs. Shame was the same as good. But I still am, must be. And my friends too, flesh as tender and soft as the clouds we fly through. The piglets of our feet are not bound, but set free, and the many porcine nubs of the body should grow wings like baby Hermes. And so this book does not relate to the pig as much as transform, and the distortion of translation turns the pig wooden. Pegged. At once domestic and innocuous, at once dirty and base, at once not once.

It’s only obsession sullied.

Food seems to be especially important to immigrants, who must carry their internal organs with them as they are transplanted. We know the best of all, that you are what you eat. And what you eat with.

Sometimes I look in the mirror to see that my clothes are eating me like my laziness.

Many animals begin to gnaw at themselves under extreme stress. Some chew and swallow. Some octopuses commit suicide by ingesting their limbs.

We are the pink masses sitting in gestation crates, rubbed raw by steel bars, hurled at the ground, stunned by the stunner. Young college students pepper street corners, thrusting brochures at you, Even If You Like Eating Meat, You Can Help Stop This Cruelty!

But this book isn’t “about” animal rights (which I’m for) or hum-animal rights, or my right to say anything because I have none and because the flesh exceeds those things. Cruelty doesn’t breed, is neither alive nor dead. I think of the chugging of the meat grinder, where separation is brought to relief and then confused, where is the lance and who is the lancer? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Do Grinders Dream of Minced Steel? Do Pigs Dream of Electric Cabbage?

Do We Dream of Humanoid Sausage? Do Mothers Dream of Farrowing? I ask, all parts blushing, how we can consume so much suffering, have so much hunger, how things like pain and joy are contained when it seems like they should not, when they are just like sounds that hum and have a radius, when they can pass through the skin, through consciousnesses, when insides touch and are turned inside out, is it possible? And then how silent and inert a living thing itself can be, a thing like a machine, whose bangs and sputters are nothing, no soul, no ancestry.

When the animal has no soul and we are the animal. And the pig is the least magical of all the fables’ creatures. They are us when we are naked and ashamed, and full of obvious things. But we don’t recognize our s/kin. (until the fat is transferred, perhaps.)

The first pigs crawled across the hot earth like slugs without shells, still covered in odd places by hard scales. To be contemporary is to be ancient and alien. I think of the epigraph of Berg/Goransson’s Transfer Fat. Hal, our (Plathian) “red eye, cauldron of morning”, the computer’s words, “I – am – afraid.”

Piglet: Help! Help!

But I am the wolf and I am full of stones.

ourflowishard:

OUR FLOW IS HARD/TARNISH AND GOLD PRESENT: 

THE RUSTIC VOLCANO READING

DATE: SATURDAY, JULY 28th 

TIME: 8 PM (READING WILL START NO LATER THAN 8:30 PM.) 

LOCATION: The Foundry Building/349 13th Ave NE Minneapolis, MN 55414

we like the alleyway. the alleyway is the pretty darkness between buildings where the garbage settles into smoking its cigarettes and the voices lean thier backs against the brick. our flow is hard/tarnish and gold invite you to an evening reading that will take place outside in a circular shape and twist vines into new colors. alleyway readers include meghan lamb, russ woods (a chicago duo), and carrie lorig. the rustic volcano’s writers write and perform music/fiction/poetry into lava flows that take awesome skyscraper shape and ash above the trees. there will also be a parked appearance by the fabulous fly away zine mobile, a free-lending library, self-publishing skill sharer, and promoter of all forms DIY literature. help us celebrate tarnish and gold’s last event at this beautiful NE location! come and move and talk until your armpits fill with the night sky! 

the fly away zine mobile encourages swapping! bring your chapbooks/zines for trades! 

drinks to follow at the 331 club (just a few doors down!) for all those who are interested/thirsty. 

from the bottom of our blobs to yours, 

ofih/t + g 

BIOHAZARDS:

 

Meghan Lamb lives and writes on the south side of Chicago with her husband, dog, and cat. She co-edits the magazine Red Lightbulbs. Her novella, Silk Flowers, is forthcoming from Aqueous Books in July 2013. By day, she works as a training counselor for adults with special needs. By night, she spirals through a fuckwave of sex, booze, and self-destruction.

