Author: cherry melancholic

mariasledmere.com

Playlist: November 2020

drawing of

Surf Rock
for fred and kate

Lioness chained to hillsides of lavender        the sun 
is streaming oversea entirely conceptual homeland
5G howl                                      like how a fractal glint
constitutes one or more endings                and is just 
never never never never never 
lavender exactly                   who unimaginable loses
when fox does                                    borrowed snouts
language of flowers          fuck this                       howl 
again five dimensions


Is you said to me a common placard
stands vantablack in the manacles           jason cries 
his heart broke in your jaw              I swam all night
to the motor show                  roseate perfume of the 
problem                being born out of lobster wedlock
to be ravaged by the neo-marxist programme of
naming us wasp                and other wasp sadnesses
it is for me as I for you           better at swiss twilight 
when               I was community 


In the womb                  wept effort of what insomnia 
does
from the latin meaning wandering
                             policy of “rural lust”        I will swim 
I will swim through hedgerows I will swim I swim
this isn’t the song turn up your sleeves we enter the
chess in brightness mode I wanted the heat the reat
                                     skelped by autofictive descent
another coxcomb 
texts you back                                                    O lariat 


At that altitude paying the rent              in pale world 
and even if she has lost control 
what a car does                          in green light heaven
obscenity pedestrian    the ground here opal silicate
owing you a crush moratorium
cheques out after all
                                     this is just a modern rock song
adjusting   styles pane of my old wound, new wound
at clydebank the skycastles at four o’clock who are u


Harvest season was accordion sonnetry I lifted my 
volta skirts for assholes feeling perennially strange 
in melancholy chord progression of certified orange
is this out of the question              lazily in the grass
lexie and cecil and ariel               open your mouth
be lucid 
corduroy when stevie sings 
harmony on thursday morning exhaustion I thought
             just swish would do it


Could be 1995 
how will I get there                            painting the ice-
course with fairways                          is all that I have 
boygirlboygirl varieties of noodles
                                  bunny calls it cloudheartedness 
be mute in serious leaf together 
is falling 
                          the same as time at all / it got claws 
hi can I have some more bourgeois heroine pastry


Okay to just swim and arrive here                 my salty
fiancé is a type of fish         did you enjoy The Shape
of Water and other films to which I might fuck 
glitching in the real world 
                          darling is a missing numbering
merely the sun                  streaming feminine voices
never never
a century of the Laurieston & all of my guinnesses  
are oxygen                                         saw another fox 


And wherever you are I suppose the squirrels are 
listening
as bartender came home w/ three crystal ocean
we stub the ashes out
we stub the ashes out                                     it’s him
that I am smashed mezzanine      phoning my dad 
                                                          big blue energy 
another song about the suburbs   /   mineral & gem
sometimes I can’t believe


Red lions and lionesses are not metaphors but love 
laura no lies            & lilac passion in the first place 
I wrote about you in my notebook: we might not
even be awake in the world is still in the kitchen 
scratch at my socialist lichen 
                         second paramore whose kisses are 
madness         my counsellor said yeah 
I like those mornings also 
London fog, London fog  

~

Oneohtrix Point Never — I Don’t Love Me Anymore

i_O — Castles In The Sky

Quirke — Luxury Red Pence

Mogwai — Dry Fantasy

Salem — Red River

Songs: Ohia — Lioness

Silver Jewels — Federal Dust

Johnny Flynn — Lost and Found

Keaton Hensen — Ontario

Life Without Buildings — Sorrow

Drop Nineteens – Winona

The National — Dark Side of the Gym

Weyes Blood — A Certain Kind

Marika Hackman — Playground Love (Air cover)

God Help the Girl — Pretty When The Wind Blows

Porridge Radio — 7 Seconds

Elliott Smith — True Love

A. G. Cook — Beautiful Superstar

Bat for Lashes — Peach Sky

Lemongrass — Sayonara

Tennis — Tender As A Tomb

The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)

Golden Mean — Midnight 

Phoebe Bridgers, Rob Moose — Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)

Angel Olsen — New Love Cassette (Mark Ronson Remix)

Belle & Sebastian — This Is Just a Modern Rock Song

(NEW BOOK) neutral milky halo

neutral milky halo loops around the pixelated tempos, imaginaries and myths of this fraught, contingent moment. Poems of weird ecology, cultivated address and tendering detail; poems of disorientation, hospitality, sounding and shimmer. Poems seen through screens, reflected on or refracted from glass; poems seen-through and poems making visible the otherwise shadowed. Poems that envelop the animal, the flower, the technologies of writing and other means of resistance, expression and growth. Weaving the everyday ‘scenes’ of the anthropocene — from starry cosmologies of new gods, months and seasons, to kissable forests and the ice cream trucks that haunt our quarantine — neutral milky halo draws fragile yet glistening socialities for dreaming between ‘thick’ futures.

