Gesture Literary Journal - July 2013

EDITORS
HEATHER GOODRICH LINDSAY KING-MILLER
PHOTOGRAPHER-AT-LARGE
IAN RUMMELL
REVIEW EDITOR
KARA MILLER
INTERVIEWS EDITOR
BRENNA LEE
WEB EDITOR
REBECCA HOWARD
Gesture was founded in 2011 with the intention to publish work that is
not boring. Published quarterly, we seek written and visual submissions
from new and established artists. Gesture is the home for poetry,
poetics, prose, theory, reviews, interviews, images, and interaction. We
want work that does not intentionally concern itself with genre. Some
may call this experimental. We call it exciting. As in, not boring. We
want to feel a gesture and be electrified.
Gesture 2
© by Gesture Press & Journal
Cover art: Ian Rummell
Cover & book design: Heather Goodrich
www.gestureliteraryjournal.com
gestureliteraryjournal@gmail.com

GESTURE PRESS & JOURNAL
DENVER
2013

CONTENTS
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS 7
POETRY & PROSE
ANTHONY CAPPO 9
ASHER GHAFFAR 11
CAILY GRUBE 13
LIANUSKA GUTIERREZ 14
J/J HASTAIN 19
KATHLEEN JONES 31
DOC LUBEN 33
KRISTEN PARK 35
JH PHRYDAS 40
STACY SZYMASZEK 42
MATT WEDLOCK 45
REVIEWS
KARA MILLER 48
INTERVIEWS
BRENNA LEE 53

7
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
In creating a space for writing and visual art, what we want is to feel
gestures put forth on the page. A gesture reaches or pushes
forward in both form and content. A gesture is muted, mutable,
and static. A gesture is a wish, a hint, or an idea caught between
synapses. We want to collect gestures for you to explore, relish in,
be repulsed by, love, and investigate.
Throughout our many read-throughs of each piece individually,
and as a collection, what constantly strikes us is how wildly
different each piece‘s form is in relation to other pieces. Suzan-Lori
Parks‘ essay, Elements of Style, signals at what is happening in this
issue: form is neither a passive vessel nor an imposition upon
expression.
The following pages house mutation: the evolution of form
where authors are using the words as material substances just as
much as the words are anchors for potential meaning. The form of
Brenna Lee‘s first installment of the 666 Interview Series is
reminiscent of Gertrude Stein‘s structure of Tender Buttons. Yet, Lee
evolves the verbal Cubism by assigning a word not to herself, but
to another author, evolving form and construction. In Lianuska
Gutierrez‘s essay, the heaviness of large prose blocks breakdown
quickly with her use of commas and dashes. This propels readers
into an addictive momentum bringing the end of the story before
realizing it is the end. The momentum continues in other pieces.
Stacy Szymaszek uses double forward slash marks as punctuation,
which creates line breaks—yes—but her punctuation also creates
thresholds signifying breaks or gaps in time; JH Phrydas uses of en
dashes create calculated, longing, and dramatic breaks that carve
craters in time; Then Matt Wedlock drops a single curly bracket
into his piece, which catches at the back of the throat. Nothing is
passive about form.
As you will soon feel, form and its agents of construction are
just some of the gestures we collected to present to you. We hope
you love this issue as much as we do.
With love,
Heather Goodrich & Lindsay King-Miller, Editors

9
ANTHONY CAPPO
REDEMPTION POEM
Milk, eggs and apples rattle in my basket
like the ache of you shaking my bones.
When the clerk rings me up, she asks if I want
to redeem and I say yes, I am the light
of the world! My suffering has bought
eternal life for killers in Chile, torturers
in Oregon, rakes in Appalachia. I ask what I can do
for her. For I have smote the dark, ripped a gash
in its crawling fabric. Harrowed the graves
of the unshriven. She asks if I want to set alone
as the default on my card and I say yes, consider it done!
I‘ve built towns teeming with isolation. Peeling
walls ringing dusty squares. I‘d share this kingdom
with you, if you‘d just visit.

10
AD INFINITUM
Prepare thee the labyrinth of the Lord,
its drawers all filled with schmutz. Up
the stairs to the landing—lunar transmissions,
theories of oppression, gadfly professors.
Wanna put some money on it? Everyone
likes your looks. Unlock your clasp-shaped
heart. I offer you apologies, cheddar and hey
diddle-diddle. Snip snip my poor Cretaceous lip.
Cows in abundance, the seven plagues
of the Lord. Get your gun. This one‘s hard
to believe. Give them buboes,
the mothers wailed. You’re damn right
I’ve got the blues. Courage, the newsman said.
It‘s going to be a bumpy night. Wilfred Owen
had it right. Pack up your troubles
in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.
The lie of the marching song.

11
ASHER GHAFFAR
HOMEGROWN
I swim and make thread nests in air.
I‘m lucky if I settle
on the tree. The first book
is the babbling of just
discernable
things.
I tried to grasp
the latent meaning like a greedy son groping
through an earlier version of himself
born again as a thing.
Everything condensed
is in the first book
that is a bomb ready
to explode in another writer‘s brain.
A featureless love moves through air.
The waif who watches over me pursues me.
Crossing between two points
involves a black hole where
body and conception of time are swallowed.
The black hole is a logic in the body.
One foot ahead of the next is a thirst
for a coming that doesn‘t matter.
Yet thresholds acquire
thumbprints, while language calls out the usual
treadmill of desire. Call out for mercy,
the drowned man chained to a rocking horse.
Gather what sank in the belch

12
of a sea cavern, the heirs that left the first book, a flight
to hereafter, or a confrontation with now.
Pursued by a cruel God, I sharpen my wordage,
hone my silence, prepare for here
after; send the fist hurtling through air.
I have no great place in this war of positions.
I fall over at the point of submission.
Ah, the infallible transmission!
Rend open the body, turn over the page,
and the force of a curse: eternity‘s shadow
is recorded on the membrane—
Oh miraculous transmission
of the body, distorted, splayed open,
made consciously dark!

13
CAILY GRUBE
THE QUALIFICATIONS OF AN
ENGENDERED LANGUAGE
his hands lost the word mân
can barely draw it in the finger-air
television mutes the soft nasal sound of it
this is connecticut and
this is my grandfather, staring into the mowed lawn
that is not romagna
to be american is
to be the disconnect between
famèja and the way we spoke before you were born
nonno becomes nòn becomes
none—no words to give
i don‘t have the sound for his hands in english
in the transplant pot, june tomatoes and vowels
lingering lifelost near the roots
there are too many silent letters to learn
after the war, he lost our lèngua
lost the fight, except for the nights when
bombs rain down in a babble-dream
oil in a shallow pan, the garlic tanning
i listen for the silent letter of any word
who am i but in comparison to the sounds that have died before me?
to be american is
to be the disconnect between
tëra and country and home
the qualification of an endangered language is
a past trying to erase itself
words so soft the end gets lost