Carrie Lorig is a member of Our Flow is Hard and an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She has been a bike messenger, a mountain in South Korea, a herd animal, and blood in the corner, among other things. Her favorite holes are in cups that coffee, form a poem in the desert, and appear often in the very center of records. She blogs atcarrieabigstick.tumblr.com

Russ Woods edits Red Lightbulbs. He is a librarian living in Chicago and his book, Wolf Doctors, is forthcoming from Artifice Books. He does things over at     

http://solarflareshavebeenknowntocauseheartache.com

The Fly Away Zine Mobile travels North America with pages dripping out its tailpipe. 

http://www.facebook.com/events/334801313275600/

dislocatemag:

NO NEED TO WAIT THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE SWIMMING — OUR NEWEST ISSUE IS QUITE DIGESTIBLE AND CRAMP-FREE.

Luke Reiter, Paula Cisewski, Eric Lorberer and Maggie Ryan Sanford.

YES! come to our party.

kristen-stone:

so we went on tour and it was magic. 

right now i’m sitting at a motel in orangeville (?) south carolina. wanted to drive through the night but it kept storming— scary glorious lightning and trucks whizzing past. 

i met/saw a bunch of lovely sweet people and felt like a real writer and signed my book and made friends with mary and talked about the girl and failure and abject, everything was abject which isn’t even bad, it’s just sweaty and dirty, also it’s fun to be a rockstar, and it’s fun to be shy, and meeting people is actually wonderful, and there is sometimes a bit of dreamy shared language, like driving through the mountains with puppies and monsters. 

cute pictures cute tinctures! i was abject at the airport and thought of you, ks. xo 

http://fengsunchen.com/2012/07/11/grendels-cheek-is-at-the-airport/

Kristen Stone is adorable. It’s too bad that staring at people can make them feel creeped out. Nobody likes to be reduced to an object. The desiring gaze is terrible because suddenly… suddenly you are accountable for your body.

But her thoughts are also adorable. I respect the adorable. It’s adorable to watch KS and J together, and watch them touch and smile at each other.

K uses the word abject so much it becomes another object. The closeness of object to abject is also very pleasurable. Friction between words and meaning and the question of meaning, the answer being another question, because separating levels of sense? Data begets more data. We didn’t wash our hair for days—I gave in to shampoo after I got flakes in my scalp but KS remained ever greasy. Sad feelings are not bad feelings. Kate Z, Kristen and I agree.  KS has a tattoo of asymptotes on her arm, and asymptotes are one of my favorite analogies. Feelings, poetry, meaning, asymptotes. BAM. SAT vocab.

It’s true, how strange it is that people worry about being happy. It’s a Disney thing. I only like the broken parts of Disney, the broken parts of happiness, because the broken stuff is the part where it becomes possible to love other things.

Sianne Ngai said that brokenness contributes to cuteness because it makes them helpless. Beauty is often helpless of itself. I read Hunger Games in Gainesville and felt weird about the helplessness of Katniss’s uncontrollable beauty. The kind that cannot be achieved, because posturing by default makes it impossible.  Broken people scabbing together always make me cry. “Thank you for your children” boohoo boohooooo! But it’s true. The threshold of cuteness vs. abjectivity/abjectness is ambiguous.

Other things, it was nice to meet/see everyadorableone else I met while running around the south! Hi Ariel (yay!) and Rose and Kale and Brooks and Jesse and Nic and Genet and Maggie and Ben and Kim Vodka (har) and my libra twins and KS’s fam and Toad and Bruce (kittens!) etc etc etc, thank you for your children and the puppies.

[this was written many hours ago in the airport.]