SCRIATION
In both cases we might (we must) speak of an intense immobility: linked to a detail (a detonator), an explosion makes a little star on the pane of text or of the photograph: neither the Haiku nor the Photograph makes us “dream.”
– R Barthes
Long voices brushed out. Canyons momentarily dry are moistened with shit and flimsy voltaic plastics. When I wake, I meet the dream: stones are in our stones are in our mouths. Pockets out, thundering and stationary machine. Touching the silicone machine to machine, two or one or three, and perimorph. Mastic indigo marriage to mechanism. I listen out for the rows of benches, for their sea-songs. They point green slats flush against the silver oak shade, crushed shells from the bay or the interior (imports, tax, maybe), sidewalks which preceded the wars. First, limestone. And my imagination must be destroyed in the name of name, to destruct name and the will to it, honey. The benches empty as to seem or to (never) forget are violently full.
Wandering up a hill, the hand. And then hush there is a moss, candescent green, marking a velvet seam. This is gentle. Gem-gentle, as their compressions take refuge in the loam curve outfit of the road, let out the waist at the rib, a ribbon, refuge from testing mandate rushing together forgetting the rivers. The lumen we find in iron twitches for future. Name of the transgression a typical labor. The buried and archived solids anterior to formation; at the end of the island, you find a mask molded from my second face, parametric wind. Sodden anther.
All empty, the benches, monument with abandon. How is it—as the bus goes by blue, new camouflage concealing its cargo (geotypical?), and the anachronistic water towers bruise what’s left of sky—that?
Green when bleached by an orb, sun or moon: like tide here, too subtle hierarch, such as a time, not enough ecologists in this rind of a town. Does lightlessness also bleach? Yes. Could we pursue life in a town where resemblances are the only expression? Yes, once could, only one.
Ignore Taconic orogenies, Acadian, the dimpled water. Dripping, who spoke of it, the ruined room takes her lacerations toward impermanence.
Ice on the boulders, encapsulating ice shadows. Law happens in a scan.
Inconsequential that we live shadow to shadow, search begotten with temperature, outlasting the can’t take it anymore, I’m tired of their charts. Wind again, scooping out the hill, here again, hill, the hill. Defunding the cliffs. Your daughter your lover the company, calling from, what’s the difference? To become recognizable—to undo it.
Gridmonth the first. Sitting alignment in status parcel. Status, numbering the visual beats, bearing us percussion turquoise. Gridmonth of the borderless hedgerow—my umbilical pellet, how long did she crave the earliest mention of resin? Fasten. Who comes to my ladder anymore? Glistening in snow volcano, no light overground or molecular resistance. My hand flickers. Tonight, this afternoon, an hour gussied toward horizon, before the one stalling curl, a marathon of interruption. Yes, honey, no more Januaries ever again, that’s it.
*
Blue was valued even less than green, the color of vegetation and death, which was sometimes the intermediary…Blue was nothing or very little; it was even absent from the sky, which most authors and artists portrayed as white, red, or gold.
– M Postereau
Under sweltering watershed west lapped a shadow stream stuck to this world by rotting knots. To harbor in tidebearing, lost, and none bother to hum its melody or breathe its tangy perfume—before, it existed just to snap across their faces and, later, to hiss into electrical current. We tracked the storm together, hanging up paper maps, marking the precise locations of dizzy spells with pins. Here, who is it, ecstatic.
One morning, this, I balked. I sweat, paint drips, suddenly grey-afraid of your disgust. Am I certainly not dead? The present peels into reverie. I come to believe we have forgotten the dexterity attempt and let panic spill, time to run. Amid the quiet carbon you emit in the morning as infinite emerges from the inches suspending our shapes. Astride me now, on a shaded hill, no—underground in a train car—the aging, in puckered hiking boots discuss sassafras and mushrooms, planting rice in a traditional way.
Above, a crackling teleo-phone, I mean blue sky. Cutting collapsible dynamics, swatting away the blight; it convinces our bodies. What is reasonable is long in dying, axis fraction. I also want to be dead, when I tell you, you say, go on, this isn’t like you. What resembles your dense resistance more than hibernation, the wound of karmic stutter. Refuse to be slight in my body, in an anemia I also inherit. You are watching the tears and tightening. Be the window.
