radiant fracture

Happy book birthday to Rachel Ash Rosen's Blight, second in the Sleep of Reason trilogy.

I am excited to see this book in the world! The author is Known to Me as a fine stylist and a word-puncher on behalf of this often desperate global conspiracy we call trying to keep our human hearts alive.

(I consulted on the future aquatic subduction of my home city for this series and have no regrets.)

What is this book about? I will quote:

anti-fascism, revolution, queer longing, and like, giant fucking bone tentacles.

Would you like to read about a different end to the world? One in which, the characters, like you, have survived and find ways to make meaning and keep fighting after unimaginable loss?

Maybe you will like it, in that case.

(I was tempted to remove the "maybe" there, but my training tells me not to alter the sense of a quotation. Anyway. You will like it.)

Places to order Blight:

From the publisher

From the big river with all the books

From Books2Read


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This morning's work, prompted by reading Enkidu is dead and not dead by Tucker Lieberman, a gift from sabotabby .

* * * * * *


I come in from the outside of that city.
I come in; the door is unguarded.
The door is unguarded
to go in. It’s the way out that is venomous,
fanged, seething with fire.

It’s Enkidu who knows me. Knows himself not
as human, wild but not predatory,
with silky hair. I have dreamed
of Enkidu.

They threaten you, these other men
in the snake’s gullet.
There’s only room inside this great city,
Poisoned-Snake-Guts,
for real men. Your sweetness, your weakness –
this time, they swear they will drive you out.

The snake is immortal. It has eaten
their immortality. The men are searching
for their unbounded lives, here
in the bone-barred throat, smelling their freedom
in the snake's bowels.

Yet you never are expelled. Only cursed,
punished, your face shoved
into the acid sea that sloshes
around the men searching through shit
for their immortality.

That is Poisoned-Snake-Guts: unbreachable
and terrified. You can never leave,
unless you leave.

I say you and I mean you, Gilgamesh.
You are bound to your city.
Your magnificent wall holds you
like the throat of the snake.
If you run with me, no matter how far we go,
you will always turn back to Uruk. I like Uruk:
but I go where I please.
I am the man who goes between.

I say man and I mean it, and yet
I am no man of Uruk.

You shake your head. No, you say, we
tamed you. Cut your hair. Gave you
beer and bread. You liked the beer, you
smile. And the bread. And the bed.

Gilgamesh, I have travelled here, long days
and nights in their thousands, down
the road of the snake, into its stinking guts,
to bring you back to the world, which you call
wilderness.

But always when I begin to explain
your eyes return to the gleaming walls of Uruk
bright as copper, as a strand of measuring-wool
in the waning sun.

* * * * * *

§rf§

As if haunted by the worst fear,
you open doors and doors,
sinking into the deep house, its calm
featureless hallways, seeking
the perfect empty room.

You are fleeing from the rustling
bright mothwinged creature
at your back.

Despite your skin
electric with alarm,
I regret to inform you
the wings are attached.

It is true that joy is a way of being lost
in the open. It is a monster
to the carefully cached heart.

Yet here is the sky still,
burning open all the eyes of the house:
one too many doors
and it is yours.


+ + + + + +


I got Mendoza's poem "Harbinger" as a prompt in my inbox today (see next post!). Her poem made me think about my own dreams of exploring houses and interior spaces. These are joyful dreams, not like in this poem. But they also maybe are about turning to the interior when the exterior seems fearful.

Possibly this poem is a little too sentimental, but it is hard for me to claim joy. I could use all the help I can get.

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Posting again for a performance application! (Also, M. used the poem in his class. How cool is that?)

A poem about making art in a bad time.


Vultures

I say vultures are the only poets:
they gorge on the remains
of old age and surprise attacks
treachery, waste, and accident
Cholera, botulism, and anthrax --
They swallow everything, and transmute it
into thick black feathers, into flight.

Let me be like that, unabashed to be seen
naked and hideous and hungry, transforming
in the boiling kettle of my belly
all the poison in the meat,
all the sickness and sour hate
into undigestible beauty.

This morning while I tried to decide whether to be awake or asleep, as though I had any real say in the matter, I was listening to episodes of The Slowdown, Major Jackson's poetry podcast.

I must have heard about The Slowdown on Poetry Unbound, and the format is similar, except that the story the host tells at the beginning is more elliptically connected to the poem, which is left uninterpreted, except for the juxtaposition of the two.

The episode about Mary Ruefle's "Crackerbell" was guest hosted by Shira Erlichman.

Half-listening, I was captured by the grace of Ruefle's last stanza, and I thought I'd like to share the poem with you.


