spills, 2010

7/30/2019 spills, 2010

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spills

∝manuel arturo abreu

2010

7/30/2019 spills, 2010


THE PROBLEM

Paul Blackburn

My wife broke a dollar tube of perfume.

The arab

who owns the perfume shop, insisted

it was good-luck.

Sure it was.

To break any vessel is, if we know

the appropriate formula to make it sacrifice,

and know a god

to dedicate it to.

1956

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∝

∝

spillsblood island

collecting

hope

symmetry flocks

a child named surely

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blood island

It was a time when I felt like an empty parking lot.

I had recently found out that I was trapped and could never go back and forth

freely as I once did.

Whenever I changed, I would have my incredible fun without fail, but I could

always go back to operating in my habitual body, and I never came to develop a real

relationship with this form I now must wear forever.

Two years ago I discovered that I could change bodies.

I didn't just wake up a woman; it's almost as if, piece by piece, I built this prison

body with the words I used to think about what it would be like to be a woman.

It was like hopping on clouds but I knew nothing, and still don't, because I

operate as a man, even in this woman body: because I saw this form as alien and

virtual, without what having a dick meant, there was no cogency.

I never thought about being a woman a real way, or this wouldn't have

happened. Everything was image, still is, purely sensory surface, me a playful cyborg

on wretched vacation, spending recklessly. I don't understand bodies.

If I were put in a cloud-hopping situation I'd die of lack of oxygen or

hypothermia or something. And I wanted to die.

But I met a man in the inside-out city.

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I was feeling down out in that part of town, in a weird emotional prolapse and

trying to bum a square after spending all my change on food, and he must have seen

my eyes, my hands in ashtrays, because he walked over, shook my hand, smiled, and

gave me a pinch of tobacco that tasted like infant stars, in a pipe he had fashioned

from flowers and toffee. It revved me.

A chrysanthemum was sewn to his right shoulder. There was a ruby of blood

that could have been an island seen from above and away.

He invited me to his butterscotch house, he said I could eat of it, or I could eat

tiny trees plucked from an oblique soundless mango, and when the tiny trees were

done I could eat the mango, the inside black and sweet.

Or I could have a horizontal fruit, he said, and I asked him what it was: a spicy

sweet creamy fruit from a horizontal tree, which was invisible except for the few gray

leaves which flopped over like arms. People tripped on the horizontal tree every time,

he said.

So I went with.

I could hide in your dimples, he said.

He told me that he had once been a woman; he could tell by the way I moved

my hands and where I pointed my feet that I was not born a woman, that I, like him,

could once switch bodies.

He is trapped, he said, but he knows that it is something like a suit having been

sown to his being, an inescapable living suit.

He said he would teach me to live as I was, inside of what I was not.

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He looks at me and says under my breath, When will what lives inside you come

out?

He had a bed made of imaginary bellies, not too hairy, and so warm you didn't

need sheets or covers. At first, I didn't like hearing the bed grumble with hunger, but

he told me that the bellies were not really alive, that it was actually my own belly

rumbling, echoing through the imaginary bellies as if they were fleshy loudspeakers.

I told him about how as a child I would sprawl naked in the dirt and sing to ants

as they crawled all over me, on a hill overlooking a town that could fit in a handbasket,

my town, and it's chilly dusk and the little houses look like cheeks trying not to blush.

The bellies echo my voice.

He never wants to tell the same story more than once.

I say stories change with every telling.

Perhaps some things bear repeating, he says, looking at me.

So everything must be different.

We had sex like sugar and salt, he would imagine a new garden in his backyard

every noon when we awoke, he would try to make the sun change color but couldn't.

Why can't I change the color, he asks. The sun makes color, I say, and we fuck

like that. I ooze honey when he touches me.

For a week, it's this easy.

In terms of reality, he had a way of making money appear. If he wasn't inventing

gardens he was taking me to restaurants so expensive you pay more to eat standing,

buying me dresses made from birches, crafting me a pair of sunshoes...

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He has been subtly introducing to me the New Flesh.

The body is nothing, he says, not even a vessel, and death does not spill what

we think is inside.

In fact, death is the cup, life spills, he says. Once it has spilled we are free to fill

up the cup however we like, the New Flesh will give us this power, this technology.

At first I did not understand. Now, hogtied with a meathook lodged in my ass, I

think I understand a little more.

I haven't eaten in a week and I feel like a chicken bone tied to a string. The New

Flesh does not come out of the body; it fills in the space the body leaves, its inherent

emptiness.

The body is something we do not know; the New Flesh is that which we once

knew most intimately, but have long since forgotten, being born as we are, into

bodies. The New Flesh is one step closer to formlessness, to maieutic living in energy

without body, communication without medium.

It is the negative space of the sensory-conceptual interface.

He says he will sow my lips shut with a silver needle. He says it will feel like

feathers. It doesn't.