14
LIANUSKA GUTIERREZ
MY AMERICAN DREAM
I was a child who listened. I was very shy, I loved to read, and homework mattered
to me, so much; I had a fear in me of disappointing, and I‘m not sure where it came
from, because I never did. Or mild reprimands were enough, enough to teach me to
take care. I was easily shameable. I could tell disapproval in earnest, the more if they
tried to hide it, turn the dial down, just as I could tell when I had really pleased—I
knew, as children, and animals, know, when I was loved.
I remember Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights when I was 12 or 13 and not a
pretty child anymore. As I waited to cross beneath the el tracks, the onset of
awareness, of no more beaming at me, no more gratuitous warmth from strangers.
The world was new, it was cold, I did not elicit kindness any longer. Something had
come over me to make me endangered; glares told me I was one to hate now.
I must have just begun to walk about on my own. I was sheltered and usually
accompanied. Mama‘s experience on landing here from the Dominican Republic
was a couple of attempted kidnappings, two cabbies who wouldn‘t let her out of the
car, she had to jump both times.1 She knew better than to send me for butter and
eggs, and she knew the news, the milk cartons.
__________________
1 One drove her four hours for what should have been a ride of twenty minutes, with me, a baby, with
her in the car. He was headed upstate with us, a long way off from Dyckman—maybe he would have
sold her into the sex trade, a mother such a mother, a wife such a wife, all tenderness, and I would have
been lost, lost, raised by modern-day home-grown and immigrant massahs. That cabbie would not
return my mother‘s address (―Sir…‖) or make eye contact with her. She flung the door open on a
highway, and amid honking, fled—was able to take a ride with a dulcet hermana and her family. The
woman told her, ―Today you‘ve been reborn.‖ My abuela said later that she‘d heard my mother‘s voice
calling to her during the time of the ordeal.
The other cabbie talked plenty, in a cajoling, prying, leading way—way that presumes to know what
will topple guard and put under spell quick as scissoring a blouse. She felt something wrong in his
friendliness. Or the shorthand, inner lexicon accrued from life as a petite, pretty, and timid* woman
intimated to her danger; to be more technical. At a stoplight, she jumped out of that cab without a
word and ran. Two officers saw this and chased her, they asked her what had happened. She told them:
he had begun asking about my love life, he wanted to change his route to get gas, etc.; and it happened,
they agreed that she had done right, they were not ones to say, nah, silly bitch.
She encountered the chatty one before the silent one, maybe to prepare her. Maybe the silent one
loomed in kismet, without intervention, as a certain viper, as the living reaper, was the one really slated
as killer. But by the time she met with him, she‘d had an experience to prepare her. If you believe in
plans, not waste of pain.
*Or if not timid, appearance of good, what shows out like Buddha third eye sheen—they think this
means not having suffered, not knowing—and they make sure to teach (called envy, when it means the
reduction of an innocent, one not a tyrant or destructive fool—when it conflates innocence with
stupidity—sees essence of the child as something deficient, homely); and/or they take advantage.

15
But the eyes and mutterings, and long strident suck-air kisses, tongue flicks and
undulation (tall clever iguanas, serpents all around), she couldn‘t stave off, those
became my life as a girl. I was in the park across the street from school when an
older boy first called me ―cunt.‖ I remember his jokered mouth, and eyes pinched at
me, in wolf-smile. I think it was before that, that I had seen a man on my block
twirling a keychain that was the green-jelly figure of a cunt, jelly like the sparkly
plastic sandals little girls wore in the ‗80s, I had my pair.
One time a glass bottle shattered on the ground behind my step. Walking home
from school a few years later, a driver blared his horn at me, having waited for me
to cross in front of him simply wished my undoing and to make me look (and I
refused). It startled me, oh I remember, the jolt. This would happen so many times,
but I was still new to it then, I had actually expected peace on my walk. My heart
moved in me like a jumping fish (right to be frantic, the fish, out of water, in human
hands or bear claws—in one or the other, caught to beast). And the rage I felt, for
the scare and to have had the thought I was shaping shot off like a bird.
That rage I got used to taking home with me, until I learned, long after, to forget
shame and yell on the street, purge in the moment or rankle for a long time after.
Before then, for years, the anger had no out. I was too shy, and I took all in, I was
one to feel to the ends of me, to shaking, to tears rolling while I stifled sound; I
founded my calamities, my body told me what to feel. I trust my body, I remember
all its talking from the time I was small, and I intuit infancy before. It points out to
me the clandestine, the rotten and finessed. I hid all in spite of me, of my want to
out; others hide in wicked canniness. The flux to me of small intensities would find
them out to me.
It was as a teen that I had the rage seeded in me, rage to want me back to take
me back, put stop, give me like track-tied to help, and, too, much more than
immolation, compelled, all in but yes, my hair somewhat the fire—live in a cubby
for vow to tell, live in 3 feet, this sacrifice, the keep in mind, nestle in abject; but no,
the tunnel in and in, innerscape is a universe.
Is the god in the air or in the I?
In the moment, hell or soar, hand held, hug to I felt flayed at school every day,
to just be there, among strangers, pretty much, with most of whom I could not be
me, hierarchy in play and alien (just me at home, my parents immigrants, quite living
for me), and I not beautiful, not talkative, not knowing how to joke, how to pilot a
group. All the time, around most, raw nerve, sounds acute, ill omen—sense of self
as not armed with what to do, on verge of shame, some kind of outspill, that will
make them condemn. Who did I think they were? What did I think they could see,
slipping out of me, eclipse with the black coming out the back, behind my head, ear,
while my face wanted so to be a sun—try is not even the word, such a fail, inability,
for something telling me always, they will laugh at you, so every step, one foot trips
the other.
I could not see then, in h.s.: they are limited, they have buttons that plunge them
to past scenes, stamps (frozen images, totems, statuettes, blurred portraits with one
feature intact), one word, and you remind them of one they boxed away, for threat,
for what they took, in some web chink of their formation to the present, as

16
unpainted mask, latex blank canvas, unknown. Like kneading a toe and in so doing
tickling the throat, the face they make at you, or what they say, unexpected, is not
about you first, it‘s about their pickled one, mummy, locked as reference in their
memory. Unless you are that new for them; you present a new frame, framing
nothing yet; your lack of surety makes them sluice you, what you show in that
moment all the quicker to some ill category they have within (this is what not to be,
or you will forfeit your dearest; this is who to praise).
One of my buttons hurtled me down to my unthought bravery made to grow a
brain, an eye, because someone had picked a secret off me like butioneer snatch,
and I didn‘t know what they‘d grabbed, what they fondled, when I spoke one day, a
little kid, and he, grownup, locked eyes with others, and made me funny. I
remember; I was telling a story, talking animatedly, and the man was not listening to
my story, he was at first, but then he was laughing, as I was talking, and he
interrupted me to tell others that my dress was transparent.
I felt naked, and I shut up then and there; whatever I‘d had to say, that I‘d been
believing I was telling to such effect, in a circle of parity (this just given, assumed),
I‘d been wrong. Such confidence was not reliable. When your guard is down, when
you assume amity, you are fool; what you think you steer or do dazzle, like hands
nimble in cut and coiffe, is broke, does not work, you do not take, they do not like.
And the new thing too to know—that it Is work; the face to face is effort, not fun,
not extension of breath, of play.
I don‘t know today who that man was. But strangers leave a legacy sometimes.
Anyone, any no one, can be a danger. But no, I learned over and over, not just that
day, that people are quick to turn, to jab, to do something that gets too in, where I
did not give them permission to go, or where they presume to be able to see, but
they‘ve come in with techno-headgear on, playing pictures for them, before their
eyes, in goggle cups or robo-band across, that they mistake for my privacy, but
they‘re only watching the pictures they came in with.
They may not see me, like I am not in the room with them, be they talk to me,
target me. It did not have to make sense, and it often did not; it just was; the rules
need not be in common, but one is made accountable.
Some call sensitivity gift, others illness, depending on how they like you in the
moment. It did hurt, it was an opening, skin pulled back, un-cuticled nerves in trot
from room to room, the hallways full of eyes, sitting for an hour at a time—lost in
the lecture, but oh, then to have to talk. Those around you feel it, and they find you
ugly for it, for your speech halted and messy, for your inability to perform, to play
some flamboyant part, or to waft an angel, stoner puff of calm. You don‘t give some
brand of sass, wryness, hint of wind ya waist, Beavis in the ether like cosmonaut
bobbing from a tether, so you bore. But more than that, to look on lack of suavity is
to look on a wound, a maim, and no one wants to see. It angers them, that you
show them that. And the worry, that smell on you, suffusing, or electricity humming
about your form, sending wavelets and wobbly streaks out, altering the air in the
room (unless they can ignore you), is a demand, even though you cannot help it. It
is a demand put out to them to console; they catch your electricity, resent the lent
jitter, the guilt it implicates; they say no, they say leave me be. They say, I can, why

