#1

i wake
to the sound
of bones clacking
and when I open my eyes
all i see is your face floating
taunting me
waiting for me to tell you
that you were the only one
who ever looked this creature in the eyes
and saw me.

it would be easier
if you had no legs
to stand on in this matter
but at least with this silent way
we are both unsatisfied

maybe in another three years time
you will throw yourself bodily
into my path
again
and we will spend the length of your cigarette
knowing each other
just to rip it all apart again

the bleeding of the feet is difficult
but the dance is too beautiful to cease
a skeleton embrace
stripped it down to the base of everything
white and red and black

Exit 65

It’s in my blood.
“jerz.”
You know what I’m saying?
My non-native friends call it “the jerz”
but it’s a flexible word.
When I am being frank & vehement
I am “getting jerz” on the recipient of my attentions.
Sometimes it even sneaks up and becomes my name.

I had a Vermonter boyfriend who would ask me to say hot dog over and over
“hot dawg”
“hot dawg”
They just don’t know it like me honey.
They don’t have a skull crammed with goomba-english,
with that special “coming home to cousin Nick in the cucina”
something
that makes it home.
Walnuts, oranges, and figs
a course on their own.
Entire conversations held in yells from different parts of the house.
Trains pulling out of the yard
two blocks dopplered.
Their whistles cry destinations
“Hoboken”
“Hoboken”

The abandoned swimming hole in the woods,
it’s concrete docks, jutting out of reeds like aching molars
and haunted by echoes.
The twisted pine barrens, with their wet sap smell, and the 13th child of Mrs. Leeds.
The bitter and gentle shore, and the Cape May diamonds.
They could not know
So I lie,
content between my devil and my atlantic sea.

For some reason this strikes me as hilarious.

Gorehound

I’m a gonna bust you up
break you down
make you cry
I’m a gonna thrust
this axe in your head
but you ain’t gonna die yet.
Hot cherry!
You look good in red

Lemme go an’ trap you
stalk you, with a chainsaw.
Lemme tie your wrists raw.
Get the device revved up.
I know you ain’t fed up
you’re a gonna beg me
you’re a gonna beseech me,
entreat me and implore
and I’ll always always
have just a little more for you.

You like a good screw?
How ‘bout one through your eyeball?
Gotta get those bodily fluids going
all that vitreous humor really flowing.
And I’m a gonna get that fire going
get that pyre really growing up.

I got this need
you’re gonna oblige me.
I’ll fill your mouth,
but please
don’t stop crying.

And who’s a gonna tell me
it’s not exactly all the same?
There’s hysterical shrieking,
someone nearly naked.
But this way everybody’s
gonna be a screamn’ your name.




...

everyone please remember that writers are liars

The Collegiate Sexual Apocalypse

A friend of mine recently admitted to doing what almost every college student considers at one point or another, screwing in the library. I wasn't particularly shocked by the confession, I've actually HEARD people getting freaky on the third floor and the person in question was also just the kind of person who could actually pull off having sex in the library, but it left my wheels turning. I have to admit that I've never really understood the appeal of sex in public places, and to a sick sick biblophile like me, the act of nooky in those hallowed halls almost seems sacrilegeous. There's this little newspaper that comes out at my school, the "alternative" to the big school paper, that described the library around midterms as a "place where learning, drug-use, misery, and sexual tension... all intermingle." I'm of the mind that this could accurately describe almost all of UVM, but considering that that brick-shaped, brick-made building is essentially a microcosm of the school itself it's not surprising. But back to the interesting part.

Why DO people want to boink in bookville? Is is just the taboo? Some collegiate rite of passage that somehow combines academics and sexual recreation? Is it true, as my friend Sophia so often asserts, that "Finals make you horny"? (Please note that ALMOST EVERYTHING produces that effect in Soph.) For most it's probably one third taboo and one third tension relief and one third "sticking it to the man." (pun intentional) 

It also helps that college students are also in an interesting point of their life in general and that this time lends itself to all sorts of odd behaviour. It's a time of discovery, a time that you kind of figure yourself out a little, and apparently it's also time when you knoodle with people just because you're both reading Karl Marx. (Also not me, maybe Jung might do it though.) One of my professors, David Huddle (google him, dude's a bomb writer) referred to our generations way of hooking up as Instamace, and it's fairly accurate. We're an almost completely media driven generation, we want our email in our hand, our entire music library in our back pocket and we want a double mocha skim no whipped cream TO GO NOW DAMMNIT. It makes sense that we would expect the same of our relationships, even the purely sexual ones. I feel like the word isn't even exactly pertaining to the speed at which these relationships develop, though that is often part of it. It's the fact that that there is this TERROR of traversing the fantasy. Of getting to know the real person behind the  "I'm the free spirited political science major" or "I'm the stoner math dude" or  "I'm the cynical english major with a blog."(GUESS WHO THE LAST ONE IS)  I don't feel like this is a new revelation by any means but I feel as though since we're essentially the "igeneration" its effects are a little more dramatic. 