He looks at me and speaks. Before you die, he begins, you could have a bowl of

your favorite cereal instead of a last cigarette.

After you die there'll be infinite cigarettes anyway— there's absolutely no cereal

in the afterlife.

It should be the cereal you ate as a kid, in one of those deep Saturday-morning

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bowls into which an entire box finds itself emptied throughout the course of the

morning and afternoon cartoons.

It should be the spoon you bent once, trying to see how strong you were, the

one you blame for your chipped tooth. The shows you liked ended at noon, maybe:

there is no noon here, only you are dying. Please do not be surprised.

It will happen as it happens, he says.

Rules are written for things that happen: nothing ever doesn't happen, though it

could happen, always. What will have happened was up to you, once, he says, but you

have already decided. Imagine the point of articulation.

And maybe he's right: maybe agency is not entirely conscious.

I am mostly sure that, while I can't point to a single moment at which I made the

decision, over time I came to realize that I would willingly relinquish all control of my

body to the man who was born a woman. Agency is subjugation's nexus.

And if I could have come to the decision, gradually, this means I had already

decided, long before I knew it. I was born ready to radically submit to the entirety of

the bare life structure, the antigone of metonymies.

Now I cannot even ask him to come with me.

∝

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collecting

It's not exactly dark out when they gather in front of Fine Fare at the corner of

Gun Hill and Perry. The sky is bleakly steely blue and blushing orange.

Each member of the family pushes a black shopping cart with full white garbage

bags piled in it and a handful of empty white bags in one hand.

From some blocks west comes a whoop with echoes, then a piercing whistle.

There's a blanket of hum in the air.

The smallest girl is squinting across the street: Perfect Pose HAIR DESIGN,

Rosario CIGARS, IMAGEN UNISEX, Tropical SUPERMARKET. Her mother pulls her back

by the shoulders from the curb's edge.

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The family has a routine at this point.

The father takes the older girl and the younger boy; the mother takes the

younger girl and the older boy.

The father walks northwest; the mother walks southeast. They scour the entirety

of Norwood and meet at the Williamsbridge Oval Park afterward.

They use train stations as markers of distance or progress. The father's team

walks to the Woodlawn station, the last stop on the 4, collecting along the way. They

walk south toward the Mosholu station, excavating everything west of Reservoir Oval

W.

The mother's team walks first to the B and D station at 205th, then toward the 2

and 5 Gun Hill Rd. station near White Plains Rd and then back toward Oval Park. This is

farther than the other team walks.

The two groups double-check, take every turn possible, look into every alley,

walk into every open basement area, rip open every garbage bag, dig into every

trashcan. They double-check their double-checks.

They always wear white latex gloves and mouth masks.

They work until an hour before the children have school, that they might have a

moment to quickly wash the Bronx off of them, get ready, and get to Kings College

School P.S. 94, across the street.

Nickels add up.

The family got good at getting recyclables. Better than other collectors, who

soon learned to loathe this family, and who would try to awaken earlier than them,

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assemble teams of people they trusted to try and run a similar operation.

But 4:30am daily is actually pretty early to wake and five other trustworthy

people are actually pretty hard to come by in NYC if you don't have a family.

Even if you do.

These other collectors, roving in sullen packs sometimes, looking into bleak

points in the cold morning distance, would be left to scavenge whatever the family

had missed, or, more plausibly, was generous enough to leave behind.

Because anyone with any respect doesn't pick every fruit from the tree.

Industrious latecomers would hunt at the outer limits of the neighborhood, or

even way down east past White Plains Rd, or west when W Gun Hill Rd becomes Van

Cortland Park S.

The family outpaces these other collectors because they don't only collect cans

at dawn. After the father has returned from work and children return from school, and

after they have finished their homework, the family goes out for a two-hour run.

Trash constantly accumulates, and if it could be done someone would collect it

all day.

They return home to eat dinner and relax, whatever that means in a one-

bedroom apartment for six.

From the father's industriousness and minimal know-how of carpentry came a

split living room and a split bedroom such that the inner half of the living room

became a small bedroom for the parents; the inner room of the bedroom was for the

two girls, the outer for the boys, each with an iron bunk bed and a window.

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As well, the father and the boys go out before their nightly showers for a quick

collecting run, one hour at most, swift and exact. Their routine is just about perfect

because at the hours of their runs, no other potential collectors are on the street: in

the early morning, they're all in bed, or intermittently trying to consistently wake up

early enough to 'outwit' the family; in the afternoon they are preparing or eating

dinner, and probably watching television; at night they can't go out, as they're

preparing themselves and likely others for bed.

Collecting is something other people do, sometimes, when they are desperate,

but the family has made it one of their keystones. It may not be their reason for having

come here, to the Bronx, but whatever that reason might be, collecting would do for

now, along with whatever under-the-table gigs the parents, who were undocumented,

could pick up.

Collecting would do for now.

The father has been saying that for five years.

