Month: February 2005

forgive me for the sirius pun

I am reincarnated again. I am a lost love repeatedly, a concubine clean, a dead child who didn’t waste her life through her veins. Fate tells me like a skein of sparkling thread, but I am bound tighter than any trinket, harder than any stone. This is Merlin’s tree and an offer of freedom. He takes the Crows commission and takes it for his own, twists it to take me, this forbidden fruit to innocently taste.

It started with dinner, looking out over a strangely private slice of the city from the Cin Cin balcony, red blood pooling on the plates. The music, incongruous renditions of a certain look at classic rock, was at one point an insouciant pop style rendition of Moondance with italian singing. Actually it started before that, with meeting someone on the street and deciding on Robson street. Preceding that was my apartment and asking hard to answer questions like, “where do we go for dinner?”

The staff treated us like we were honeymooning. Careful bowing out just on the edge of vision. Our waiter whisked plates away and laughed with us like a delighted friend. Dressed in black and matching again, outside alone in the cold, our silverware not warmed but inconsequential. I had a query to answer about travel. Would I go with, if circumstances permit. It’s across an ocean, it’s across a language. Culture rift, a plane a raft. Somehow later they were surprised when I offered them a key to my apartment. Logic failed a little there, I think, but anything it might occur to me to need was met. I remember Marissa listing out her haves and have nots. “He must be smart, have a car, and have brown eyes. No idiots.” I never could list my own, I would try to make up things to placate her. “Er, long hair, intelligent, um, a sense of humour.” I guess it was a date, but I think too, that we skipped that part. Six months in two weeks, like last time I was in love, but better because we trust each other.


I’ll never find someone quite like you again.

This was a living inkwell of liquid pain, searing in my fingers and bones. A painful dream of needing to touch you. Attraction unhealthy, wanting you to slide with me. This is your name tattooed on my skin over and over and over again. It won’t let me alone, not alone, not without you. It’s history stained needles bright with Procyon heat, it’s a binary. Spinning in tandem, serious as the brightest sun in its divine constellation, you burn me. An animated tremor of painting my cusp with your breath, you inhabit or reside within as such a spirit, force or principle that it takes me and blinds my tongue as deaf as my eyes. When you stay it is a carnal victory, an unexpected reprieve from trembling in darkness, curled in a ball. This is a heart implant, a sighing beating force of body breeding and delicacy thrown away. Archaic temptation satiation, driving spikes into my mind. The sweetest stigmata craving release into blood in the palms of our hands, all curling fingers and sweaty seer visions. The sound of arms bending in unconscious ballet grace to knead you closer in to me. After a while the word with becomes to.

It’s not a fabian policy, but basic violence. Pointing the way to greater good through biting my lips and drawing your tears in linen sheets. No strategy past honesty, past asking please. There’s no compare for my witch eyes. The worst is not so secretly accusing you of incubi, sensing somehow that it might be true. The nightmare is needing you, requiring something beyond myself and unrequited for honey tongued evenings. I have a sense of justice because I know the taste of rage. This is strings music, soft orchestra humming along to the rhythm of pride. If I were myself of a year ago, I would be ashamed.

There’s no reason I should say your name in Russian, you pull tongues from me. It’s a pun, meaning both mouse and bear depending on the language. I suppose I’ve named you. An issuant creature, mighty when it roars. Portraiture of everything that everyone else sees, like a private joke of my ability to stare past it all to look out through your eyes. I don’t know what kind of tree hasn’t any leaves or how I see the beach but I know what the sand feels like on the bottom of your feet. The tremor is abusable, but this time the shifting earth sends its regards. A richter scale heard through walls to cry out muffled into pillows and mouths. Doppler collision of breath and body. A cello sweep of hair, I said, and I stand by it. Thick like the smell of wine, I want to lick every tousled strand of white. I can never explain, not properly, though I’m more than willing to try. It’s like a practiced first, everything leading up to your moments, your lucid voice. Snick into place, like a well honed blade. There’s no ballot here for intimacy, the mannerisms married without us. In transit there is choice, but your kisses taste of storm static. Birth of the universe desire, the crackle of snow on the dead channels. White and black chaos patterns, feedback moments scientists dream of and touch themselves in their sleep.

I can’t believe I sketched such an accurate gun from memory.

The first five are finished. I can’t believe the number of responses. I’m rather daunted that so many talented people replied. i feel like I’m digging myself a creative grave. Pray be kind to my MS Paint creations.

Larry:

Please forgive the terrible play on words, spelling was sacrificed to my lack of clever.