Crackerbell
by Mary Ruefle

I grew up

I became myself and
was haunted by it

and I loved to wander, utterly alone

listening to the sound of tears
striving to guess my own secret
and racking my imagination for
a dream

meanwhile,
everybody else knew my story
and there was not one of them
who would give me so much as
a bird dropping

so on I wandered
with arms and nitric startled eyes,
nitpicking my way through the world
when the electrical current
that runs in all directions
deep beneath the earth
shook me

and at once I felt
there are so many years to fail
that to fail them all, one by one,
would give me a double life,
and I took it.

* * * * * *

( Notes to the poem, for those who like that sort of thing. )

What do you notice?

* * * * * *

Here's a response from this morning, not so much an answer as a parallel journey.


Hero

I aged, and acquired
a little wisdom, sometimes from injury,
often through sheer repetition

And now it may be too late
to set off in any fashion
other than alone

Since, for all the gifts given me,
and there have been many, from many hands,
the whole city equipping and adorning me
while begging me not to go

I did go, and found myself lost
in the wood without names,
where that child -- who was it? –
and that animal – what was it called –
well, you see how this goes --

Unable to recognize, let alone make use of,
any of the implements I carried,
I had to begin again with what was to hand.

This, I saw finally,
was nobody's fault, or my own,
which amounted to the same thing;
and that gave me, in my long labours,
some peace.

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Also from today's session -- a little part-documentary, part-fantasy born of the snowstorm.

* * * * * *

The daytime snow was blue and gold, not white at all, but polarized and luminous. And when night fell, it wasn’t dark. The snow’s trillion tiny mirrors, and the low massed clouds, and the light pollution of course, collaborated to make the street almost as bright as it was in the afternoon, but closer, almost an interior, the inside of a long low tunnel of ice.

Our area has poor street lighting, poles too far apart and too tall, lamps often burnt out, so the night before winter solstice was brighter than any summer night. This made the winter seem like a time not of darkness but of evening things out, a reversion towards the mean.

The city bought those flawed bulbs everyone is talking about, the ones that turn purple as they age. They dyed the street a pale artificial violet. It was beautiful. It made you smell perfume in the cold air, lilac and lavender, scents of spring and late summer.

People trod up and down the gritty ruts in the snowy road, so pleased with the job they’d done shoveling the sidewalk that they didn’t want to walk there. Only a few houses had that bright festive smear of blue or green from thrown-down road salt. You assumed they needed to do it, but you worried about the animals.

Like the yearling deer that came high-stepping delicately among the drifts, swinging her head in perplexity, or the small black dog like a liquid shadow, a little splash of dark water, streaming towards home.

Our Zoom writing facilitator has been finding incredible poems lately. Here I am trying to tease out what makes tonight's poem so brilliant.

Content note: grief, death


Miss You. Would Like to Take a Walk with You.
~ Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

* * * * * *

Again, I would read it out loud to hear your own voice say these things. And thoroughly break your own heart. Why else read poetry?

So the big gesture Calvocoressi is going to make us notice is the way she chops off sentence parts, especially the subjects (I) and auxiliary verbs that indicate tense or mood (would). She beheads her sentences, peels her verbs.

This is direct speech, but truncated, like a text message or a note -- an utterance simultaneously direct and at a slight remove from the person being addressed.

Isn't that first line incredible?


I imagine someone so decentred by loss that they can't speak from "I" but only from the emotion itself. To say "I" is to say "I-without-you" and this is impossible -- the whole address is to the you.

In fact the form of this first statement blurs from the declarative into the imperative -- "Do not care" could be an instruction, "don't (you) worry if you arrive in your skeleton --

In your skeleton! --

I do not think that's what the speaker means, but I like the way the verb collapses the I/you -- whose verb is this? -- and that slight priming may come in handy later.

In a similar way,


relies on the previous fragments


--to make us, the readers, assume the "would" in "love to feed you," (We assume the speaker means "I would love to feed you.")

But!

Dropping the auxiliary verb also allows this love to remain in the present tense: I still do love to feed you, even though truly I can't. Yet I do.

The tender alliteration of "little roasted tomatoes." The whole sound of "little roasted tomatoes / covered in pepper and nutmeg." I feel like I'm chewing as I say it.

"Bring the ghost dog," is sweet, but "you can tell me about the after" is perfect -- not afterlife, not afterworld -- no promise of continuance. You may have gone into oblivion. Come back and tell me all about it.


Oh god.

This could be stuttering, a failure to complete a thought because of pain -- "Wish you. Wish you would come back" -- but "wish you" is also a whole thought in the way "miss you" is.

(Have you wished someone? Me, I have wished several yous in my time.)
What I really care about here is the infinite tenderness -- the skin sack that parallels the skeleton, the contempt for any worries about the body and decay -- the material is immaterial. I'll know you.

Oh god.

But there is something else I notice:


Hey, the "I" comes back into grammar once the moment of facing you again is imagined. If you come back, I can come back. "You can tell me" -- and suddenly there is a me again.