Pamphlet / 184 x 140mm / 44pp / Mohawk Superfine papers & sparkly pink end papers / ISBN 978-1-913749-09-5.

Cover design by CF Sherratt.

Available now for £8.00 from Guillemot Press.

(NEW BOOK) the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene

Announcing a new anthology I’ve been working on with the wonderful Rhian Williams and indie publishers Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Copies are now available to order…

Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams and with a foreword by Tim Morton, the weird folds intervenes in more traditional canons of nature and ecopoetry to offer a poetics of the anthropocene which is thoroughly generous, queer, sensuous, formally innovative, relational, occult, fugitive and critically sensitive to the mediations of technology and culture which shape our encounters with the more-than-human.

BOOKSHOP.ORG
WATERSTONES
BLACKWELL’S
AMAZON

NOTE: If cover images are missing from any of the above links, please be aware that the books are still available for purchase.

Pages: 296
Dimensions: B Format
ISBN: 978-1838015619
Cat No: DW-001-97
Imprint: Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals
Publishing Model: Tailored

The Author

Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams and with a foreword from Timothy Morton), the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene features contributors working at the intersections of lyric, cultural critique and hybrid forms. The contributors in order are:    Pratyusha, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Jay G Ying, Sarah Cave, Samantha Walton, Rebecca Tamás, Daisy Lafarge, Jane Hartshorn, Francesca Lisette, Max Parnell, Calum Rodger, Miranda Cichy, Alice Tarbuck, fred spoliar, Iain Morrison, Gloria Dawson, Vahni Capildeo, Sascha Akhtar, Fred Carter, Katy Lewis Hood and Therese Keogh, montenegro fisher, Nat Raha, Mike Saunders, Jane Goldman, Harriet Tarlo, Rosie Roberts, Lila Matsumoto, Colin Herd, Paul Hawkins, nicky melville, Kat Sinclair, Nasim Luczaj. 

Praise

This vital gathering tells slanted anthropocenic truths, re-cognising the manifold everyday as a crucial space-time of enquiry, excavation and entanglement. Performing kaleidoscopic arts of noticing, the works within these pages render traces of a changed and changing planet with tangible immediacy. Here is poetry as a barometer of the times.

-Mandy Bloomfield, author of Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History (University of Alabama Press, 2016)

These are poems of the future glimpsed through its shards and fragments here and now – they are unhomely and familiar, revealing a skewed new normal: they are fieldnotes from a world to come.

-David Borthwick, Lecturer in Environmental Literature at University of Glasgow 

Anthropocene is the impact human beings have on the planet, while the trillions of cells making each human body are composed entirely of the fire, soil, air, and water of the earth. In this anthology, the poets are voices for a war the planet is having with itself through its human bodies, and I am very grateful for their reports. I wonder if it is unfair to think of poets as war correspondents, but this book proves we are possibilities for so much more.

–CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017)

The Overlook

I remember burgundy jumpers

I remember the sleeves of them

I remember the wet feel of wool in my mouth

I remember sucking pencils, taste of lead

I remember when tall people gave me badges, they said FUCK ESSO

I remember how the oven door never closed

I remember lighting the back with a long match

I remember the feel of it striking

I remember sunrise from bus stops

I remember it all morning

I remember they supposedly fucked on the green

I remember the security cameras, all six of them

I remember bottles of cider the size of a baby

I remember being cold

I remember being so cold I thought I was dying

I remember being this cold every day for a year

I remember when the bottle smashed in front of me

I remember wearing everyone’s clothes

I remember when he fit his fingers around my thigh, at the highest part, and they touched

I remember the colour of sunsets and ocean spray

I remember cranberry juice

I remember that song 

I remember listening to the sound of a tape click over and over, softly

I remember using too many purples

I remember being told about liking petrol 

I remember the first cigarette, menthols by the sea

I remember when someone said poppers were moreish

I remember how she did her makeup, turquoise glitter gelling almond eyes

I remember shoplifting bourbon 

I remember endless packets of gum 

I remember an abstract notion of madness 

I remember the expense of American candy

I remember the headless cyclist my brother saw, but I wasn’t there

I remember a series of accidents

I remember the muscles in my legs were so weak I could hardly walk

I remember illustrious textbooks

I remember falling over in the deli, very subtly

I remember when he pushed me over

I remember black coffee

I remember safe foods

I remember being sick 

I remember eating three pieces of cake 

I remember throwing away

I remember the chord progression to the song called ‘Angels’

