Sherman’s march to the sea
I walk the streets at midnight my heart not quite right. My heart like a brown spot on an apple. I see the purple fluorescent lights of a delivery truck and get excited again. I see the purple flowers of the textbook factory where we worked most Saturdays making sense of Sherman’s march to the sea. The purple flowers are not that of the textbook factory but an advertisement for the textbook factory where we read over and over again about murder and decapitation and rivers of bodies. The bodies of the disemboweled who we once recognized as our most cherished interlocutors. I see your reflection in the black lacquer of an otherwise defunct piano. I think to myself I should be holding onto images from the distant past: Polaroids of you on a card table smoking Camel Wides and eating ceviche, eating frog’s legs and other delicacies you picked up in Baja. I look at the blue smoke you’re exhaling into my dreams and nightmares and try to choose between personal and collective memory, between morals and ethics, between politics and aesthetics. Now I’m lying in bed reading about a sex dream Freud had. It’s cold and the icicles are like knives, the knives god used to kill the universe with—the eulogy for which will read: let’s not be so terrible next time. But it’s in our true nature to be terrible, to be terrifying, to terrorize the populace. The carcass of the universe hurtles through space. A different space. A space not yet contemplated but exists within the eye of a milkweed seed floating up and up and up and then down, ever so slightly at first and then straight down into the fiery abyss. But we are still small and wandering inside the meager eye of a nocturnal animal who is still frightened by airplanes.
~
J.C.
A priest asks for one more pomegranate seed or pill the size of one: his left eye aches. He is not a Catholic priest. Life is a journey of self-discovery. When one thinks of politics but invokes the bible what is that called? The priest thumbs through a small book (not the bible) and recites a prayer called the dipsomaniac’s miracle. He carries a small mirror and folding knife. He lights some other woman’s cigarette with wet matches. Nothing’s worse than wet ash he says to her while carving the word fairy into his arm just like Shakespeare did four-hundred and twenty-something years ago. Two pomegranate seeds make the earth stop and spin backward on its axis. Someone once asked if I’d like to carve my initials into a palm tree and so I did under the assumption that I was really the late great John Cage. I flex a muscle as a woman searches out a vein—a stranger to me but one who nevertheless means the best.
~
Reading in the sun
Contrary to popular belief impending doom does not begin along the spine or in the rectum but can first be detected somewhere in the bowels or up around the heart. Crying comes from the depths of one of those dark planets—those darker than Neptune or Mars. Nothing matters when the sun overtakes the clouds, the moon, and the lakes we call interstellar even though they exist only in our nightmares. Nothing has meaning when it comes to pent-up fear, unknown nucleotides coursing through lamentably pale veins like gray train tracks across time zones of invisible ink. It’s even true that the healers and seers give thanks to the modern miracle of surgical knives in such cases that the eye of the god of vengeance has to be excised, like so much metastasizing cancer, from the basic parts of a firearm.
~
The nightmare building
There is a book of faces without names. The astronaut explains why he left the names out while being fitted for a sharkskin suit. The book of faces falls out of a car and is lost. Time is a tunnel and the book of faces is called amnesia’s memory. Time is a spiral and when the abyss stares back into you that means god is walking along a tight rope above a sea of bright blue ink. The car is a gold Cutlass and it turns down an alley that cuts between two immense buildings. She said they’re shooting a movie down there that’s set in the seventies. The astronaut lives in the one on the left. It is called the nightmare building. The one on the right is a Holocaust museum. There is a book of faces without names and a book of left hands without wedding rings. The book of faces comes to you in your sleep or on the edge of a dream. The wedding rings have been melted down by a world famous architect in order to create extremely lifelike replicas of babies. The astronaut funds research for turning movies into dreams and vice versa. There is a book of faces created by machines and a book of baby shark teeth. The book of baby shark teeth is carried down an alley as if it were the last extant copy of the Bardo Thodol written in the original Tibetan. The book of faces is used in advertisements for colonizing the moon.
~
A little Ecclesiastes
A man hangs himself in his Berlin apartment. Sometimes I’ll read a story about a certain kind of man’s life and think: I know this story already, I lived it in a dream or a nightmare about learning how to swim. Learning how to swim is the greatest test of one’s ego, but that’s a story for another time. I have been in a Berlin apartment once. I cooked a chicken in a modern convection oven and she brought over wedding clothes to build a fire with. This man who hung himself must have cooked a chicken in a modern convection oven for his son as they listened to a secretly made recording of Derek Bailey playing a homemade guitar and talked about telescopes and telethons and teletypes. Maybe he taught the son how to butterfly a chicken with cooking shears and roll a joint with the exactitude of a Borges or a Wittgenstein. In those days I mixed a little Ecclesiastes into my everyday conversation but I’m different now.
~
Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Glacier, Dialogist, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.