The family has aged into their routine, a kind of geotropism. They are a family of

backs of hands: check the dirt under their fingernails.

Speaking in absolute terms, American poverty is better, though not easier to

manage, and lonely.

The father knew: at home, you are a man, with people. Here, you are a shadow,

trying to avoid being stepped on, fumigated, always changing stations or sweating for

someone's idea.

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But he was glad for his recently-arrived green card. He'd been wanting to join

the Bricklayers Union. He just wished his oldest son had gotten it instead.

The mother knew: cheap shitty chain food joints made it easy and greasy to eat

one's feelings, and gradually fat grew like moss, and no-one looked at you.

But she was happy that three of her kids were American on paper. This is the

dream of paperwork. She knew that America would take them in its cold bosom,

would grind away at parts of them, that they would come back with new and

unrecognizable parts, say different things, but she knew this had to happen, and knew

she would love them always, all four of them, especially her oldest, she thought

guiltily, who, like his parents, was an exile.

The parents had not decided to give up what they knew so that their children

might know something else. They did not swim across the ocean of the white

imagination. They came here on a travel visa because the older daughter was born

prematurely, with low blood sugar and heart problems, and needed better medical

technology than was available back home.

It took her six months to get better. They decided to stay. The father managed a

work visa. Maybe something else could be paved through the pain, if roads are

anything more than walking feet, or maybe they now know no-one knows anything.

The older son, who immigrated with his parents at eighteen, is essentially

resigned to his continually-renewed work visa to work construction, lack of English,

and ever-delayed citizenship. They were convinced they were close by a lawyer they

hired in 1998, then in 1999 it turned out he had a fake license. They lost $10,000. Then

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9/11.

The older soon works alongside his father, whatever jobs they can find.

Brickmason drudgery, caulking, contractor shit. Sweaty shit.

Depending on how much work is available, they sometimes work fourteen hours

a day; sometimes less than five. The mother cleans homes, asks for strictly cash

payment, has no papers, nothing. She babysits for other Spanish-speaking people in

the neighborhood who have gotten their papers in order, commute to Manhattan for

work, and need someone to watch their kids and keep them quiet. The mom is good

at this.

The two girls have entered Catholic school. The younger one, in middle school,

dare not put her fingers in keyholes. The older one does not want to be a virgin. When

they aren't too busy with homework they help their mother cook.

The younger son— he walks towards the apartment building in drastically loose

jorts and pristine black Jordan Sixes. A woman is fixing her son's pants after having

helped him urinate behind the many-mouthed blue cloth of some scaffolding.

Before the younger son's mind is an instant he recalls vividly, from when he was

much younger. He is collecting with his father one summer morning in the whispering

light before the sun becomes a hot angry eye. He screams at a dead rat on its belly

and his father hits him on the shoulder.

“Be quiet. Don't see your sister screaming do you.”

“But it's a dead rat!”

“Exactly. It's a dead rat. Now quiet yourself.”

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He remembers something else: in sixth grade he had been suspended for being

involved in an amateur explosive-related incident in a school toilet. His father, ever

forthright:

“Smart enough to make a bomb but not smart enough to get better than B- in

any of your classes, eh?”

“It was just a trick Pa.”

“Who got tricked?”

The older son has not yet come home for the night. He is young and spry and,

for now, an asset to his employers. The entire week, though, the younger son had

been missing, but it's not as if the family was going to stop operating because of his

absence. His father noticed absently and flicked his eyes away. His mother's fingertips

were first raw pink from biting her nails.

The first night she had deformed her sleep cycle, staying up until the pre-dawn

collection, believing he would come home at some point, but after crashing into her

bed and sleeping the entire next day away, she knew she couldn't alter anything in her

life for sake of vigil.

He was gone, and he would come, and if he didn't, he was gone.

He does come.

A dark spill and a turqoise-and-orange squirt gun are on the black-and-white

tile of his building's lobby. He looks at the elevator. There were brazen pennies in the

bars before the window, when he was younger.

His hand gliding along the railing, he climbs the two sets of stairs, jiggles the

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keys in the door. He smells dinner from outside it.

As he enters he sees from the tiny foyer his father sitting in the armchair reading

a Pentecostal interpretation of the Bermuda Triangle. Bobby Medina, a Pentecostal

singer, is playing on the stereo.

The younger son walks into the living room and his father stands up, smacks

him on the forehead. The boy looks scrawnier than even before, one hand flying to the

wall behind him for balance. He looks like a sapling made of mud swaying in harsh

wind.

“Explain.”

“Um, did school call?”

“Yes. Yes, they called, idiot. Of course they called. Said it's been more than a

week.”

“Okay, listen to me.” A grimace of a pause from his father. His mother at the

threshold of the living room, the kitchen steaming.

“No, what have you been doing? Where have you been going?”

“Just listen.” He breathes.