I remember the virgin who wanted to know

I remember telling her 

I remember being in class and infinite and nothing 

I remember the feeling of three tongues in one mouth

I remember pissing against trees

I remember pieces of crisps stamped into carpets 

I remember the invisible bugs on her palms

I remember selling bracelets of luminous, plastic materials

I remember light-up trainers

I remember hot soup 

I remember vodka for lunch on a Wednesday

I remember they knew my name on the bus

I remember coming online and seeing you 

I remember this

I remember holding them

I remember being told I’d fail

I remember failing

I remember failing to fail

I remember taking the train alone

I remember glossy pages

I remember wanting to be warm enough to bare my limbs

I remember nothing but

I remember the river was all that I was

I remember walking my dog the morning she died

I remember a rainbow

I remember the bruises

I remember the bruises all over my breasts

I remember biting my arm not to cry

I remember weeping all winter

I remember the welt 

I remember he bit the inside of my thigh

I remember feeling dumb

I remember the empty train

I remember being illegible

I remember losing my grammar, my handbag

I remember that winter it snowed forever

I remember counting tips

I remember we said sorry to each other

I remember it happened again

I remember holding your hand so hard

I remember it not being you

I remember fireworks from the library

I remember that friend’s apartment

I remember hot water and lemon

I remember backcombing my hair

I remember messaging you the morning he touched me

I remember not wanting

I remember stupid bowls of muesli 

I remember the smell of linseed oil, white spirit

I remember being thinned, and thinning

I remember the lyric 

I remember the clarity 

I remember yesterday

I remember the time you drove all night

I remember the dream where my hair was three times longer

I remember we made it to the beach

I remember being told my kissing was good

I remember gold stars 

I remember so many stars

I remember gasping 

I remember being so thin the air passed through me

I remember that too, the wind

I remember thinking that girl took crack

I remember the word capsule take shape in my mouth

I remember asking for it

I remember not having asked for it

I remember getting it anyway

I remember being turned over

I remember the river inside me as 

I remember that picture where I stood in the river

I remember wanting everyone inside me, I was so hungry

I remember a dress code

I remember the unreal election

I remember the absence of insects

I remember the first time, you said 

I remember we should have done this sooner

I remember the hot bright sense

I remember falling out of the hour

I remember the view 

I remember he didn’t come

I remember coming home

I remember not wanting to

I remember the burning look in her eyes

I remember being sorry for something I hadn’t done

I remember dropping it boiling on my arm

I remember stripping off in the kitchen

I remember the phone call

I remember the gentle white lie I carried around all year

I remember a series of elaborate bandages 

I remember more than a friend

I remember avocado emoji

I remember I knew it all

I remember telling them

I remember this one cool trick for making it pop

I remember your irises amethysts 

I remember my blood

I remember the word ember 

I remember saying a sunbeam

I remember red velvet 

I remember you well in the Ibis Hotel 

I remember the size of a blouse 

I remember she said, it’s worse over there

I remember a hip flask of whisky

I remember a docile reply

I remember falling asleep with the bass underneath us

I remember Arran

I remember Luss

I remember wearing skintight jeans 

I remember graduating into the falling leaves

I remember falling up stairs

I remember the clots

I remember my fingers in your hair

I remember being golden

I remember doing it again

Remember I wasn’t there

*Written in response to a writing exercise during Tawnya Renelle’s workshop on Memoir and Memory.

Playlist: October 2020

Listen for exits

For a brief eternity, nobody was fucking anything that already got fucked and that was when the leaf started falling & another then a whole earnestness of them. Fuck. The way to keep strong is being meticulous about noticing clouds and writing shit down I stopped wanting to rain, I’ll fall asleep smoking. I’ll fall asleep smoking in some movie where my brogues are black as the wet night this all was conceived, draw my red curtains away from the moon that Nasa had a claim on and think about salad days, my nails painted trademark Billie Eilish lime. O salad days pacing restaurants, the rain is on; I remember the leaves swept in the door and they too were victims of a fate in their genes, once green. So I took samples and pressed them crisp between Moleskine pages in the sleep dimension, my writing was automatic and sullen, chlorophyllic, squeezed between menus, I was windswept inside it with the beach pouring out it was heavy. File this under the brush, bush, brush it back into language. I listened to the intricate complaints of the shrubs.