17
can‘t you; where is the coal, cauldron full of it, to center you, to make your belly
flamey alcove, to draw us in. You are not gravid with that thing that gives one place;
you‘ve no smugness, you don‘t tell us our place; you are empty. Say something to
move us, or we will ink you.
My body grew without an outlet. I grew shapely and hungry, and after I‘d think
about what those men on the street who bothered me, who treated me like I do not
treat a cat psssssst niña, like I could never think to treat another human, looking back
at me, could possibly be thinking (I concluded, I was a thing to stick it into), I let
their want of me strum me in my bed, releasing the school day, remembering I was a
woman, after a long day of confinement, stapled lips. The heat of my skin, my
plangent flesh in wait made use of even them, what I had, the eyes I had on me. I
was young; my body was not yet at its peak; my first year at Harvard, my breasts
grew so quickly that pale, undulant canal etchings appeared on them.
I learned to feel like a woman, desirable, in a defining, all-the-time way, a way to
meet the world more than resurrect to in private, there, in that school.
It worked, the persona I crafted and wore. I made boys want me, my form and
aura pleased, I had a wide appeal. I felt like a dummy all of a sudden or not, or
shamed, unseen, unrealized all I‘d been was rent, I was not smart anymore but now
instead of mind, I was a woman. This was the proffered the only way of it, for me.
(My ways to work were idiosyncratic, and not for marathoning; I typed with two
fingers—the beak peck; and I had learned in my teens to slow my reading, to be able
to memorize all I needed to, all they told me to—and in h.s. the all was not so
much, and I could do it, store chapters of biology, of history, whatever it was. But
now, the piles of books were too tall, the books too lengthy. And anxiety, a want to
do well so strong it struck me still—OCD that paralyzed, permitted no flow (it
attacks the passion—what the want is in love with, has vertigo eyes on—I would
type a word, a phrase, and then erase, over and over again, sheer tic, no cause. What
I most wanted, to do well, to write like what I fed on, ruminated like religion (it was,
it is—minus certainty—more open, the doors you rest heft on give and give), the
disorder parked in front of, like a massive person spreads a black cape.
—A different anger came in later, to suck this venom out no more turning
pretzel, to please, no more I—Push out me, be both the doctor and slick infant keep
the cord, shriveled whangdoodle nose a memento, of past that was, I stand in this
(and the now rivers, but is not gone, and again, again—) I‘ll be progenitor to answer
about me, the sonny I am. No more looking to—
In the meantime, for all that, what they do to sharpnesses they give, put in only
(mostly): judge, write on me, gross, as a botched birth tell, nah, silly bitch, try try, for
a change, try—Is there anything in there?
Too late to prepare, I was there; and it was time to live, in a way apart from
books, in any case. It was time for that.) I was part of the defining, and it was
awarded to me, both. A match in looking out and look back. The desired response
back tells you there is language in common.
My fleshy lips I lacquered every day, I wore clinging garments, I clicked along in
tall heels.

18
I could move. I danced in shows and walked like I had a hive between my thighs,
buzzing, making a honey to shunt to tizzy and stupor they did not see frangible
wishbone, frail arcs joined at a nexus, each a neck forcibly bowed, given to fanged
bite in the shape of my denim-clung stalks. And that was not me (that was the girl in
me, in abeyance). I knew the power nestled in that part now, what it could do to
another.
I had waited for a year, almost gone out with an over-ready older man named
Nemesio I‘d eyed in turn in a Portugese restaurant, who kept pushing out his lips in
a flirty pout; he would have taken it with a quickness. But I didn‘t, I waited to be in
love. And then when it happened, it was real, it was the first time ever on the planet;
I was happy in a way I‘d always waited for. But son wanted to do some more
popping but he didn‘t find another untouched like me, to go for him, another like
me who could walk like a minx and at the same time wear a face of startled to be
having that effect on you and who really was an ingénue, new sling for my boo. A
girl to love him unto death and gently, like story girls do.
But then I wasn‘t new anymore, after him. And the next one raped me and told
many, many that I‘d given it up freely, on date 1.
Then I was seen as really unclean. My game was done. What strut has mystique if
it‘s literal, yoked to graphic scenes on back sides of eyes.
Boys who‘d never tried to talk to me suddenly asked me out. I was whispered
about in the dining hall, they pointed at me. I, who‘d always noticed everything.
Who had always hated this.
The first time, I went crying to my roommate, hyperventilated.
But you have to wear the iron mask, carry the killing lumber. No out from the
jail cell or the cage.
I had to carry it, stay in it.
And my America, hope of my parents, is still—
still proving that I am human, and not what you make up.
All my life is that. They did me so good,
I can never stop.

19
J/J HASTAIN
FROM LUCI: A FORBIDDEN
SOTERIOLOGY
Dark is not light‘s opposite. Dark is the authenticity by which and in which
light happens.
As an ark of darkness most likely to be decoded by a floral print, I long for
you to find ways to deflower me (in the human sense of the term). There
are times when the vulnerability in my stating this to you makes me fear
that I will pique too fast in your grasp. Learn to play the music of my
organs, those stringed, jiggling plots and skins stretched over ancient bowls.
Reach into me with the deepest symbols of your signature; leave your image
imprinted on mine.
I am a hand-made talisman. I am embodied ulterior and all I have ever been
trying to say is that I only ever want the kind of wholeness that has to do
with having learned to fill holes.

20
Dear denizen of contour,
Why would anyone push the night toward the day? I remain unable to
understand this even though I regularly push the day toward the night.

21
I often wonder where the other one third of the first estate has gone (they
left alongside me when I passed through the bleached door and it turned
fleshy, red).
All of my considerations are anagogically dense: that is a necessity.
Anagogic engagement is not necessarily dependent on traditional analysis;
this kind of pride is not of the ego. The notion that I am a universal symbol
of the ego is just inaccurate. Perhaps it is for this reason that they (the other
one third) are not all here with me right now. I mean, I definitely have an
ego, but that is only one aspect of this profuse, palpable parable.
Regardless if I was the first or the last to do so, I left what had been given
me for what else I might be able to find. In looking at me, you might or
might not be able to see what is definitely there: the adverse effects of my
father on my form.
This is an opera whose storyline consists of hot and cold shadows.

22
My father insisted that I would never be buried in the ground (as humans
are). Therefore upon leaving the bleached-wood room, I placed myself far
below the earth in this cave. This is a form of being buried, isn‘t it? Solitude
does not necessarily denote loneliness.
Ethical interferences increase multi-planar contact. In creative inertias there
is inbound relief.
I wander the corridors filled with images of my own design: the faces of
saints in erotic depictions, peppered honey and pear slices, doughy
blossoms, hybrid forms consuming other hybrid forms, glass vegetables
where human vegetables once existed.
As I spend time trying to fashion origami cranes out of my tears and my
thoughts, I also eat spoonfuls of ink: do so in the fashion of a feast of feats.
With each intake of mystical liquid, my weight increases; I sink further and
further below the surface. I consider this movement a form of progression,
of adornment.

23
If and yes are both aspects of an inexhaustible resource, sigils of chiasmus.
Consider this: sludge I endlessly unpack from a mouth with which I cannot
grin.
It gives me cell-nausea in a cosmic form every time I wonder, even though
wondering is one of the primal rights that I left my first estate in order to
attain.
What does wonder and wondering feel like to you?
I wonder if I will ever have an offspring, or if I already have one whom I
can‘t recall.

24
In the cave I am increasingly working to see beyond the strictures of
Yahweh.
At first, leaving was enough. Now I yearn for more synthesis: more breath.
Contrary to how some approach it, knowledge can be known by feeling.
Form and parts are how to prove that. The parts in all of their excess are
the stroma; pieces in affectionate poises are what hold a body of a me
together. A me in a body is never redundant. Me in a body is capacity for
ongoing climax.
All of this as ricochet in me (which is producing inside scars whose insights
are ravenous), allows me to pursue the barrages as they are pursuing me. I
do all of this; I pay attention as a way to stay a creature of sight within the
plummets of an eternally orbiculate mirror.
Paying attention to subtleties is how to fall in love and to be in love with is all I
have ever wanted.