He is ready. “It's really simple. And ingenious. I'm no longer going to school. I

don't need it for what I been thinking. And I been thinking it's not gonna be helpful

even if I do do it, I'm not about to get hired by a corporation, and I ain't trying to work

in McDonald's. So I got an idea: I collect full-time from now on. Think about it: I'll meet

up with the rest of the family for the daily collections, but then I can forage on my own

throughout the rest of the day as it accumulates, eating along the way, probably bring

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some food from home around in a backpack, and of course I would come home and

sleep sometimes, when I absolutely have to and if it's an hour where there's not much

to collect, and the money would be for all of us to find a way to use, of course there

are ways to use it since nickels add up, and I could even collaborate with other

collectors throughout the day, really I think the plan is great because the money

basically collects itself, not like garbage is something America lacks, it just needs a

living walking vessel to carry the containers and deposit them, and maybe there could

be more large-scale stuff with other neighborhoods— well —”

His father's eyes are two orbs of horror.

∝

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hope

We are under a tree with the shape of many human heads. We hear Aretha

Franklin's Think (Freedom) .

It's becoming dark, soon we'll only be able to see the outline of the tree of fire

on the front lawn, surrounded by jealous conifers.

Soon the tree of fire will be barren and the conifers will resume their smugness.

A CSO (Community Safety Officer) car rolls by like a slug.

Then the spliff is lit and Nas' Black President comes on in the Student Union and

people are milling about, squealing, scampering through the sally port.

The Student Union is attached to the long building which is the center of our

gray campus, called the Gray Campus Center.

A bit in front of us is the tree that looks like a nug.

Farther away is a monolith with the college name on it, looking like a stretched-

out tombstone.

There were two trees on the front lawn that always looked into each other's

eyes, and kids slacklined from those, but apparently out of concern that slacklining

would damage the trees and possibly the students, maintenance cut them down.

The stumps are like two knuckles from the huge hand of a long-dead

homunculus, shriveled and tanned.

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After playing some other songs— all by black artists —the dance party in the

Student Union plays the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense live set.

Johnny Love is on campus. Johnny love is always on campus.

After pissing in the sally port, he spray-painted “Death To FASCOIDS” on the

bricks of the Old Dorm Block (ODB), which that very year were reaching a hundred

years of age.

He also broke some windows, and it might not be a coincidence that a car

driven by off-campus randos flipped over on the front lawn.

It was like a turtle.

He was looking for some molly and I was following him around.

And he shambled everywhere, walking the way infants colored, pontificating the

whole way. He's from NYC too, but not the same one.

“I feel therefore I drink,” he says. “It's because people are too different. I walk

past a store and see that one person has tagged 'Have a nice day. Not.' I call someone

who's teaching me how to drive and her answering machine, in Spanish, is: 'This is

Reina. I love you with all my heart. Leave a message.'”

A random student's ID is on the ground in the sally port. He uses it to swipe us

into ODB, steals a tall boy from a fridge, and puts the ID back where he found it as we

walk out.

He lights a half-smoked cigarette he picks up from the ground. After two drags

it drops from his hand like a falling star.

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“I been thinking about how cheese gives me really weird dreams. I used to pick

up every Metrocard I ever saw, just in case there was money in there. Now I'm

smothered by comfort. I mean, look at this!”

He pulls at his flannel as if it is choking him.

“Maybe I just miss New York,” he says. “You know, I still keep my phone on

New York time.”

“Didn't you come out west like four years ago?” I say.

Johnny Love asks me a question but I can't hear it.

“What?” I say.

“I never met a girl with yellow eyes. That's all I really want.”

“It's your soul's desire?”

“No, what you call your soul is actually the first tree you ever touched. It stays

with you. You die and your atoms come back as green things. Think about that story

with the monk who cuts off his pupil's thumb or something.”

I nod. I never know what he means. His voice rivets me, it sounds like tin and

grass and infinite pillows. It sounds like he has a caboose in his belly.

A train horn bleeds in the distance, twice. Leaves shiver.

“What is it with the Four Loko?” He lifts an eyebrow. It looks like it takes

effort. “Probably before I even came out here.”

No-one asks why Johnny Love is still around and on campus so often.

He never finished freshman year here, but chances are if you're looking for him

— you're not —you'll find him playing music in the radio station, trying to get

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someone to do ketamine, or smoking a cigarette outside, trying to get someone to

swipe him in.

He is like a lamp that remains when the owners have moved out.

He says he doesn't actually have cash right now, but he is looking to trade ket

for molly. He says an Ethiopian girl somewhere on campus is willing to make the trade.

He is right. We're in a dark car on a dark night. It smells like crayons. Then we

leave. Everyone says “Night.”

A group of plaid people walk by and I hear someone say “Ohmygod shots for

Obama!”

'Plaid parade,' I think.

Johnny Love chuckles and cranes his head up. “Boy, have you seen this crazy

moon? Look at the, um, corona. Obama corona.” We stop walking and start again.