We many of us thicken as we get older, but "bigger" is so purely descriptive, so neutral. A tree gets bigger, a city. Things just grow. It sounds like the speaker may have become monumental, more than human. A stone.

Look at that -- the I-less speaker ("know", not "I know") can yet speak about the I of the past ("I told you," not "told you") -- maybe because in that past the you was still -- just -- alive.

(Or, just to allow the counter-argument, maybe because "[I] know told you" would truncate the sentence past useful ambiguity into incoherence. English only allows certain kinds of interference.)

The wish to rewrite the message: I said it was okay to go (that is the thing you say), but now I want to say something else. I want in our long entanglement the space to change my mind. I want to send a text saying "Don't want you to go. Not okay."

The little tender rhyme there (leave/believe) like a fragment of song sung at a graveside or while crying and washing the dishes.

The ending. What can I say about the ending? Oh, maybe this:


So yes, the refrain of "miss you," with the assumed "I," and then here's that "would" again, so that we carry both of those over, assume that what's being said is "[I] [wish you would] stare out from the mirror."

But -- that imperative, that order from way back -- "do not care" -- isn't that imperative now fully activated, though it wasn't before? Isn't this ending also an invocation, a summoning, a cry?

{rf}

PS. "Come through the door" is a human action; "stare out from the mirror" a ghostly thing; "come through the pipes" -- monstrous, or elemental? I'm not sure.

PPS I don't know about the leaves and the blue jacket. What do you think?

PPPS I didn't even get to enjambment.

It is Hallowe'en, best of days, and I am ill, but I want to mark the day somehow, so here is a morning-scrawled story of unease.

CW: light gore?
( Just before 6 a.m., in the dark of the morning, the air shimmered with rain. )

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 I have done nearly nothing for poetry month, but here is a small quick poem in answer to one of yarrowkat 's on friendship:



With a lost friendship we lose parts
of the world's scaffolding, I think -- open air gapes
where the sturdy, slowly assembled
framework once contained us, though
sometimes it turns out, in that sudden
gush of sky, in our lurching out over forgotten space
that the view has changed for the better



I call this Snarky Mary Oliver mode.

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Partway through this term, no doubt as a coping mechanism for actual life, I got obsessed with role-playing games.

Folks! I don't know if you know this, but there are a lot of games.

Let me propose a nonce spectrum, for this post only, from story prompt to rule set, where on one end is an improvised story based on a few seed ideas, and on the other an elaborate clockwork mechanism like D&D.

Just lately I'm captivated by games that lean towards the story-prompt end of the spectrum, which I found out about through the Party of One Podcast -- listening to Johnny Sims play Big Fight Feel with the host, Jeff Stormer, using MacGuffin & Co.'s micro-setting Primetime Colosseum.

Big Fight Feel is a great storytelling Q&A game that develops the backstory to a climactic pro wrestling match. It is a hack of In the Air Tonight, which tells suspense-heist-chase stories. Air is inspired by the "In the Air Tonight" scene from the Miami Vice TV show. Stormer has also done a playthrough of another Q&A game called Knowing You, which tells the story of a relationship in reverse, from breakup to first meeting.

What I like about story games is that even this minimal mechanic of the questions lifts away a lot of the stakes of "proper writing" and lets people revel in story.

So for my creative writing class, I made a little hack of the hack. It's very much a mini-game, designed to be played in a few minutes.


* * * * * * 

Getting There: A Collaborative Question-Based Story Game

(This game is a quick hack of “In the Air Tonight” by Austin Ramsay)

 

This game creates a story between two people, discovered through asking and answering questions.

Decide who is PERSON 1 and who is PERSON 2. Ask and answer the questions in turn.

Answer spontaneously, as the ideas come to you. Let the story take shape. If one person is having trouble coming up with an answer, the other can help them brainstorm.

When you have finished asking and answering the questions, use your story as a prompt to write.

 

PERSON 1: What vehicle are we driving and what’s wrong with it?

[PERSON 2 replies]

PERSON 2: Why are we late and whose fault was it?

[PERSON 1 replies]

PERSON 1: What are we bringing with us and what did we forget?

[PERSON 2 replies]

PERSON 2: Where are we going, and who chose the destination?

[PERSON 1 replies]

PERSON 1: What are you not telling me until we get there?

[PERSON 2 replies]

PERSON 2: What happens when we arrive?

[PERSON 1 replies]

* * * * * * 


My colleague and I did a quick playtest. We ended up as waster surfers on our way to a family reunion in a broke-down Vanagon burning oil, on a sweltering day, with a Styrofoam cooler full of fresh fish on rapidly-melting ice, trying to make it to the Okanagan in time to show everyone that we can too accomplish something, even if it isn't getting jobs, except we end up at the Naramata ER because it turns out, hey, we're also having a baby, so in the end my sister gets stuck with all that fish.

I must say I feel quite satisfied by that outcome.

{rf}