Mark:

I met a Mark Campbell here in town once, he was a bass player with wonderful fluffy hair and a pick-up truck we had to park on hills lest it never start again. I wanted to make a little schoolgirl going “squee! you’re an artist!” but I don’t think anyone would get it except Warren.

Zachary:

I was almost too in awe of your work to make you one. Just a heads up.

Michael:

I was going to spell it Czeich but decided against it at the last minute over spelling issues. It is four in the morning. Is it I before E or…?

Andrew:

You should really write some of your own interests. Thefting my more obscure ones to do with australia simply don’t count, though I’d say to keep “jesus rimmers” though, just because.

wait, did you hear that?

This is a siren song, this is a promise of poetry. I’m a sucker for well put words. I do my best to smile but I can’t help but care. I want to forge my hair into silver and wrap it around them like rings. Taste the weight of these letters as they flow from the tongue, listen to how the shape of my lips changes to birth them.

Tonight I’m going to Thundering Word Heard. T. Paul is hosting and I’ve heard rumour that he’s going off with Cirque Du Soliex in a bit. Have to catch him before I miss him. Certain scenes are going to fall apart in a big way without him. Nobody else is willing to do the work or even knows how for some of it. Might as well jaunt down tonight, when his shiny 50’s hair is still visible in the stage lights locally. I plan next sunday gets game night and Sanctuary with Bobbi. (Which reminds me – Is there anyone interested in going who would be able to heft someone out of a wheelchair at the end of the night? We keep him up, we have to be able to help him into bed.) In spite of knowing about it from night one, I’ve never been to Thundering Word. I admit I’m fairly curious as to who will be there.

CALL FOR GRAPHIC NOVELISTS IN ACADEMIC BOOK

I plucked this off the BadSignal list. It’s something Warren got in an e-mail. I thought it sounded like it could be rather fascinating, so I’m passing it on. I know there’s writers and artists here.

We are trying to reach graphic novel-comic-hybrid image fiction makers to call for graphic works. I am a digital media professor / artist at Hunter College, NYC, and i’m working on a collection of fiction and theory called _reskin_ with my collaborator austin booth (to be published with the academic publisher MIT Press this year). We mix fiction and theoretical works in the book dealing with body modification, skin, and technologies of the crossing of boundaries: transgender, transpecies, virtual and physical… the volume explores the fluidity-permeability between categories relating to skin and the body, especially how technology plays a role in these crossings. We’re especially interested on issues of race and technology. The current table of contents (sans graphic work) is located below…

We would love to include a graphic novel excerpt or short piece with the other works in the collection. There are some other visual works in the volume, such as the tattoo novel project in which participants in her large scale literary work tattooed themselves with an individual from the work; she then photographed the words on skin… Unf. MIT only publishes in B/W

We’d like to publish 1-2 excerpts or entire works of 3-20 pages in the _reskin_ collection.

As we’re working with a nonprofit publisher, the benefit to the artist would be exposure to your work in artistic, literary, and academic circles and hopefully more attention to the work of graphic novelists/storytellers in general. MIT Press has probably not published any graphic fiction and our collection could pave the way for more blurring of genre boundaries between art, literature, fiction, and theory.

We are also seeking pieces which explore the act of computer programming for a future volume called re:CODE; in this volume, we’re especially interested in the act of programming, the way the programmer makes worlds.

Please send links to work for either project (urls are best) to

mary.flanagan@hunter.cuny.edu

deadline for consideration is February 25th 2005.

many thanks all,
mary flanagan

_______

Reskin Table of Contents:

I. Inside, Outside, Surface
(non fiction) Alicia Imperiale, “Seminal Space: Getting Under the Digital Skin”
(fiction) L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Man Who Was Plugged In”
(non fiction) Melinda Rackham, “Soft Skinned Species”
(non fiction) Bernadette Wegenstein, “Making Room for the Body: From Fragmentation to Mediation” (non fiction) Vivian Sobchack, “On Morphological Criticism”
(fiction) Raphael Carter “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation”

II. Transgression
(fiction / non fiction) Sara Diamond, “Fur Manifesto”
(fiction) Nalo Hopkinson, “Ganger”
(non fiction) Rebecca Cannon, “Perfect Twins: Transgender Avatars”
(fiction) Jewelle Gomez, “Lynx and Strand”
(fiction) Elisabeth Vonarburg, “Readers of the Lost Art”