He talks about trees for a bit, how they have senses. “But I don't know anything

about 'em. The trees are probably mad at me right now for talking so much out my

ass.”

His hand is in his pocket for five minutes. “Have you ever driven a mountain?

You can wear the wind like a scarf. That's what I needed before. You know, it was hotter

than Yahweh's asshole this afternoon. And people were still wearing plaid like skin. I

stopped by this Poli Sci class and this girl who looks like a sleek marshmallow raises

her hand but quickly retracts it. For I second I caught a glimpse of the wild grizzly hair

in the corner of her arm. I want to say I was intrigued, actually I was turned on. It was

so unexpected. It was like love, that feeling of getting to the station and seeing the

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train pulling in and checking your pockets only to find out that you lost your

MetroCard somewhere along the way.”

I don't respond because I know exactly what he means. It's like this when I wish I

could cry.

We walk past a very green girl who says, “He would almost never speak, he

just, would generally talk to their African gray parrot...”

“I'm not sure,” I begin, “if I have anything to say that's as interesting as what

you're telling me, but I do think it's cool that if you move the letters of 'who' you get

the word 'how.'”

“Ha. I remember when I was train-hopping to Portland. I got to somewhere

around Boring and I passed out in a field. It was probably days later when I woke up, I

was in some SUV seeing two tiny pink crosses on some tiny hill.”

“Remember last week over Fall Break I learned how to ride a bicycle?”

“You got cocky.”

“My left index finger looked like it belonged in a Picasso painting.”

Fuck it, flashback.

“I think I'm in some incredible pain,” I say.

Avery, who has been on his bike chilling talking about brewing his own beer,

which he let me taste— ginger and mugwort— was laughing at me while asking if I

was okay. He had been riding with me. I had had three consecutive spills in the past

five minutes, on the bike. And I was still so excited to hop right back on.

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I don't know how to ride a bike, is the thing. And the rain was like phlegm on

the bridge, the amber line of lights under each railing reflecting in it. The big leaves

lacing the concrete were like footprints.

I punch my finger, which is fucked at the knuckle and bent far toward my palm,

back into place. I squeal quietly.

Some people who'd been gone all break stopped at the end of the Amber

Bridge which faced the Grove dorms, where we were. I was massaging my finger,

Camilla rode by on her red Vespa, I told the arriving CSO— who I had called in a dazed

bog of pain —that I thought I was fine. It was Tall Saul, who bikes up mountains and

listens to Swedish techno.

He looked at my finger, told me to take a shot, and proceeded to massage my

hand, hard. It felt like how planes sound when they are too close. Your bones seem

fine, he said. He told me to soak it in alternately warm and cold water, for two hours at

a time, twenty minutes of each.

I later learned from a costly X-ray that I had broken my left index's phalanges.

Johnny Love leers at Avery, who is asking the people who are waiting to taste his

brew. They are kind for hanging around with me, I am laughing from how much pain

I'm in.

Andrew says no, says that if he smokes or drinks again he won't be able to drive.

Johnny Love says, “Sometimes the wind has bad breath, which is a terrible

situation, it's not like you can give it the sun for a breath mint. Air needs space to

breathe.” Camilla screams her laugh.

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“I don't really know what you mean,” says Avery.

“It's like the classic New York hot garbage smell,” Camilla says.

“Oh, are you from there?” Avery says.

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

“Here's an oblique strategy,” Johnny Love says as he fishes for an unreal

cigarette. “Give guns to the homeless, see what happens.”

After a second, Avery laughs, and not nervously.

Johnny love says“Language was given to us by aliens without physical forms,

they manifest themselves through language's infinite patterns. It, like, infects us. God's

name is, like, the series of every utterance ever made and every possible utterance,

like, in every order, or something.” Avery touches his hair.

“It—i-i-it's funny, I can't tell if you're serious or not.”

“He's always so serious,” I say.

“Does anyone have a cigarette?”Johnny Love says.

Anyway my hand is still swollen from then. A few days after my spill, it looked

like an evil pillow or an irked boar. But right now drunk people smoke cigarettes on

the Student Union porch.

“I guess you have to get hurt to learn,” I say.

“No, you just sometimes get hurt learning. No, yeah, I remember that night.

You know, there's this restaurant that's like seventy dollars for six courses, and it has

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communal seating. So you can reserve like two seats at most, and when you go there,

the point is that you're sitting with strangers, you're supposed to get to know them,

you may possibly see them or never see them again.”

“Sounds like too high a price tag for a gimmick.”

“You don't get to pick the food you get, either. You take what's given to you.

Not that I paid for anything.”

We are at the mouth of sally port looking at the Student Union, we can hear

they are playing Hope by Jack Johnson.

“I bet they'll play Daft Punk next,” I say.

“They already exhausted the Talking Heads option,” he says as he crushes a

cig butt on a sally port brick. Embers drift away from the butt as it falls. “Jeez, look at

all of these people. All gussied up for nothing.”

