An average failing, a breakdown. The sadness of grace seen fleetingly

How did I know what the sea was, let alone know how to dream of it? 

I had never seen it. 

The water I knew was near stagnant, 

it had no motion unless others waded in, 

pushed their bodies into its warmth.  

How did I know saltwater? 

The runoff of eyes.

But those small dark marks know no motion except down.  

The sea rose and carried me, 

my two-ton body, my rough self. 

My dried mud toes and caked mud tongue.  

I woke up, my equilibrium lost. I could not right myself.

It is hard to keep circling around the thing that happened and not say it. 

But it is also hard to say it. 

So, I circle some more until it tells itself. 

I can trust that it will. 

(More drafts of Land Beast)

NYC

Anne seemed diminished and withdrawn, but it was still lovely to hear her read from Nox. She did not talk to the audience in an introduction. Her grey hair was pulled back in a girlish clip near her temple. She wore a baseball cap up until it was time for her to read. She wore all black, just like the last time I saw her. She seemed happiest, most comfortable, when I saw her read in a tiny bar in the East Village. She did not wear all black that day. Her presence is intense and charismatic, no matter her mood.

Alice Oswald was phenomenal. She memorized all thirty minutes of her reading and never once looked down at her paper. Her delivery was dramatic but not hokey. It made me say, "I want to do that when I grow up." I bought her book and read it most of the long, late bus ride back to Baltimore.

My dreams were full of my own language and symbols--a moon with a brass handle, a circle of blacker black behind the moon door.

Motion, revised

There were great kelp bladders, air mouthed into the growth, fed into them. The process of lifting near rootless, an easy production. Sea constant against each hollow knuckle: falling, unfalling.

I have no built-in buoy. I collapse into the undrinkable. 

A benzo or two and so casual a silence becomes, even here in the sea.

But mostly, I remember the river. My head rooted under that water, pulling against anything that wanted to lift. The plants thin green and mucus-rich in my teeth. How did I ever find the water.

Arms, off. Legs, off. No, that's not true. Just the horn and some skull.

There is no leaving, not whole. The adjustment plain and ordinary. An everyday thing, like flux.

The hard hollow frame for breath collapses under sedation. A matter of giving away, of no longer resisting. Heaviness from needled air.  

I would like to continue.  

Self

 

Okay, blogger, I figured you out. Thanks for allowing me my paragraphs again.

Hooray!

I'm psyched to say Big Lucks is taking two of my stories, one for their print volume and one for their online magazine.

It's interesting: the print story, "The T-bone," is one I'm proud of because of the syntax--the style of sentences I'm developing; the online story, is one I'm proud of because of my effort to confront subjects more directly--to say more of what I mean instead of really holding so much back from the reader.

So, style and subject.

Big thanks to Mark Cugini.

DFW

Hey hey hey David Foster Wallace's biography is pretty amazing...

Wallace: "This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing...Irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks."

D.T. Maxx: "He had never really liked plot, that tidying up of life in which, as he had written Howard in 1986, 'revelations revelationize and things are cleared up.' To rely too much on plot risked seducing the reader; it was like selling Tide. Moreover, plots typically involved the gradual maturation of the characters, and that was not how Wallace saw things. His default view of life was more mechanistic than organic. Change in a character...was usually a binary flip. Yet he knew an unplotted book violated the physics of reading. So over the years, he slowly cast about for a structure..."

Silverblatt on Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: "Here, it is felt as if, in reading these stories with eyes wide open, I was being asked to resolve so much that I would get dizzy. And that, in the fall, in the dizziness, a kind of compelling sadness--that the sadness itself is formed by the obligation to have no stable position. That everything has to spin on itself, until a kind of weariness, attrition, ecstasy, exhilaration, humor, terror, become compounded. And the emotion bomb, as the therapists says, is left in the reader."

Read Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. It feels huge--a discussion so much larger than the book--a discussion about where we are and where we could be going.

Moonshot Magazine

My new favorite magazine said yes to two of my poems! I'm so grateful to the editors.

Yeah, I get these.

MY MOST RECENT AMAZON RECOMMENDATION EMAIL:

Leather Chaps - Unisex Braided Motorcycle Leather Chaps
by Jafrum

Ulysses (Gabler Edition) Ulysses (Gabler Edition)
by James Joyce, Hans Gabler

Trudeau 0991105 Gravy/Fat Separator Trudeau 0991105

The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse

The Web Designer’s Idea Book, Vol. 2: More of the Best Themes, Trends and Styles in Website Design
by Patrick McNeil

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)
by James Joyce, Seamus Deane

CrampBuster Motorcycle Cruise Assist - Standard/Black
by Crampbuster

Thickfreakness
by The Black Keys

It takes three timelines to make a braid

EXECUTIVE HUB TRACKED ACROSS LIFESPAN?*

I sent back the proofs of "Martin" to David McLendon of Unsaid. My heart was pounding, racing, jumping. I've never written anything so personal. I've never felt this much anxiety and anticipation about a piece.

*It is bad blogging technique to use quotes from the neuroscience articles I read at work;therefore, there is a general louche, llaisserfaire feel about the thing; you do not know what to make of it; it is also unclear if I am bothered by the knowledge I am failing at blogging, but you have to assume I don't; perhaps you are wrong, perhaps it bothers me greatly and I am unable to stop.

decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.

Unsaid Six: Recipients of Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award Announced!
Posted on January 30, 2012 by David McLendon

The recipients of the 2012 Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award are Luke B. Goebel, Tom McCartan, Kate Wyer, and Matt Bell. The award is given annually in honor of Ms. Scott, whose life as a bookseller and community leader was one of modesty, dignity, integrity and grace. Each recipient of this award is a writer who exemplifies these laudable traits.



Does that mean we are the BEST modest writers of Unsaid! Haha.

ink blot america

inhibit the voltage-dependant sodium channels

People in Europe love my post about A Girl on a Motorcycle. They love the shit outta it. So do people in Brazil and Japan, but mostly Europeans. It's nice, to have a post loved the shit outta-- but that post? It has nothing to do with me and my presence on this Internet. I guess it does, I wrote it.

This is the larger thing, wtf about a presence(6. an invisible spirit felt to be nearby)on the Internet? Should I give a? I haven't for a while and that's obvious. I've stopped updating this tiny address. But, I have just as much right as you to clutter this Internet. It's a goddamn god-given right to clutter the Internet. I'm holding out this small corner, this tiny smog molecule in a dense sky. And I added another site. I thought, to hell with A Girl on a Motorcycle and those Europeans. I'll do something else, something good, something Kate Wyer. And then I stopped; I stopped updating that other smog, too.

"Take on a little contour, for heaven's sake"- Beckett's first play, a failure. A success for him to figure out what worked. The same, as always, a process.

I got two rejections today. I haven't had an acceptance in a long time. I actually don't want to think about how long, to actually give it a frame. I stopped submitting at all for some time, so I can't expect to get acceptances, now, right? Further demonstrated by


So I lied about stopping this one. I'll make the other one look pretty and professional, a writer needs a professional(writers are very business-like, conferences, name tags)image or place to say, "This is my life's work, take me seriously. I need you."

I need you.

Contour

Please find me here: upturnedface

It's very professional. You should take a look.