25
Even with the crystalline shape of my yen, even with so much accumulated
skill, I continue to see myself as a stranger to my first estate. Perhaps one is
forevermore estranged from the sites and principles to which one is
heretical. There‘s a difference between playing god and striving, with every
fiber of your form, to become your own divinity (as personage, as passage).
I guarantee you I am divinity in states of striving.
It is a challenging but refining work to be a nomad who travels while sitting
still. Better that, though, than being an infinitely smooth young savior,
running feverishly from the contours and contents of midnight as it burns.
So many of his drops of blood were wasted on the bleached stones in the
garden: wasted at the foot of the cross. It feels of value to ponder his
unclaimed hemolytic droplets in comparison to my intentionally released
droplets. Do you see this needle here in my hand like a salty genital? I
remove some of what is within me in order that it might act as nourishment
for someone else, even if that someone else is me.
I am not into waste: much more interested in profane but functional
methods of syncretistic devising. In my case, my self-released emissions are
like red dye going into a full glass of red wine: infinitude being held, the fact
that I depend not on my attributed lineage, but on my own schema and
perseverance.

26
It feels uncomfortable to me to present the impressions within my image to
you as forms of teachings. Haven‘t we all had enough of teachings? There
are more anarchic models for us to go by than teacher to student: modes
which have eros (as opposed to hierarchy) as their base. As images are
birthed within, starkness tempers and begins to secrete essence.
It is possible to transgress spiritual subservience: to be real and genuine cuts
into the patriarchal order that is regularly imposed on mythologies of deity
and angel. As an embodied annulment of my father‘s overarching position,
I cut the pleroma from three (as with triclavianism) to innumerable. I want
you to consider that cut to be one of the ways that I am able to experience
things akin to human erection, but so in the form of reredos.
Contexts of self make a me like a god.
Abaddon within an antimatter-alma mater.

27
Creating and populating images is apotheosis: an important way to reconcile
opposites.
Because I am image creating image and not image created by, then simply
living out an attributed destiny of that image in a planar realm, please find
the largest and longest mahogany box out there. Find this, even though
there will still be more drifting autumn leaves, swords long gone limp, and
aborted aspects than you could ever possibly stuff in the box.
Find this for me, then put me and other images within it and store the
unabridged mix in a secret place in your life. In this new body, symbols will
be sums: unusually soft. Only hard when they need to be; similar to balsa
wood floating in the surf appearing to lose its structure as it bobs in the
waves, then you reaching out to touch the wood on the shore and noticing
that it is, in fact, a solid object.
This is one of the many ways I move from Lucifer to Luci (bypassing
Satan). Only when I need to get hard do my images get hard. My images get
hard from within me, and then proceed outward as protrusions. Like in the
case of a human erection, this is something that I can‘t stop from
happening.

28
I remember others‘ human memories.
Sometimes this remembering feels like divergent destiny, yet other times it
feels like dysphoria, displacement. As is reported in the case of Claire Sylvia
and cell memory in the transplant heart she received, others‘ experiences are
here with me in my body. These experiences are personal for me: in me
they are me even if they are not from me. The cells of a first body carry
their memoirs into secondary bodies. Notice my strut like an upright beam.
See how I am materializing these images: green peppers, beer, maniacally
shouting the word ―amen‖.
Psychotropic revelations are here to add mystery, not completion.

29
So many blemishes and mutilations on my form: meaningful minutia. Here
on both of my sides, wounds leak an odiferous liquid. Stunned and
disturbed by this leaking I still have not reached my fingers into these
wounds to taste the emissions, to see if this is in fact a mixture of blood and
water like in the case of my spirit brother‘s own side: Longinus lance.
When Adam‘s side was opened to extract Eve, the stoutest bone of Eden‘s
fate, I am sure my father underestimated how much blood would spill forth
from Adam‘s side. Blood is a natural intensifier of embodiment in human
forms.
Consider this: in the moment you pass someone on the street with their
sign asking for a dollar, do you stop? Not always. But if they were bleeding
from their eyes or from their outstretched hands, though you probably
would still not touch their hands due to an unresolved fear of getting AIDS,
the likelihood of your giving them your dollar is greatly increased. I have
seen this happen many times.
Thinking blood would function as something to assist him with his desire
to control our forms, I think that my father is still surprised by how blood
emancipates the individuality of our own agency: that force which puts us in
deepest proximity with our desires.

30
Slitting open the dried pear to reveal linkage, pairs of pearls therein. Pulling
knots and tangles from hair by pulling them right from the scalp of my
image, I am thinking about how compressions and elongations cultivate
cleanliness that has not yet been robbed of its complexity.
Why did I get such adverse and dramatic responses from my father and
spirit brother every time I tried to bring up my mother? Could it be that I
did not come from anything that retains a mother‘s image? When I was
younger I often snuck into the library pursuing myths about Baphomet (the
hermaphrodite god of the pagans) in the pages of the books therein. I
intuited and therefore pursued Baphomet, but did not yet know that this
god (like so many others) was an imagined one. Did imagining make that
god less real? Certainly not to me. Imagined gods are definitely more image
though, than they are dogma.
At the frothing edge of a water so great that it could devour all of the
contents on its shore, a tomboy plays gingerly, joyfully with a toy boat.

31
KATHLEEN JONES
GOLD STANDARD
I was going to a poetry reading, to meet a friend‘s friend.
The bus from Boystown to Andersonville was nearly full,
everyone economizing their bags and purses and asses.
When two girls jumped on, wielding suitcases, the grey
old man perched up front lurched from his spot
to the just-emptied seat next to me. His sweatpants hugged
his skinny legs, his head bobbed with the movements
of the bus, he faced forward but muttered. He said
queen of clubs and fanned a deck of cards across his thigh.
It wasn‘t a trick but a visual aid, a sudden delight.
He said coffee and a pack of smokes but he was not
drinking coffee, he was not holding cigarettes.
Later, he said Wal-Mart gift card to no one
or to me, the words not quite nonsense.
Compared to the night, the bus was dry and warm,
a good crowd going, the quiet almost friendly for once.
Maybe he expected me to marvel aloud instead of silently.
Perhaps he was disappointed. But then he held out
a black-and-white school portrait for me to appreciate.
It was him, but a kid, crazy or not-crazy, happy or sad,
or all of it. I nodded and smiled, but froze when he plucked
a loose hair from the tired blonde head of the woman one seat up.
She spun around and glowered. I shrank. When the bus stopped
the man stepped off first, then the woman, then me.
The next night, at another reading,
Carol Ann Duffy read ―Mrs. Midas,‖ and when she said
then watched / as he picked up the glass, goblet, golden chalice
she paused and looked at us, and when we looked back—
we thousands of listeners—
she ran a finger round the rim of her water glass.
I‘m talking about cards: here are some cards.
I‘m talking about a glass: here‘s a glass.
When a person speaks, watch.
Gold standard, a vault behind each thought.

32
FRACTIONS
After ―Mother, Bradford Yorkshire 1982,‖
one of David Hockney’s composite polaroids
David looked at his mother, wondered where
she had gone, thought he might find
an answer today. In woozy pink carpet
he photographed her sixteen by seven times,
expression and posture whole but in fragments.
If Mother is numerator and a Polaroid
camera is denominator, David Hockney has made
art of fractions. If he‘s made art
of fractions, he‘s done so using already
existing math. Who hasn‘t calculated the day‘s
remaining hours and needed to sit down,
ankles woven together against all possibility of
getting up? Who hasn‘t gazed in two
directions? So he sliced her up then
glued her back together, white spaces reminding
us: we all live in rectangular rooms.

33
DOC LUBEN
THE BEAR
A bear moved in
to the mansion next door.
A large brown bear, all full of pre-winter fat.
The family that owns the mansion is on vacation,
or maybe moving to San Carlos,
whatever pointless thing
people who live in mansions will be doing.
But the bear smelled food
in the cabinets and smashed in
through the French doors on the back deck
and hasn‘t left.
He has lived there for weeks.
At first he ate as much as he could, very fast,
but that lost its novelty.
and he wandered away from the open freezer door.
He sat in all the chairs,
then sat in all the chairs again,
pretending to be Goldilocks.
He turned on the computer
but his fingers were too fat
to compose anything of great meaning,
so he smashed the screen into the wall
and was angry not to find any meat parts inside.
Anything that gets warm should have meat parts.
The bear laid down to sleep in front of the fireplace
but it made him feel macabre, like an antique accessory,
so he moved into the master bedroom.
He sleeps naked, on top of the covers.
He tried once to ball up the pillows and comforters
into the shape of a lady bear,
but it was not big enough
and came all undone
when he nuzzled too vigorously.