A guy in parachute pants and an Infected Mushroom t-shirt, who shaves his

head and has a Fu Manchu, expels a hefty loogie. It dangles from the table he is

standing on, he barely shrugs.

“God, Americans just like, expel body fluid. Just like, everywhere.”

I laugh.

“I'm serious,” he says. “Jeez, look at this sign: 'Love is a VERB. Love is a

DOING word.' Reminds me of when this guy told me he thought Madison, Wisconsin

was kind of like heaven.”

He stops right before the steps leading to the entrance to the SU. “Geez, it

smells like dick cheese. Actually, it's funny, when I first came out west I was repulsed by

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these people who rarely take showers, but actually, sometimes I do like the way my

body smells, when I don't shower for like two or three days. It's like a power odor or

something, I sniff my armpits sometimes and just, like, have my spirit quickened.”

“Why do you think it makes you feel better?”

“I'm sure there's some complex evolutionary things going on there. Like, think

of it this way. I was with this girl, and then things got complex, and we tried to talk it

over, but the words got in the way. So in a sense there are certain biological impulses

and attributes which we can't abstract, they're just there even when they're not, like

clouds.”

My laugh sounds like writing with a pencil. I have no idea what he means.

“And like, one of the people I used to chill with two years ago used to say to

me that he hadn't taken a shower in a year; he wanted to see if he could develop

immunities to diseases by not showering: he hoped the diseases would eventually

become endogenous to his body.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No, I'm just saying. I still remember what he said to me: he found the smells of

his body incredible, he said, small shocks that explode him, every odor like a small

rancid flower, a kind of ugly beauty. He never showered because he didn't want to

eradicate his experiences from his body; he believed he was all body, thus evidence of

experience can only be contained on, in, or of the body. I remember him talking about

availability of access to a certain hygienic paradigm. I don't remember after that.”

We're waiting for something to happen. A lot of waiting happens here, and

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cigarette smoking. Johnny goes up to a guy and says, spare a square? He comes back

with a Red.

“Actually, I remember seeing him recently, he showers much more often now.

Disappointing, no-one believes in anything anymore.”

“He wanted a cleaner a image, to get a job.”

“There is no job.”

We don't want to go into the Student Union because, as Johnny says, it

“definitely sucks infinitely”but we have to go in because that's what there is, there's

never anything else. That's it. Hoping for something to happen is like hoping for the

sun to come back once late Portland fall comes around and it hides behind a sheet,

forever. From inside, a chant flares up: OH-BAH-MUH, OH-BAH-MUH...

∝

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symmetry flocks

Possible cities have disposable realities.

We will drive toward a line of bright lights through the night as I pass through

and return from different depths of sleep.

Light snores come out of my mother like bubbles from a docile fish.

I am sprawled on the back seat thinking about once when I was in a tangle of

sound surrounded by steel and I saw a girl who was a frazzled rainbow.

Our eyes clicked together and we stood pinned there for forty seconds.

Language was an impediment.

I probably should have talked to her, though.

There is the hopeful act in dashing forward and flailing from syllables that do

not ever choose to withhold.

There is the feeling of wanting to be inside of time.

What I mean is... I don't know.

We are pulling out of the JFK parking lot.

The six hours from Oregon to New York blinked.

I'd boarded expecting to pass out.

As I dug through my bookbag for my headphones a man slid in front of me to

sit in the middle seat.

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He smelled like a garden of rotted figs.

It turned out he was mistaken about his seat and instead, a blonde white woman

sat next to me.

She looked like a button.

She began speaking to me.

We talked for two hours.

This is the most I've ever talked to a stranger I know I'll never see again.

We talked about the possibility that language affects perception so strongly that

if we change our language patterns and habits, we thus change our life.

Damned Whorfians.

She said understanding the physicality of written and spoken language, and

manipulating it in the mind's eye or ear, like turning a word upside-down, or imagining

the different ways it could be said, was a way of training ourselves to understand how

language mapped onto us.

My job is basically linguistic calisthenics, she said.

I help people use words better, she said.

People and businesses become more articulate with my company.

Anyway everything is an event.

There is a limit to the number of events in which we can partake, or which we

can experience at a given moment.

We can thus say that some events are distractions from other events, or indeed

that any given event could be a distraction from any other event.

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If, as Thelonious Monk said, everything is happening all the time, then

everything is a distraction from everything else.

That is, every event is a distraction from every other event.

We can unify things in this way.

Everything is a distraction.

If everything is one thing, then it is a distraction from some other unified entity.

What is it?

It doesn't matter.

I have learned that I am a thing who have taught myself nothing.

Life is not some kind of mirror test.

I have made a mistake: or, I have not made a mistake, events occur of

determined necessity, I am living with a feeling I am trying to name.