*

Between myriad Tuesdays, I became a psychiatrist of seashells, pressed to my ears their exquisite misery. 

*

Time was a month of afternoons and then rivers of weeks and the sexual appetite of the hours then none. M. said in emails it all feels like soup. In no time I drink echinacea tea and wait for you in black velvet trousers, my pretzel crossed legs. The black velvet night is missing from other suns. There is no time. My chest is clearing itself of the leaves and a mysterious spore they call viral but is it just metaphor, is it the just continuum of falsehood, heavy as my tongue in your words and letting the owls out is only fake news. A black velvet night full of owls. The way to keep going is smoking at the window notwithstanding the smoke, I mean lean out like me and catch it. Someone drops loneliness pills from high windows, highest, like the song about throwing pieces out a twenty-storey flat…Your browser does not currently recognise any of the video formats available. And yet that song and for the love of bread and jam and here in our crumbling houses. Seedless. My brother does not understand tenement lust, the trend for it, but a tower-block remains in our town. Black velvet surrounds us, slapped between lunar slices cut from the nightmare of twenty-twenty. It isn’t your vision. 

*

At five, he would drink all day diluted wine and snort at jellied nature. I love receiving your comments and photos and learning what is an amethyst deceiver and those in history who wanted us killed. If I am held down by world, I had a cold shower and lived in the hades of a woodlands that didn’t belong to me. Smell of tomato all summer in the glow of my window. Smash it all over your clavicles, the insides of your thighs, between your toes, the secrecy of your neck. Flesh of a very red vitamin C. Imagine owning the woodlands. Not to eat, I typeset all night to the sound of sentences, insects, let them lay me down later, I am all this humming snow. What sleep is it that comes three hours at a time, at a time without time that is never quite dark and five hours late. If the clocks go back. You say it’s impossible to write in these times and you are right, as anyone is to say of the impossible I feel it, here and closing in and peeling the skin from my cuticles. Not this. Backwards. When you ask what I’m doing, I’m quietly bleeding. In the hazard assessment, failing to be meticulous is not this. Failing violence. Touching green. I have a good kick at the heart and the head. The men are all down. Held down. You and I get so tired. 

*

I want to know how she dies before the novel even opens. Lain down in the grass; the spine is split, our folds are torn. Because you say nothing I go into the orange department and juice my feelings very slowly in rapture. Waking up is to know not what happened. A blade is working in spiral formation – a blade tornado. What would rip us from orange and up, up to our tower block office at home? Dream pith all over the air around us, sticks. Walter Benjamin is very anxious about this, that you should not write dreams down before breakfast, should not attempt to narrate them. You break fast to break with your dreams. I dreamt I wrote copy for an orange juice company, who wanted their ingredients relayed as sonnets. It seemed impossible that orange juice should be so teeming with things other than oranges. The names were beautiful: canola oil, sodium citrate, beta carotene, cellulose, sucralose, Neotame, potassium sorbate, yellow #5, yellow #6 – and what could be seven? What could be less than seven! We are, we are…In the mix, at the end of the nineties, “soft drink turned a girl yellow.” I remember this as though I had been in hospital and the walls were all yellow for how much I stared at the pale and acceptable middle-class blue. Where was this, surely not in the news. I paint my eyes girl yellow, the colour of soft ghosts; I practice quietude, then sugary schemes of rhyme.

*

So what is the meaning of soft in your work, is it ordinary eggshells around the thing itself, is it orange peel, goldfish, autumn maple. I tread lightly on the question of being at all. These terms are so loaded. K. is reading novels where people casually set off fireworks, they do it all the time: they grab them from supermarket bins and set them off in the carpark because why would you wait. A catherine wheel for Asda and my blues is spinning, my blues in the washing machine, O rocket, a felt sense I could hug you then and the blues left a stain on the radiator. Dashes sparkle. We sit in old meadow in mud and the dogs roll over each other. We are not drinking cocktails. The transience of dalmations. What is the meaning of soft. Softness as a kind of value. I wish I could learn precision in language but it goes running over my senses and to be soft is to experience aphasia. Say in the meeting we stammer and get to the question, late morning before this, zoom before zoom, arranging the clattering scale weights and spices. I slept with Bachmann’s Malina under my bed. A blue skirt stain on the radiator. Blue heat rises. Dad says, “have you been listening to seashells again?” I fantasise gas flames.