34
He started to think a mansion is not a great place for a bear,
but now that he was here
leaving seemed implausible.
The other bears would scold him for returning to the woods,
saying he had been ungrateful for a great thing.
He tries to entertain himself
with walking up and down stairs,
and knocking over lamps and then standing them back up.
He turns on the television
and roars at the people
who do not seem to be frightened
but are still unhappy.
He has taken up a form of gardening
which involves him batting at the rosebushes with his claws
leaving large holes of nothing but bare branches.
He has eaten nearly everything,
including the Halloween candy hidden in the youngest son‘s bedroom.
Every day his eyes look more sleepy.
He climbs the stairs and goes down them again.
He likes the stairs.
They seem almost like magic,
like climbing a tree from the inside.
He wants to give up eating
and focus on stairs.
Stairs are the opposite of food.
The more you use them the more they are there.
They never run out: all you have to do
is turn around
and there they are again.

35
KRISTEN PARK
from AURELIA
There was something Phillip found in Aurelia.
It was not her hand. It was never her hand. Perhaps, a toe. Perhaps, the
point at which a line is drawn. Sand or wood or something impressionable:
water. The threat was greater than the indentation.
None of these chairs is right. It’s hard to sit. To be here with shoe tucked under shoe,
ankles bound, the floor unrelentless. There is no support in this wing. The
fluorescent lights asked only of shadow and bag and carriage. Fee green
and yellow cinder blocked to cold electric spite.
The point does not draw upon the lifelines palm found. Hands flounder
and fumble and. Phillip tucked his in the folds of his arms. Pressing was
warm. Stratification a threshold that exists in press. Something to be.
Aurelia lie in the hospital bed unaware of the shuffling heels drawing
ceiling; drawing capacity; drawing door.

36
Aurelia‘s fingers fan on bed. Sheet line over comfort. The cleave of heels
in hall. Walls catch but pitch but keel sound. Board empty. Arrival at
bedside, nails half moon blue beneath the pink. Wind catches the leaves in
the window frame and blows them inside out. Or perhaps it is upside
down. The silver is showing. Her veins are showing. Palms prone to
pressing down. Nails breathe into the bedding, showing.
Exposure, though is different than diagnosis. As to expose is different then
to prognosticate. There is only so much time between sound departing and
arriving. The heels, the breath, the scratch of nails on fiber. Counting
threads and lines and cells.
Phillip watches the leverage hands pressing down can achieve. A lift of
sternum. Pressing is not holding is not grasping is only uni-directional.
Symmetric. Met by the surface, against. Tension with no torque may be
unresolvable. He waits for the break. Moon on leave and trees arrive as
wind. And then he cannot wait. Turns palms supine and presses thumb to
flesh.
Fingers fan in his. She continues to breathe. The heel sound drops at
doors endjamb.
Phillip is wrong. Maybe it was her hands. Maybe a life was drawn in two
palms lining sides. Perhaps, perhaps is something. A threshold of wait.

37
Aurelia knows only nurse drawing. Perhaps, well, maybe, there is more
than taking here where space is blocked cinder upon wall. And so nurse:
We will test the bone for there will be some innovative, really only injected then
fluorescent on screen so red blue jelly fish protein deep
tissue your bones well, find cancer early and
exposure to jellies will
we need a diagnosis to proceed
No, this is not protocol.
And so Phillip:
Love calls deep and holds unknown
And so Aurelia:
Proceed, I give my bone.
And so nurse, and so.

38
It is important to distinguish between plunging and pressing. It is
important to distinguish between plunging and pressing because this is a
love story. It is important to distinguish between plunging and pressing
because this is a love story and this love has flesh. This is not an ideal love;
this is love between bones and cells and signals; and it has a carrying
capacity, and thus, forth, has a capacity to carry, and so: It is important to
distinguish between a plunge and a press. For the needle‘s sake. For
Aurelia‘s sake. For the sake of Phillip holding the object and asking for
space. To draw for to draw yellow breathing bones. The hands shake
where the soul treads a weight too light to point in.

39
Philip wakes to burning. Rope frays between the roll of thumb and middle
finger. Prints fill with line and line with cells and the knot is nadi is heat is
center is unraveling finger friction hand.
He must drop the line to lift Aurelia‘s hand. Mark. The degree at which
the knot will loosen is the degree to which he looses himself in the process.
He takes her pulse at the wrist. Mark. He takes her pulse at throat. Mark.
He takes her pulse behind the knee. Mark time passes regardless—a
function of distance, a question of space.
Her lids flutter but her lips stick together. Skin dry and cracked holding
humid heat. He rubs ice over blue lips and they part rough beneath the
melt. He wants her to speak but she swallows instead. She wants him to
speak but he listens instead. The quiet holds them and there is no telling
who the pair of eyes belong to. The ones on the ceiling. The ones noting
the horizon line.

40
JH PHRYDAS
from LEVITATIONS
a bon-mot sits on a pedestal – underneath, a
layer of bodies resist unnecessary movement
– anchored by ankles – tiny raps of knuckles
evoke time – they wait for no one – carpet
hairs separate them like leaking sculpture –
the way hips protrude like silence – glass staining minute detail – unabridged
sentences – increasing and suddenly decreasing –

41
bone compass – create through insistence a
spiral – shifting, the world emerges –
amalgamation retains its own form – but a
scattering – I
but a crossing – limns – and the institution of watching – limns – and the rights and
rituals keeps – limns – taut – skin recedes when touched – or thickens – gains
momentum – force coalesces as a seeable object – interior movements outside
regulatory perception enact a more precious form – because life-supporting –
possibly being – merely a system‘s reaction to dissolution – here – investigates the
potential of impermanence –

42
STACY SZYMASZEK
from JOURNAL OF UGLY SIGHTS
8.31.12
East Village: disgruntled worker zone, remember Arlo walks up 1st now, throw
caution to the wind//notice my reflection in the window of laundromat, my ass
looks huge, then memory of something someone may be said about O‘Hara not
being the type to notice his reflection in windows//will never patronize any of these
new places//young man with open sore on his back drops to his knees to ask for
money//outdoor seating eats up sidewalk//been off caffeine so long one cup wires
me, light lunch doesn‘t level me//urge to skip steps, forge signatures, it‘s okay, you
can forge mine too//pieces of ceiling are getting closer to my chair//go out for
water and come back with soothing spruce bath salts// what would the Godfather
do?//lost the Power Ball despite Susan Miller‘s certainty of money from an
unpredictable place//prop up on iron fence gobbling spirulina chips//new
rubberized sheet for Cass rolled up in a bag//expression of confidence followed by
the ever so slight fear that patterns can‘t be broken//my therapist and gynecologist
have basement offices//emerge into late summer dark//Shulamith Firestone dead
in her E. 10th St. apt. all week
9.8.12-9.20.12
Carroll Gardens/Soho: nyc.gov text tornado warning seek shelter right before 4 hr
meeting in Manhattan, reminds me to cancel this service//order breakfast from
diner during storm, pass delivery guy on way out, text K she can have half of my
potatoes//F service change, book to Jay in ultra humidity//smack gum on F, feels
good but looks bad to watch others do it//persona non grata in room of people
who make a living from their art//gardenia smell of only lotion sample I could find
at Ricky‘s//the unprepared getting prepared in real time//new lay out of Brooklyn
Fare, produce in too many places, buy more than I can carry, call K half way home
for assist//K watching Auntie Mame in bedroom, too much horn in a score makes
me nuts//cook everything the wrong time//yell ―put the blame on Mame‖ at the
top of my lungs//
credit card balance
payment not posted
payment received a day late
payment mailed a week early
late fee
try to get it waived, realize I‘ve been chatting with a robot//