Riding on the eggy smell of a highway I'm almost dozing and imagining a big

seagreen college lawn.

Across the street from this lawn are stern small houses.

The lawn's been aerated, you can poke your finger into the holes.

It looks like there's turds everywhere.

The Bronx, though— many oceans could have been built from the fire hydrants

in the summers.

My uncle said when he lived downtown he had a fire hydrant key, he would

party for days, wandering around the city sleeping wherever, showering with the

hydrants and a bar of soap in a zip-loc, leaving the hydrant on for kids.

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He got deported.

I'll tell you some other time.

I think of different places which overlap in an abstract mental space, creating a

topography too complex to be named anything other than memory.

Try one day to remember everything you say to yourself at night, encased in

your bed and speaking so softly it's hard to tell whether you're thinking or not.

On a still night, so still you can hear the wind settling, the dew thick and heaving

from the leaves, the moon's rainbow aura engorged.

You sigh like bubble wrap after being popped, you cannot find inherent light,

only the dark immediate.

Maybe there's a tree you hear brush by your window, so softly, there is the

different dark behind your eyes, and the red veins, there is a shadow that looks like a

kneeling man when for a second you open them.

I have tried to remember.

Whether I'm awake or asleep, everything moves at a rate I can't fathom, there's

some sort of breathing structure that I'm not in on, some kind of formal beauty I'm

not allowed to touch, or even point to, with my fingers or with language.

At the most, we can assume it's there.

Maybe someone or something has given us language, but maybe it is not a tool,

only a thing, there because it needed to be, or there because it is.

If the worlds we know is an amorphous picture then language is the picture

frame.

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The wall on which the framed picture hangs is something else.

Bodies or something.

Everything is mythic in the war against abstraction.

In one second the underlying structure of everything around you can change,

from one decision the entire order of your being could be shifted.

Why do I even believe in the underlying structure?

Because that's how I get my power, I submit to it.

Like a tree gnashed by wind.

I'm watching raindrops race on the window.

Imagine nostalgia for something you never knew. Imagine the way rain smells

like spit.

Imagine a room where everything looks like one system, like skin.

Imagine that room is another country.

When I was 5 I heard that a rabbi dove from a window.

I did not know what a doughve was, I thought it was a heavier dove, and I

thought doves were Christian, not Jewish.

My kindergarten teacher Mr. Capaso who I once called Mr. Picasso explained to

me that it was the past tense of diving.

Why wasn't it dived?

For example, as I sit here writing this I'm remembering a dream from last night

in which I cut open a human body to find it stuffed with itchy hair.

I don't remember much of what I was saying. I was plundering the barren tear

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duct under the siege of the square silver moons.

I found a clock inside a nose, I saw a tooth turn into a moth and a comma

completely vanish.

Throughout the dream-context which led to finding a corpse and being

compelled to pry it open, I remember thinking to myself that even though I had my

glasses on, my eyes were still blurry.

I thought how questions must fall from us like rain, that rain is dew on the sky's

leaves.

The dream wanted to tell me something about memory and meaning, I knew it

from the way that I was trying to discern meaning from the hair-stuffed carcass.

It was my mind laughing at its own necessary processes, laughing at its inability

to escape them.

Or something like that.

I think too hard about dreams I'm lucky enough to remember, and in a sense it

ruins the privilege, the absurdity of dreams.

The flowers are like soft-headed matches waiting to ignite.

We imagine memories as flocks in symmetry.

There was a man sleeping on cardboard in front of a riot gate, he had a face like

a scarred knee.

I find my tongue heavy as if it were dewy, an abstract outlaw far from itself.

But I am watchful for my opportunity to snatch from the queue of stars.

I look at the casu marzu clouds. The sky is the color of the taste of menthol.

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a child named surely

She had had the child at fourteen and she was not the first in her family to have

had a child at fourteen. The apartment's one bedroom smells like an anus in bloom as

she tries to install the child's crib. It will be next to the bed where the fourteen-year-

old mother and her grandmother will sleep. The fourteen-year-old mother's

grandmother is cradling the child, her great-grandchild, who was not the first in the

family to have been born to a mother of fourteen years.

The radiators in the bedroom are plaintive and cast iron. One is a pole in the

corner; next to it is the normal one that looks like prison bars. The child will start

crawling soon, she must be kept from the wheedling radiators. The fourteen-year-old

mother must build a barricade, or find a tall cardboard box to use as a playpen.

Or buy a crib. The crib is ready and creaks. The fourteen-year-old mother slides

her child from abuela's arms, holding it to her crowded breasts under the baby's

armpits and laying it in the crib. Its tiny fat hands reach up toward her. Her Blackberry

Pearl buzzes in her back pocket.

She fingers the pocket's embroidery— ENYCE. The child's first birthday present

will be a frog-shaped green balloon and a plastic toy car. For now the balloon even has

helium, the car's wheels even move. The fourteen-year-old mother's grandmother is

engulfed by a novela on the screen. The fourteen-year-old mother's mother is

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elsewhere indefinitely.

