Anna Krivolapova 日 30/05/2023 · admin No comments

FITZCARRALDO, SEPTYCH SHOCK, AND THE CENTRAL ARTERY FROM BOSTON TO GERASENES

Distracted by orange barrels on the highway,
I creased my suit and taunted velocity,
I wanted to fill them with ink, but instead,
I stole copper from the jungle
To wiretap your head.

Scrying with my eyelids, pressed down like the pagans,
Neon cathedrals swam red in my vessels,
When they left me with nothing but sunburn and questions,
I studied the seismic shifts of your neck bones—

Silent, your neck will tighten a fist,
The neck is the knot where they tie off the fish,
It’s all in the flick of a teenage wrist,
Swishing in plastic,
Home from the carnival,
Two fish in the backseat,
Darting like irises.

David Kuhnlein 日 26/05/2023 · admin No comments

THE WAITRESS (EXCERPT FROM DIE CLOSER TO ME)

Olivia possessed a chic frustration with her inability to impact humankind, or Süskind-kind, for that matter. She kept secrets instead. One was that she would quit smoking soon. Too many of her arteries had been condemned. Those that hadn’t would be finished off by factory smog. Süskind’s dry season came through like a knotted stent. The wind was stabby, bus stop to café. “Need more ice,” she whined to Carlos, partitioned in the kitchen. She would not stop wearing tight pants, even if they sent the wrong message, because of their comfort and compression. At some point she stopped turning to face the men who pinched her. Classically heart-shaped cheeks curving to the palm of another passerby. Even Carlos positioned himself so their bodies touched. The side of his head brushed her bust. He forgot what he was pretending to reach for. She pictured his whole visage as round contaminant.

Her black bib, waitress outfit, and other service-industry adornments toggled on and off over her head like a neon “Jackpot” sign. Being a halfway-decent blonde by men’s throbbingly low standards was reason enough to swap clothes after getting tipped out. A hopeless romantic shuffling between the ghetto’s shadows and soft spotlighting, she considered taking her own life. The knowledge that men desired cripples fortified her even more. Two years after the collision, she was riding buses instead of bikes, warming to her discombobulated leg and its ungodly pangs. She knew promiscuity deluded one’s spiritual self. The oil-slick wing she clutched at night was lathered with human stench. Laying herself bare before a beloved (whomever), she felt born on the shore where life first slithered free.

Slouched in plastic seating, she massaged her left knee until her hands went numb. Yellow pullcords slapped the dirty windows. She positioned her temple against the pane, each whack lulling her further to sleep. Cash she’d made throughout the day sat at the bottom of her string bag, big bills at the top. In this low light, their green glowed. Crisp bills reminded her of her friends, so pristine they looked fake, overtaking beauty for something wordless, more of a blunder. No creases, folds, marks, wet off the press, warm and womblike. The room-temperature world beckoned, then fizzled. Eyes fixed on the oblong mirror above the bus driver’s head, Olivia obscured her face with the seat in front of her and tucked a bill into her mouth. She folded it hamburger-style and let it melt like a giant sheet of LSD, the ink slowly fading, turning her tongue blue. Outside, the sky whizzed by, trees cheering, their leaves shooting straight up like confetti. Olivia chewed, swallowed, shut her eyes.

Her neighborhood resembled an overturned litter box, a shit cascade. The cul-de-sac stank like twist-tied fecal matter. “Every cripple to their smothered cat,” she thought. The freeway was a dumping ground. The weed-whipped, sludgy ravine etched out the face of the block. She blinked the houses gone, leaving only the brown vines that coated them. People walked on air, dry-humping clumped bedding. Ghosts came to mean something to Olivia. People rebranded currency with a value in and of itself. The billfold was a remnant of palms. Rich people didn’t tip, because they were too close to the top to stop. They wouldn’t be shaken awake before the wet dream was over.

Olivia wasn’t convinced there was any separation between the way things were and what they were destined to become. “If only madness could be caught like a cold!” she thought. Men’s mouths opened in the toilet beneath her, a color-changing ink she distributed across their lips. The linen bills she ate absorbed well. The watermark spiced it up. Water in the toilet swirled blue then red as she flushed. She had never been the centerpiece of someone else’s life. She wished for celestial love, not window dressing, but the whole planet was disabled.

Ryan Kelley 日 18/05/2023 · admin No comments

NESTING GRIND

They’ve left the biomic behind and slipped back into routinespun daymass, where the otaku gathered look to her like watchers, Shenmuezens lured here by secret signal to check out what she’s up to. The dregs are fading into lowmid lux, dying with last coughs of stray vagrants and food stall paved over with chain matter. The local feed is an influx of stuff from other areas. Statdates on which shows are on-trend, which ones accrue you culture death.