43
synthetic ball of hair held by a weed//thorough Gowanus House grounds
people won‘t pick up that condom but finally got mud-encrusted doll leg//Cass
meets Biggy, he licks her asshole, guys walking Biggy expect me to be
offended//can‘t lose 2 pounds I picked up in Milwaukee//bully stick on bed, bed
as giant wee wee pad//not dead but not growing plants//moldy rug, Winn Dixie
not stocking rugs anymore
Upper West Side: sit in gown opening to the front listen for footsteps, notice there
are now magazines in the exam room//Dr. who told me to lose weight indifferent
to my weight loss//powder-free latex gloves, ―does your GYN do a rectal?‖//9
month wait for appointment//her language striped bare//―get dressed and meet
me in my office‖//my real weight on upscale scale//stack of amber urine
samples//medical waste bin lid open
East Village: everyone wants a tree//
practice of redirecting
grey area calls to me//threat of giant mirrors being permanently installed in Parish
Hall//passing Sarah on 2nd Ave, not saying hello because what if she sees me but
doesn‘t want to see me//sign in sheet at church says IN/IN//600 wheels of ricotta
salada recalled, threw out the wrapper of the wheel we‘ve been putting on
everything, K‘s listeria hysteria//another person surprised that I work full-time like
I volunteer because I love poetry//―Szymasver‖//―Save on Juicy Turkey‖//Stacy
with an ―e‖//
diaper smell in the about to be public forum and stain on fabric covered
chair may be related, wheel it into kitchen where later Will almost sits on it//one of
the cheeses for reception brown, furry//
blushing in front of 90 people Anne later telling me it‘s the year to take my
power then demonstrates how ―hey there, nice to see you‖ then I try//ugly memory
as Rachel reads, her calling me from Temple in 1992 ―you haven‘t actually
graduated‖ thought I was such a good poet that it wouldn‘t matter//when a bed
was a sleeping pallet everything dragged in from Baltimore Ave//passed math
forgot about grad school//student journalist with a deadline whose calls I avoid
shows up//season kick-off night of 1,000 hugs and one finger in ear//fear I won‘t
be able to remember next reading without writing it down//how naturally
diplomacy comes//
period of time when I see beautiful so can‘t write ugly taking a holiday
makes this ugly//
someone asked if I was a therapy junkie//my
therapist says I really use it//I really
excel//therapy billed to credit card//
accrues interest

44
Carroll Gardens: K says she can‘t wait for the day when the fecal collection kit isn‘t
sitting on the back of the toilet//listen to cello music while working on budget//my
bare foot as a broom//square on calendar with double booking//being outside
when high school lets out//take a pic I thought would be cute but I look menacing,
like I‘m choking the dog//gerunds are ugly in poems//forgetting wallet, at least
Cass doesn‘t bark anymore, frozen meatball stains on sheets//songbird on cement
flutters wings, move her to woodchips, this just is//person who has no sense of
how to move through public space, word to the wise, figure in your giant backpack
knocking people around on the subway//
emailed lab results late Friday night, ten minutes of thinking I‘m diabetic,
words in the abnormal results field, probably nothing//
crawling into bed, tormenting K with my anxiety
East Village: subway drum circle sets up with me nearly in the circle//Fetish
Fantasy Series, pleasure tape//walking composition ratio of forgotten to
recalled//about to betray my mother put it off another day//so many offers to use
people‘s upstate homes can‘t seem to take them up on it ―sounds
dangerous‖//December facial tremor in September//lesbian of note on F, not ugly
but K would say her shoes are, never remembers meeting me//is occasionally
wearing a blindfold during sex really a fetish?//use my apt keys to try get into the
office and vice versa//―Chemical peel is an exciting way to improve your
looks‖//Chirping Chicken//Pudgies//―thank you for improving my
face‖//toothpaste stain on my lapel

45
MATT WEDLOCK
WORN DOWN CUTICLE
we cut well against the fracture
our faces silk sheared crimson purple and white
go tell {them of my siren song
this, my hands raised index finger pointing in
gives pause to your upper lip
and for good reason
i‘ve tasted the colorless sugar
fucked the salt strangling here
brought tongue from
before, skin told air to behold skin to dance
no god before devil set water
to word, before you

46
from CORN BREAD NO. 2
to make
to render
to be
to be
itch scratched fat
butter soft within flat landslide
bite triumphs baker‘s cry
observer‘s drunk
waist deep neck flounder cry
sea flea sand feet prick poison
curved thighs
split tails search for copper teeth
he forgot the she, the she gave the she a he with a lemon and cold winter dress;
gradiations of June within July‘s fiddle smile amiss with. now I, skin weathered
sycamore against the depths of no saved except pulls fingers marionettes. bread and
butter cold lips
fantasy no one wants
so everyone makes bread instead
water the temperature of blood supposedly makes a fine loaf for dead white men

48
KARA MILLER
HOW TO BREACH AND DESTROY
BOUNDARIES
Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, claims that ―fear works by establishing
others as fearsome insofar as they threaten to take the self in.‖ For Ahmed, the
paradigmatic object of fear is being swallowed up, losing the boundaries between
the self‘s interior and exterior. Horror, in Ahmed‘s reading, is always located on a
boundary of some sort; there is always a structure in the process of breaking down.
This principle goes far to explain two very different modes of horror: the ornate
suffocation of Shirley Jackson‘s The Haunting of Hill House, and the violent, primal
stillness of Clarice Lispector‘s The Passion According to G.H. Both novels circle
obsessively around boundaries both architectural and organic, and both novels
evince a fascination with decoration and adornment that goes beyond the creation
of impressions or mood. Decoration marks the boundary between interior and
exterior. The walls of a room or a house exist in their ornamentation; the skin of the
body exists in the manner in which it is painted, altered, and made beautiful.
Haunting, the imposition of horror, transforms that decoration into a site of decay
and revulsion. Where the walls or the skin break, the adornment that marked them
becomes a talisman of horror.
This horror of ornamentation is particularly apparent in Jackson‘s obsessive
visual evocations of her haunted house. Hill House is not malevolent simply because
it is haunted; it is evil in its very construction, ―chillingly wrong in all its dimensions‖
A house, after all, is composed nearly entirely of boundaries; when the boundaries
begin to bleed, the structure itself is infused with horror. One can sense an echo of
this adornment-horror in a line from Clarice Lispector‘s novel The Passion According
to G.H.: ―Killing is also forbidden because it breaks the hard casing, and leaves one
with the sticky life.‖ This mode of disgust—a primarily aesthetic mode, that of the
bodily inside being allowed out—has been put to extensive use in the horror genre,
but the violence that interests Lispector is of a strangely formal variety. Passion is a
profoundly still and internal novel. In its early passages, G.H., a dilettante sculptor
and socialite, enters an unfamiliar room in her house, where she sees and crushes a
cockroach. What follows is irreducible and nearly indescribable. In her encounter
with the empty room and the horrifyingly alive roach, G.H. sees what she terms the
―neutral,‖ the ―insipid‖—the absolutely unembellished and undisguised substance of
life. Thus, while Jackson works in a mode of gothic over-adornment, Lispector
utilizes its inverse: the horror of borders that reveal themselves bare and unadorned.
Both Jackson and Lispector fixate on the uncanniness of the decorative object, the
point of disturbance where luxury corrupts itself, the displaced ornament that
reveals that the boundaries between life and its antagonists are not functioning as