III. Mapping

(non fiction) Christina Lammer, “Eye Contact: Fine Moving Hands and the Flesh and Flood of Image Fabrication in the Operating Theatres of Interventional Radiology”
(fiction / non fiction) Shelley Jackson, “SKIN”
(non fiction) Mary Flanagan, “Reskinning the Everyday”

everything I haven’t done yet again for the last time tomorrow


andrew asleep in my bed
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

My bed is made of pillows piled, velvet colours against brilliant feather filled silk. Fushsia moments of vibrant purple and embroidered flowers to catch on my hair. I’m alone, a sadly unexpected course of events. I’m feeling like I should be used to it, absence being my usual dine in fare, but somehow it’s a weight. I can feel an invisible body, cells dividing in every breath. Voices have nothing on this. My hands are sliced, cut from broken glass. I broke my lamp earlier tonight, the bulb shattering hard on my little side table.

My music reflects little impact moments, refracting time spent wondering and waiting up again. No matter how high I turn it up, it won’t drown this feeling out. A song of connection, never tearing from my throat to come pouring out my eyes. It’s not my game, it’s not my anti-drug. This is a powder I shake to the table and gather in the palm of my hand because this is your heart and I hold it. I want to transmit the scent of dying roses and let it gleam for just a moment in your eyes when my lips finally part.

There’s no freedom or justice here, but a quiet flying fuck of desire and twilight. I know it’s possible for me to spend days alone together only with my computer. I’m sure I’ve done it, easily fourty-eight hours with no human contact that wasn’t filtered through a machine, but it’s not healthy because sometimes late at night it’s like I’m the only person left alive. I woke up and missed the disaster, now I can walk out on perpetually empty streets and eventually die, watching for people to crawl out from their hiding holes.

I should take a picture to seduce you with. Clear a swath with my razorblade gray eyes. You’ll never think of anything else again when you think of gunmetal blue. It’s getting colder as the city flickers out one light at a time, the creatures going finally to bed. Nervous system on hold, pause, repeat. Sleep-mode across the border, the sun is coming up in England as I type this.

one meme at a time, ladies

If there is someone on your friends list you would like to take, strip naked, tie them to a bed post, lick them until they scream, then screw them until both of you are sensless and unable to screw anymore, then wait about five minutes and do it all over again, then post this exact sentence in YOUR journal.

1. Comment here and I’ll pick one of your LJ interests and draw a picture, using my choice of medium.
2. You have no say in what I draw for you, or the quality thereof.
3. Put this in your journal along with the pictures drawn for you.

Ellen made me

full version

he was on stage while I was gone : I feel like I’ve been robbed

I dream a dream of white hair shot through black. A smile I’m not used to being turned on me. You move like I do, that wary look around all at ease. It’s disconcerting if I think about it, but I have yet to bother to. Your eyes, they speak to me of the same things I used to remember that mine were interested in. It’s a judgment call I made without me. Elemental lying back and letting the world happen, there’s a bright shadow drifting across the sky with my name on it.

If this were somewhere else, I would be less ready. Tying into someone in a foreign city, I can’t explain it, I’ve done it, it might have happened anyway. There’s so much to see that it blinds me a little. I forget that we don’t know me.

I’m glad we went to see the play. With me was Andrew, Ray, Ian, Ethan, Graham, Matthew, and Dominique. I cried when some of the music came up and I chuckled remembering which jokes were mine to claim. John can be brilliant sometimes and I remember so many days of him sitting in the kitchen glued to our phone. Canada Day was attached to the Jesus Murphy Band. Bill on drums, Johns on guitar, friends gathered together to play music in an old what used to be a church on the north shore. Gonna burn that steeple to the ground, oh lordy. Wandering down to the waterfront, hoping to see some fireworks and running into Ace. A partially wretched day, but one I filled with different flavors of love. I was comfortable there and bored, but glowing. This was my time and my people. I was at home in this drafty empty room with stained glass windows and theater humour.

I called him today. He sounds happy. He opened a show last night and was acting in a Yeats while I was gone. I wish I’d known. I would have flown back for it. My time in the rain versus seeing him on stage? No contest. I would have left for the airport that day. I’m taking him for dinner this week, his birthday’s on Monday. It’s so precious to hear him smiling. I want to be there for him and with him when he flips over to fourty-one. I think one day when I’m older I’ll learn to fall out of love, but until then, he’s still intrinsically attached to me. It’s been forever since this time last year, when people came over and Bill Devine covered for me so I might sneak out to get a cake. We lived in the big house then, the homeless home on 53rd with the mural on the wall in the basement. The shower which had it’s own room in a dark corner, where the lightbulb exploded and studded me with little pieces of glass all down my body. Mishka played the violin and smiled so wide I thought her face might break.