She’s reading this transmission from a world lost to her when Seriana nudges her. “We shouldn’t stay in one place,” the girlroid says, eyes of violet faded pale in the neon fire that now strafes them, auras breaking rainbow bursts like splashes of flame across their backdrop. Bled in with the feeds are the ad copy, the holowaif or hus algo-picked to align with your mood hue. You would watch them, she thinks, and the one you zenpressed for would be in it for a sliver of time and space. They drift within the throngs and glitch into Seriana’s prometh field, which catches them, caught midshift between characters in monster trip splicings, an instant before they see they’re made and blip off to find otaku more in the mood.

Then there’s the merch ads, showing up even this low to the dregs. These dissemble pixel by pixel, collapse into clouds of butterflies, take wing and swarm as holofauna somewhere else.

So she’d had to chill for a second to focus on a single thing. To stay with it past the patterns all meshing, coalescing and disintegrating before her.

“Where are we going?” Elise says.

Dan R. 日 13/05/2023 · admin No comments

ANON

He was just one of those nameless lost souls wandering the avenues of places that don’t actually exist.

but the flagrant manner in which he eschewed the language of those societal types up there in them buildings downtown has always been a point of some contention amongst his dissident, parochial cohort. all of whom are out there trying to make a name for themselves, in that frenzied maelstrom they call modern life.

it was the manner in which he had presented his rejection to their restrictive vocabulary that was so fervently objected to. discussed passionately amongst the various splinter cells and affinity groups which made up the local anarchoid circles: there was language, and then there was language. true believers that they were of the possible levels of violence and mayhem which could be wrought should certain words fall into the wrong hands. that’s the stuff that keeps you up at night.

catch my drift?

they were the least of his concerns though. the real test of his faith would be the inexorable web of disinfo he was to face, that inchoate wilderness of mirrors we’ve all come to inhabit. rings encircling rings of informants informing on lower strata of informants: the ones whose raw data was the foundation of the whole tottering structure. confidences exchanged between agents tripled now quadrupled in conflicting allegiances to esoteric alphabet agencies sovereign only to themselves.

Peppy Ooze 日 29/04/2023 · admin No comments

BODILY FUNCTIONS AND THE ROOTS OF INTERNATIONAL DREAMWAVE

Misled by a great ability to introspect, I was just thinking is all. Might kill myself eventually: not yet: in 2044. The neon of the chicken takeaway on Prinzen Street is some of the bluest I’ve seen. How the electric glints off black leather and puddles, off of tarmac like gas aflame, as I squinted down the pavement to a curved block of flats bearing dozens of satellite dishes, the bays of balconies repeated below the sky. Draped in dark another towerblock looked like the Nostromo spaceship but not manmade more insect it felt. While reaching into my jacket for tobacco, a pouch of AMERICAN SPIRIT, I stepped thru the shadowline behind these caged wastebins. A rat jogged across the floor and its tail slurped under a fence. Yes: slurped was the noise as I pushed my right hand into the pocket holding a few euro notes and the crab pulled out a twenty. There was this steel door that I didn’t knock cos they say don’t knock when you knock. I coughed. A hand tapped a window. The door opened, a little screech, a tall outline of a man, a voice beckoned to come deeper into the gaping black stairwell and I did and in a stilted croak said: Zwanzig bitte.

Ganja enables to hear feedback sonically. So I mooched homeward with a ziploc inside my jacket smelling of Lebanon. Lemons I mean. The citrus.

Between the U1’s steel-riveted legs along the slabs to Hallesches I strolled. Some tent was erected near the canal, one of those domes. And I thought about this and paused on the Athenian platz where vaporwavey statues loom at night above the water. The oily smell from that kebab shop I remember: July 2017, sweltering: a busride from here to Kotti with many seats taken by hardened Berliners, hot and frazzled, everyone silent when Kendall said: You can now tell people you’ve lived in Berlin. You can now say: I’ve lived in Berlin I have. Like Vladimir Sirin and Kevin Shields, both moved to this city and made art. I wonder if The Gift song is inspired by The Gift novel. Noise is the street. Noise now in March 1922. Specks of rain fell when a kid between Mehring and the abandoned railway path on Yorckstrasse, he said hey have I got a cigarette and when I said yes and halted he had more questions, wanted my name, my nationality, age, time since being here. Said he’s from Syria but speaks fluent Teutonic. Why, he asked, if you lived here five years do you not know the mother-tongue? Because I’m an intellectual maggot, would’ve been an apt reply and he insisted he roll his own cig so I gave him a strand of tobacco in a skin, dropped into his palm a GIZEH slim filter.