49
they should. While Jackson finds hell in the skewed corners of her Hill House,
Lispector imbues her roach with disconcerting aesthetic fetishism: ―Seen up close, a
roach is an object of great luxury. A bride in black jewels.‖
In Jackson‘s novel, the malevolent Hill House absorbs a quartet of individuals
already to various degrees deranged. The group is summoned by Dr. Montague, a
researcher of the occult, and its central character is Eleanor, solitary and jealous and
strange, with a history of finding herself in the midst of paranormal events. Eleanor
has spent most of her life nursing her now-dead mother, isolated from the outside
world, and Jackson introduces her by way of this statement: ―The only person in the
world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister.‖ Into this
nexus of feminine toxicity comes Theodora, another of Dr. Montague‘s subjects.
Theo is beautiful and vivacious and probably a lesbian, and she constitutes the
perfect subject for Eleanor‘s barrier-dissolving envy. The final subject, Luke, the
young and charming heir to Hill House, intrudes upon and mediates their
relationship, but the book‘s most important emotional currents run between the two
women.
From their first meeting, Theo and Eleanor can hardly maintain a clear line
between their bodies and identities. They share clothing, sleep in one another‘s beds,
and watch one another with jealous fascination. At one point, Theo paints Eleanor‘s
toenails red, and Eleanor‘s body revolts at the violation: ―I hate having things done
to me … I don‘t like to feel helpless … My mother—‖ Here, the decorative arts
have been perversely used to destroy a boundary, and with the dissolution of that
line, an entire history seethes to the surface. Later, when one of the house‘s ghostly
manifestations floods Theo‘s room with blood—for which Theo blames Eleanor—
Eleanor thinks back to the red polish: ―It might as well be paint, don‘t you see?‖ The
horror of blood, here, is not in its reference to violence or death, but in its reference
to seepage, a body not contained in itself. The red paint and the blood are both
accessories, both markers of where one body ought to end and the next begin, and
they echo one another with disturbing precision.
Lispector, too, finds gruesome meaning in simple forms of ornamentation. Early
in Passion, G.H. enters the room that was previously occupied by her maid and finds
it stripped of all decoration. She describes this empty room as ―the portrait of an
empty stomach,‖ a thing whose ―entrails had been parched.‖ Lispector uses this
carnal imagery to a precise purpose: for her, decoration is not a sign of life but life
itself, and its absence is a form of evisceration. Unadorned, the room reveals itself
to be as vulnerable and obscene as a human body. In the room, G.H. encounters a
mural depicting three empty figures: a man, a woman, and a dog. Describing her
revulsion at the mural, G.H. says, ―the drawing wasn‘t a decoration; it was a
writing.‖ Decoration is essentially incommunicative and opaque; it marks a border, a
point that cannot be moved through. When this decoration transforms into something
explicitly expressive, a point of leakage has been opened, and G.H., along with the
reader, recoils in disgust. Though the horror is less explicit, the effect here is not

50
terribly different from the effect when Eleanor finds her name written in blood on
the walls of Hill House. Walls that bleed and walls that send messages are both walls
that breach their essential function.
This complication between outside and inside is inscribed in every surface of
Haunting. Hill House is a structure far more organic than rational, composed of
concentric circles connected by passages that twist like viscera, its openings
concealed, its inner passages obscene and private and guarded from light. Softness,
curvature, and circularity, properties that can be alluring on human bodies, are
horrifying displayed on the walls of the house. Of course, much of Hill House‘s
malignance consists in its power to break down the boundaries between itself and
the people inside; over and over, Eleanor experiences the house‘s hauntings as
coming from inside herself. Hill House threatens to consume Eleanor in a number
of senses: by swallowing her up and annihilating her, of course, but also by
dissolving the barriers that divide body from architecture, structure from soul. The
displaced ornament—here, the form of the organic body rendered on the walls of
the man-made structure—functions, again, to corrupt the ideas of decoration and
sensory pleasure, and to reveal the porosity and leakage of most boundaries.
Sara Ahmed writes of fear as an affect that produces and maintains distance. The
primary object of fear is being swallowed up or consumed, but that very fear works
to maintain a mediating space, so that this devouring impulse is never
consummated. Fear, according to Ahmed, ―restricts the body‘s mobility precisely
insofar as it seems to prepare the body for flight.‖ What happens, then, to a body
that refuses to flee? G.H. does not run from the manifestation of her fear, and as a
result she loses her adornments, the hardness of her boundaries, the limitations that
render her sane. Lispector writes that ―the vision of an infinite piece of meat is the
vision of the mad, but if I cut? that meat into pieces and parcel them out over days
and over hungers—then it would no longer be perdition and madness.‖ Images of
eating constitute objects of fixation in both Passion and Haunting. In the mind of
Eleanor: ―I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, and the monster
feels my tiny little movements inside.‖ In the mind of G.H.: ―the unclean animal of
the Bible is forbidden because the unclean is the root … eating the living matter
would banish me from a paradise of adornments.‖ Swallowing and digestion affect a
total dissolution of boundaries, a total displacement of every object of decoration
and sane sensory pleasure. For Ahmed, the perpetuation of fear depends on the fact
that the threat of consumption is constantly deferred; fear ―constructs some bodies
as enveloped‖ but maintains a distance between the enveloping body and the body
experiencing fear. Without this distance, terror is not properly terror. It might
instead be G.H.‘s ―infinite piece of meat,‖ no longer marked by the embellished
boundaries that make an object or an affect intelligible.
For both Eleanor and G.H., there is consummation of a sort; Hill House
destroys Eleanor‘s body and claims her personality, while G.H. quite literally
consumes her roach. In Haunting, this transgression of the border that produces fear

51
effects a sudden, jagged end to the narrative; in Passion, the narrative circles around a
crater, the inexpressible moment of consumption. Eleanor‘s inner narrative ends
with ―I won‘t go, and Hill House belongs to me,‖ and then her suicide; G.H.
concludes with ―Life is just for me, and I don‘t understand what I‘m saying.‖ The
two women have in common this dissolved, leaking me; the boundaries between
higher and lower life, and between life and substance, have been utterly corrupted
and bled through.

53
BRENNA LEE
666
AN INTERVIEW WITH BHANU KAPIL
Installment One | Author One
[six words six authors six issues]
The 666 Interview Series is an attempt to explore language, the conceptual, and experimentation in
writing and art-making by creating a space of vulnerability and transfiguration through engaging
simultaneously with a structured and open format.
Words are objects. Each word holds weight and possibility. As objects, words
contain the potential for transmutation. Words have the ability to melt. They can
burn, shift, or fall apart. The intersection and variance of these interconnectivities is
where we find the hinge, the image. The image is an allusion, a locus for the object
itself or the object inside of itself. This is the power of the optic, to both refer to
and occupy this hollow landscape. How does the author-artist inhabit this gap? How
does the author-artist compose the silences of this break? How does one curate the
phantasms? It is here that the reader realizes the unity of word and image. There is
no moral division between the two. The written word-object creates the image-
object, or the word-object becomes the image-object itself. In this malleable space
the author-artist and the reader both can explore the relationships among words,
images, and meanings.
To explore language, the conceptual and experimentation, I chose Bhanu Kapil,
author of Schizophrene (Nightboat Books 2011), as the first 666 author-artist to
interview. Experiencing her work is often an act of engagement with the image of
the body in space and time; on the grid. She writes, ―Sometimes I think it was not
an image at all, but a way of conveying information‖ (40). Kapil‘s readers often
encounter what Cixous would refer to as ―a universal woman subject,‖ which
appears as a repressed female unconsciousness deeply connected to the sexual and
the animal.
With this in mind, I selected six words in regard to the body, especially in Kapil‘s
work and use of form, which is such a site of intersection that explores the
transmutable space. It is a place of incubation. Kapil responded to the six selected
words, as vectors, prompts, memories, or in any way she chose. While discussing
Schizophrene, Kapil expressed the importance of moving past the beautiful
language, of letting go of the excess in order to let something else emerge and to
allow the reader to encounter, as she puts it, ―the intensely vivid present of the
hallucination.‖ This is the experience of entering her work, of memory as matter. In
May 2013, I interviewed Kapil in an attempt to explore the space and limits of her
own texts, bodies, and language.

