Tears were a sexual thing. The wet light brimming beneath her long lashes made Rachel’s eyes more beautiful. I wanted her to cry, to make her despair by just kissing her, whispering in her licked ear. I closed my eyes, let my mouth travel down her solid body, following unreeling shapes in my mind, like the primitive landscapes on a radarscope.
A man with yellow hair takes me down to a basement movie house where other avatars are watching a porn film on a screen. The cartoon me in the polka dot dress in a basement porn house and the flesh and blood me in the bathrobe at the desk are both riveted by a video of flesh and blood strangers projected on a wall in a cartoon universe.
Should this even be happening? Is this a gay thing? Would they have opened the doors at the Oakland Coliseum and flooded the place with vaccine if we were straight? How will this go when monkeypox spreads more widely, when more and more folks outside gay communities start posting pics of open lesions and weeping pox, with stories of unbearable pain, selfies of facial and private parts disfigured...
I meet her at the door and kiss her hard. I grip her arm and force her up the stairs. My anger leaves me heartless, callous. Esther understands and plays along. The look in her eyes is knowing, ready. There’s no room left for bodies gently lapping, no space here for the perfect rhythm of love. Every touch that was soft is rough, every tease now demand and seizure. The sweetness between us that...
Was Donald Trump a puppet president? Of Russia? Of some far-right conspiracy? Of his own ego? And what about the January 6 insurrectionists? More puppets? Puppets of a puppet? And Joe Biden? Good natured Joe? Standing there like a Sesame Street masterpiece? “The President.” Does he have the same handler as Kermit the Frog?
“I don’t usually define myself by one genre; however, I am a poet, a fiction writer, a hybrid writer, and a non-fiction writer, and so I claim all of those identities. I see myself ultimately as a writer who writes a number of different things, in a number of different genres, who experiments with form sometimes and who writes what she wants when she wants.”
It was John Lennon in house-husband mode wanting to show Sean the planet at the end of the Seventies, inviting a group of his mates to meet up in Hong Kong for a week’s holiday. Exploring the back streets one soggy afternoon, they heard a voice behind them. A cute kid, maybe ten or eleven, running up and asking, brisk with excitement: Are you John Lennon? Without hesitation, John answered: No...
The beauty of this novel’s style is that it allows themes to appear via juxtaposition—refugeeism, the nature of human consciousness, the end of life. The fragmented storytelling resonates in a way that moves the reader’s emotions in a constant flow of varying chords, the tensions raised in one story carrying over into the next, then back again.
So, the bad news first. All of a sudden, we have rivers. No one saw it coming. All of a sudden we have mountains, seas, and lakes—yes indeed, we have bodies of water. Still water, rushing water, water gushing up from the deep.
Les Chants de Maldoror is a work that seems to permeate each mind it touches, even if briefly. Whether role-playing or reminiscing, the contributors to The Celestial Bandit bleed confessions. Jordan Rothacker sets the stage expertly by giving a framework for the influence the Comte de Lautréamont has had on generations of creative renegades...
peace is only ever an interbellum blink
a mere footnote in the battleground
especially in these parts, armies clash by night
no amorous remedy for that, master arnold
when refugee babies are washed ashore
or the indignity of a naked dead body dragged through mud
a desperate person in self-immolation
a tearing cow on her way...
you got yourself a new motorbike
although you didn’t need it.
you have no money.
no worries we’ll loan it to you.
what should you be for the rest of your life
if not our slave
promise we’ll help you if you can’t pay us back
and then if...
Statement of Record