The halls of sandstone catch hold of the clouds—long voices. Expels saturation from corridors. Pure as in fulgurating essential, the extension, in ascent becomes what it could mean to be dimpled by the light, here, wintering. I have considered the spaces silver, grey, an absence of green. Citations. How I am upset by this modernity: I have read that hues green black and grey were interchangeable transolvents, interlocutors and direct apparitions of the sacred, throughout the mean Christian centuries. This study of blue around blue.
*
Maybe a poem you half translate:
Germ aligns with edge, love at the
Formal, fast
corrodes with
My empress spread her news
Into the earth in augur bruises
The sand mistook for cloth, and salt
Her letter
On the glittering turn
Edging its way into my more subjunctive spores. Tight spirals, words such as plastic and method rituals and pleistocene.
*
Lover, it’s a confusing day in the ritual. I’ve been reduced to the container (name) of my intention. Which food, whose music was revolutionary, what revolution, how have we been, and how will we continue because of course we will. I am tired, manic, pleading to be recognized as my aunt born again in reverse, the schizophrenic. You question where the echoes can be let out, open to their broadening. And I feel you also despair their bodies. That for me is a discovery. Sometimes language is not enough—it happens like a shock. Lover, I am listening, hoping that in your turns I will swarm like a blossomed hillside. Dormant root. Today I walked my thousandth. Today I wake to your cord of stones laced over the land.
A blindness, the absence world, the pressure of those rendered invisible, pressing and shoving.
I have dreamt the recall, and my inner thighs are chalked. I am shuttled north and south to unlock apartment doors, ascend steps, pluck a guitar for a cat, offer pellets and mice to mouths of dog and snake. Blink the coat tight around my chin. I’m not called back by most of my names this season, though certainly I am not a ghost. Have you? Seen his new advertisement? Squeals of a dialogue between schist,
pulley, and handbrake. I lose faith that even my body could be of monetary value.
Goddess singing. Valence virgin. Kidney arrival.
The monstrous platelet I’m cut from. Who is sick? Vacuum domesticana. My dissipation, her face, which tulip tree, the barbiturate elect ridicules her tomb. Then the line mellows, over time, a wine winnows, the river bloats from a monsoon in the north and is dyed with indigo and turmeric. Among those who live in the village, it is encouraged that all touch this universe painted anew (again, as it’s climate, it’s tradition); the birth goes on for hours. By the time the sun has shrunk to dwelling height there has been a transformation: many have leapt into the yonni of silt and emerged with skin soaked with combination: true form, time mutation, appearance. The residents will carry on, and so it is a village. A village of the inexplicable, in all sizes, will be undetectable and unrecognizable to each in the haze of twilight. Beveling through night. Does not this disambiguation happen every night, without the mask, what happened around the stream, in any village? To endure the mirrors armed with olive and arrow. Tonight, an ineffable transfusion alters parable (parabolic) traces.
Stillmention, basin with the rain in my chest. Above, your wavering visitation.
Once a skipping blue satin, perhaps a dress, perhaps your public stomach: whose spine have I lingered over recently, language of my ruin? A mountain imprint. Rolled out, carved in for visual texture. Impassioned over the once thriving saturate, cushions snip flora and beetles, cream and adrift. The blue cigarette case, canalize I heard, slip cast of a shadow at the café. I am catching essential shapes: archipelagos in the remnant linoleum floor. On the empty runnels toiled over in your workday to make room for their emptiness: you are profoundly sad about getting older, side by side made of the drive to cease existing or to die many times over. Phones surge, yelp me dry, and I find there is not enough silence left to defend life. It is bad faith to consider your life an exception. Our bodies are wrecked from this fourth hour, carry on.
**
JHANI/J is a writer and artist currently based in Los Angeles. J is interested in the intersections of precarity, ecology, diaspora, and cultural schizophrenia. J co-edits the journal rivulet.