54
1] Monster: Chopin prelude #15. I looked left. To see Maiana, one of the
undergraduate students in Monster class, untangling the red wool from the tulips.
Walk to red. Follow the red wool to the trench or ditch where – I am lying down.
Then everyone gets in, taking an animal posture. We make a star with our bodies for
the dirt and put ourselves into that. The language in the middle of our bodies.
Absorbed. I left with their papers wrapped in an emerald green sari. Looking left, I
see the last thing – as above. To write you have to be a monster. You have to open
to the thing that isn‘t you.
2] Smear: Ban is a smear on the asphalt – a dredged bit of something. Was I a black
girl? Yes. Yes I was. In the culture I was from. In the era when, in solidarity with
their Caribbean neighbors and fellow workers, Indians and Pakistanis called
themselves black. Ban is a girl walking home from school just as the race riot begins.
I built a chrysalis on the street: a light tent over the text. Sometimes I think I keep
writing that – Ban – waiting for the moment – which is diurnal – something that
happens in time – or because of it – time – when she completely – disappears. No.
Ban is a stain that reappears – the outline of a girl‘s body – as soon as you rub it off.
3] Mimicry: How Ban repeats. In real time. From India comes the news that a girl.
Is on the ground. That she lay there. For forty minutes. Before anyone. Called the
police. And that this. Happens. Five minutes from my aunt‘s house. On a part of
the street I have. Walked past. Or driven past. Multiple times in the. Last twenty
years. Who am I ? Who is Ban? Ban is my sister. Ban is my daughter. Ban is me. But
who is this girl? What happens when what you are writing about becomes – more
real – than what you are writing about? This is when writing is no longer the
appropriate response. To a scene. That is not founded upon. Semblance. Or
mimicry. But is only itself. A bleed. In the red-yellow dirt, re-mixed and – wrecked –
on that other street.
4] Shift: A thin muslin dress. Cessation. The shroud in the form of a simple
garment. A girl is set on the pyre. At the last moment, as the flames surge and lick –
she opens her eyes. And leaps. Out of the fire. Into the river. Where she is carried
by pink dolphins. Out to sea. There, mid-ocean…
5] Return: So I did. By the Thames, I recollected my childhood with the dirty
swans. I put my beak in the pudding. Glancing left, I saw the path I used to walk.
Up the hill. To lie. Between the graves on the bright. Grass. Above London. Where
the person I did not marry. Said. ―You are my home.‖ The next day, or the day after
that, I left. Without a word. To return to my life. In Colorado. Which was beautiful.
Not yet wrecked and violent with yellow and white flowers on the windowsill. A
son. Not yet born. Or begun.

55
6] Hole: Sometimes I think that everything I have ever done as a writer is the
regulation of a glimpse – through a hole – in an ox cart – mid-century – on the
border of India and Pakistan. My mother saw…and then her head was pushed
down….beneath the straw….so that what she saw was always….a partial…scene or
image…that never resolved as narrative. But as the fairytales of my childhood. In
which a woman was always. Tied to a tree. And dismembered there. Like the
women. In the Ramayan. A text of my childhood. Also. The angels and demons
pour out of that hole every time I write. I became an experimental writer as a way, I
sometimes think, to create a surrounding environment for something. That was
never. Fully seen.
Lastly, please leave us with a word, an offering for the next interview:
LOVE.

56
CONTRIBUTORS
ANTHONY CAPPO received his M.F.A in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence
College. His poems have appeared in Connotation Press – An Online Artifact, Lyre Lyre,
Scapegoat Review, Scribble Magazine, and other publications. He grew up in Cherry Hill,
N.J., but is a long-time resident of New York City.
ASHER GHAFFAR is a writer whose work has been featured in numerous Canadian
literary journals. His first poetry collection, "Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a
Strange Music" was published with ECW Press. His forthcoming collection,
"Homegrown," addresses the surrounding discourses and the material fact of home
grown terrorism. The writer has been haunted by this emerging global reality since
the the July 7, 2005 London Tube Bombings. In addition to a dissertation in Social
and Political Thought at York University, Ghaffar is also at work on an
experimental autobiology on the problem of djinns and psychic possession.
CAILY GRUBE recently graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in
English Writing. She has evacuated most forms of social media and hopes that you
can't find her. Currently, she lives in Pittsburgh with her boyfriend and their two
terrariums. Her work appears in Hot Metal Bridge and Collision.
LIANUSKA GUTIERREZ is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of
Missouri-Columbia. Work can also be found in Counterexample Poetics, Eratio
Poetry Journal, Corazon Land Review, Wicked Alice, Yemassee, and other journals.
J/J HASTAIN is a queer, mystic, seer, singer, photographer, lover, priest/ess, gender
shaman and writer. As artist and activist of the audible, j/j is the author of several
cross-genre books and enjoys ceremonial performances in an ongoing project
regarding gender, eros and embodiments.
KATHLEEN JONES is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of North
Carolina Wilmington. Her work has appeared in nibble, The Stickman Review, Jones Av.,
and Morpheme, and is forthcoming in Iodine Poetry Journal.
BHANU KAPIL writes her bio as, "An obliterating heat. Or weather. How these
other forces impede a post-war architecture‘s modernist aims. Similarly. I want to
write out, one after another, a sequence of degraded colonial forms. My work
engages the colony at the instant of maternal death. Part of being a writer is the
capacity to make statements like this, privately. Is the colony a kind of mother? I
want to study form as an activity of incarnation: the thing that abates, progresses but
never loops again. Instead, I want to write my subjects to the end point and beyond,
even if that means I am a failed British novelist of some kind. BAN is a novel of the
race riot, for example, set in the U.K. The pre-biology of this project extends from a
World Conference of Cultural Psychiatry, at which I was a delegate, to the street on

57
which ―Ban‖ – a girl walking home from school in the opening moments of a riot –
lies down to die. I am interested in social death and the acoustics of violence. Since
2010, I have given [built] performances upon these themes [activities] in India, the
U.K. and at various venues in the U.S., including the Schindler House in Los
Angeles, The Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley and at Pratt Institute in New
York."
DOC LUBEN is a writer and spoken word performer in Portland, Oregon. His work
has previously been featured in The Legendary, Smalldoggies Magazine, and
Housefire Books. His poetry collection, The Diesel Powered Rag Dog, is available
at docluben.com.
KRISTEN PARK is an ecosomatic writer of the littoral zone. As a Naropa University
M.F.A. graduate, Kristen found the language to investigate samskara. She writes in
edges. Cofounder of the Inukshuk Collective, she generates somatic writing
exercises and coordinates poetry-movement events. When not choreographing in
the bathtub or writing in the sand, she teaches composition at Johnson & Wales
University and Bryant University in Historic Rhode Island.
JH PHRYDAS is a current MFA candidate in Writing and Poetics in the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He is originally from Atlanta, Georgia and
received his B.A. in English Literature from UC Berkeley. Phrydas was saved from a
life of bartending and wayward travel with generous grants from the Endeavor
Foundation for the Arts and the Anne Waldman Fellowship at Naropa. He is the
founder of Fair Warning! Press, co-founder and editor of TRACT / TRACE: an
investigative journal, and has forthcoming work in Something on Paper and
Bombay Gin. Phrydas currently resides in Boulder, Colorado exploring ―how to
write the distance between two hands, nearly touching.‖
STACY SZYMASZEK was born in Milwaukee in the summer of 1969, and grew up
there. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005) and
Hyperglossia (2009), both published by Litmus Press, as well as numerous chapbooks,
including Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005), Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux
Press, 2008), Stacy S.: Autoportraits (OMG, 2008), from Hart Island (Albion Books,
2009), and austerity measures (Fewer and Further, 2012). From 1999 to 2005, she
worked at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. In 2005, she moved to
New York City, where she is the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's
Church.
MATT WEDLOCK lives in the watchtower of the Sunflower House in South County
RI. He received his BA in Literature from Bridgewater State University and his
MFA from Naropa University. He is currently an adjunct professor of Literature
and Composition at Bristol Community College and Bridgewater State University.
He runs the recently founded letterpress printshop Salient Tooth. He blogs
at everypaupersnickers.blogspot.com and tumblr.com/blog/everypaupersnickers.

Gesture Literary Journal - July 2013

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