Abuela rises at whalesong pace and shuffles to the leaky fridge, careful not to

lean on the janky door. First row: cloudy water in a milk gallon jug next to a block of

government cheese and gray broccoli.

Second row: an infantry of small SUNCUP cartons in lines of six according to

color— red for apple juice on the front line, behind that yellow for orange juice, and

finally purple for apple cherry. Milk cartons, standard and chocolate. A milk spill. Once

there was a milk river. Muffin-like things in plastic packaging. The classic spork-and-

napkin package in plastic.

Third row: a bruised tomato and dust. A lusterless apple. The grandmother, who

receives these leftover public school food supplies from a friend, reaches for a carton

of apple juice. A pregnant roach skulks from under the stove to under the fridge.

To her grandmother, the fourteen-year-old mother describes everything simply:

she feels full of holes. The grandmother knows her granddaughter's nipples will soon

be the ashy-skin color of her elbows, or worse her knees, from the child. The fourteen-

year-old mother had not known till Shawn that blushes could explode in brown.

She had kissed a boy before, once, a nothing. But she blurred after Shawn's first

touch to her elbow, her elbow became the daisy of her lips, the breath coming from

them blowing away stone rainclouds and letting grass grow where caulking in

concrete decayed. She thought she was knowing glowing: there was great grass in her,

she was all bright coiling fragrance that was swooning and peeking at the little rough

strings of his words which, she found out too late, turned out to be swords as she

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pulled on them. She was filled and emptied, and this was Shawn's goodbye.

There was that whooshing airy lace she was tricked into, trying to ride in it, and

then there was reality. Now with child, she didn't know what she would do with the

rest of high school, let alone college, if she thought of it, which she sometimes did.

There was no way that the fourteen-year-old mother, who had been innocent enough

to fall for a muddy fraud like Shawn, would by any means be strong enough to go to

school and grow up alongside her daughter, having within herself only one shoddy

teacher to teach two wholly-ignorant pupils.

She could not be her own mother and be also a mother to another. Her first

lesson: she would hereafter let inside herself only what had come from inside her, and

only that from inside which she came, or as close as she could get, her mother being

elsewhere indefinitely: hereafter it would only by wela and mija. Wela was reaching the

age where abeyance encroached, where she would talk more and do less. The

fourteen-year-old mother would soon have three pupils, and all three talked back, she

thought. But there would never be another man, the grandmother of the fourteen-

year-old mother knew: her granddaughter had been spoiled, blown out like a bulb, for

daughters should not be holding on to the ends of daughters. Plants do not share

roots, though the roots cross each other.

Surely the child of the fourteen-year-old mother was relinquished to the foster

care system, surely a hard egg of hate and hurt by the age of six, four years after it

would become a ward. The first year, the fourteen-year-old mother had tried to go to

school as well as work at DIOS RESTAURA Laundromat, her grandmother with the

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baby until the fourteen-year-old mother's day ended, at around seven, when she

returned home an oily-faced pulp, her shirt damp and tight against her, showering and

wolfing down a microwaved plate of rice and beans and sort of doing homework, but

eventually and early passing out to wake up at six the next day. She dropped the job

fast, considered dropping school, but realized— and it crushed her —that the choice

would be between herself and her daughter. If she was to live, there were two choices:

she must live for her daughter, giving up any real possibility of her own future; or she

must live for herself, relinquishing the child's future. And she could not split herself,

could not overlap being a mother and being a child— for certainly she could not have

been her own mother, and her grandmother, much less her true mother, could not

help her decide what and whether to be.

Her grandmother had once walked into the apartment silently, and had seen the

fourteen-year-old mother standing before the bathroom mirror in one of the abuela's

white dresses, humming an imperfect fourth to a perfect pop song on her pink radio,

and holding a magenta hairbrush in both hands. The infant was in the living room,

crawling intently toward the singing radiator. The baby must have thought that the

singing was for her, not the fourteen-year-old mother's karaoke but the radiators' loud

whinge. Abuela creaks downward, picks the child up, and cradles it in her arms,

watching the fourteen-year-old mother and sighing, then sitting down and calling her

name.

The fourteen-year-old mother is dancing like a fledgling flame in front of a

mirror, she has no idea she's listening to Nina Simone but it's playing fuzzy on the pink

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radio. Her arms are drowned in bangles. Her face is drowning in her sweaty frizzy

glorious hair. She flops onto the frazzled rug on the floor in front of the small fan.

When she is older she will often quote Heath Ledger: What doesn't kill you makes you

stranger. The child is playing with its tiny fat hands in its crib, is looking for the flavor

of its tiny toes. The illusion of choice is enough.

∝

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~~*thank you

for reading*~~

<3

manuel arturo abreu

natrices.tumblr

twigtech.tumblr

@Deezius

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