Like Hipsters, there's a primo example. An entire group of people who essentially culture vulture the rest of the art community and then turn those elements into completely vacuous, vapid crap. 

So I suppose that the Symbolic Collegiate Sexual Apocalypse would be two hipsters screwing in the library as some jaded form of protest.

Which is fine as long as I don't have to watch.

And then I get to kill them.

And eat them.

image by Alexander Milligan

Collected Notes from a Month of Sundays

i.
Mornings are feral.
One sock half on, every hair growing in a different direction
I drag myself out of the den. You is up up up.
I’m making eggs and quinoa
and
do you want any?
and I tell her
baby
please
I don’t want no hippie food,
I just want rye toast, black coffee.
(then I cringe cause it sounds rough outside of my own head.
homegirl is just trying to make me eat breakfast
and don’t I have half a kind word for her this early?)
so I try to make you laugh
bring up about last night
when Jefferino told us rapid fire
that quinoa was only $1.50 a pound
recommended we make a big bowl every week
and that it was, in fact,
the mothergrain…yo.
you tell me
Hubert likes quinoa more than rice.
I grind the coffee.
Hubert also made a tattoo gun
out of a pencil sharpener
and got Rex to carve
“Welcome Theives”
in Russian
on his ass.

ii.
See I was at that party
and so was she.
We hadn’t met yet,
didn’t meet that night.
Separated by the oceanic divide
of Hubert’s bleeding ass cheek.
Our mutual fear of being presented
with the bloody horror
(the gun didn’t work so hot)
kept us on opposite sides of the house
and so we missed each other.

iii.
I chew my fingers and eye up that quinoa with suspicion.
They look like curly little tails in the eggs,
and though they seem kind of cute.
I still just want rye toast, black coffee.

iv.
Stop pacing, and if you’re looking for the radio, it’s busted on the floor over there.
The stove’s heat melts the patterns on the pane,
it refreezes into slashes across the glass.
how’d it…
oh it just fuzzed and popped and stopped.
That asshole of a trained rabbit
pokes his head from under the couch
and climbs in my boot,
probably to shit.
A large piece of mirror stands in the corner
reflecting a sliver of the scene.
And I cannot remember
when the glass monster was trasmuted
by lack of time or indecision
from art supply to home décor,
but I have nearly cut my foot open on it twice already.

v.
–I remember
how we did eventually meet.
All five of us were moving into the slanted house together.
You and I were the only ones who showed up early to sign the lease.
You opened the pickup door and the ice cracked like a pistol shot
get in, it’s freezing.

vi.
The radio’s bowels are all over the coffee table.
I am searching for a loose wire.
You don’t have to fix it.
but I really am desperate to fix the thing.
After I drop you off at the hospital
I will be home, alone, before work,
feeling useless as all hell.
I’ll want the news
and the paper ain’t gonna sate me.
I want to lose myself in those disembodied voices,
let their words become my thoughts,
let the waves bounce through my brains.
My toast pops up, it’s burnt.

vii.
oh ¬ and I am wide awake
and it is morning

VERMONT!!!!!!!

you so crazy

Bloodless

It is common in the case of anemics
to develop Pica and eat any number
of strange objects. Coal, hair, metal
wax and dirt. I could never imagine
feeling that familiar weakness
and consuming nails and bolts.
Washers filling the void in my belly,
till my stomach jingled like a change purse.

But when I peel the heart shaped beets,
their red dye, reflective and pooling beneath,
and I eat the raw slices,
they taste like the earth that they were born from.
And I know what the others were trying to devour.

It is the fortification of the self.
Each piece a charm against the flaw in my blood
that grows up from my liver,
until it hits the follicles and I?m left pulling
a thousand tiny hairs from the bath drain,
and the comb, and the rugs of my house, and the pillow where I sleep.
As if my body laments the innate disconnection
in my mode of consumptive urban living
and the brick and mortar worlds and shells I?ve constructed
and then expresses it's sorrow by rejecting a thousand slivers of me.
Screaming as they fall, each piece reminds
that such surroundings are no path to real safety.
You must be brave enough
to swallow all the earth yourself
and stand to be shaped
by the wind and by the rain.

...
Christa Pagliei