*

Conch, scotch bonnet, wentletrap, simnia, drill and murex. Rose and sharp-rib, American carrier, Gulf oyster. Marmite mushrooms frying on the stove. You know there is a shell called ‘Coffee bean trivia’. In Brighton you could buy trays of them for a fiver. I bought Guinness instead, a half pint for you and I on the last hot day of the year. There was a kind of listening to sunlight. Softness as what could be damaged inside us: organ spleen, aura lamina, the shell of our bodies. Your cells soft mint as the cure. People are cycling to work; I barely leave my sofa. Various adrenalines assemble inside us. So far the shells have daddy issues because of the sea. Scrub hard and anything shines. I am under the influence of rainbows, umbrellas, a rim of salt. 

*

I was fired from the orange department for wearing this blue on my sleeve. In the atrium standing there with Styrofoam coffee, swished blue from my dreams; compliments from the manageress and frowning at the meeting that never would last, and something we didn’t say. ‘Divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions’, writes Jackie Wang. I sat outside Perch and Rest with lemongrass steaming from a cup I had purchased and the leaves blew into my face with rain, they were soft and important, licked and wet.

*

We were about to make love but one of us took concussion from the piece of citrine beneath my pillow. 

*

I dreamt rabbits were climbing my beech tree the way goats do in Israel. 

*

A small porcelain jug of milk, a blue jug, was all I could glean from the orange department, after my passing. Carried it home in cardboard, I passed through the walls. It is all because the clocks go back and a crack on the wall. Anhedonia, that I hold breadcrumbs and nothing left to imagine. At the late-night snack bar, composing these empty sentences. Do we get paid for the hour we lose? A soft wound is still a wound. “I would like truffle fries, I would like oysters…” This is something I once seriously wondered. Pools of oil in shells, a meltable system. You break crockery and throw it at the sun. It goes like fuck; it is fucking you brightly. There are still exits, listen.

*

Thee Oh Sees – Goodnight Baby

Little Comets – One Night in October

The Cure – Underneath the Stars

Oneohtrix Point Never – ECCOJAMC1

Moses Sumney – Neither/Nor

Massive Attack, Young Fathers – Voodoo in my Blood

Bicep – Apricots

Autechre – si00

HEALTH, 100 gecs – POWER FANTASY

Animal Collective – Bridge to Quiet

Pharoah Sanders – Astral Traveling

The Raincoats – Only Loved at Night

U.S. Girls – Velvet 4 Sale

Jenny Hval – Conceptual Romance

Tomberlin – Floor

Sharon Van Etten – Let Go

Julien Baker – Faith Healer

Julia Jacklin – CRY

Sun June – Karen O

Soccer Mommy – crawling in my skin

The Weather Station – Robber

Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders

Jason Molina – I’ll Be Here in the Morning

The Mountain Goats – Rat Queen

Bright Eyes – Miracle of Life

Admiral Fallow – Dead Against Smoking

Adrienne Lenker – heavy focus

Kevin Morby – Valley

Lana Del Rey – Let Me Love You Like a Woman

Four Tet – My Angel Rocks Back and Forth

Julie Byrne, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Love’s Refrain

New Book: Chlorophyllia

Chlorophyllia: a pamphlet of poems written in April and May 2020 in the midst of lockdown, feeling falling, light sensitivity, the body as plant life and panic. Released as part of a 5-part series alongside Carolyn Hashimoto, Suki Hollywood, Ruthie Kennedy and Emily Uduwana.

~

Chlorophyllia is a glassy architecture for gathering the leafswirls of those moments of seeming contingency, the offcuts of correspondence, and nourishing them in the hothouse of lyric hyperbole. Maria Sledmere offers up a pamphlet of weird dialectics and conversation: where dreams eat into ~reality, where herbal remedies glitch in the feed they’re found in, where green and blue meet zanily under the breeze of ‘Jolene’, where sleep is yet daylight’s constant longing and language is photosynthesised. Elon Musk crawls out of a Deleuze and Guattari parenthesis, Keats is filtered through Zoom mosaics, there are glimpses of Neptune rain and the speaker craves IDM aquaria. As increasing time spent online comes to dominate our unconscious with surreal imaginaries of face-reacts, screen freezes and the syncope of laggy encounter, poetry becomes a way of laying out those confusions of voice, scale, desire and bodily grammar.

~

Maria Sledmere hits the reader with a monsoon of language played at once in major and minor. It’s a blissy elegy with room for the amphibian and the paypal. For thinspo trees, waging snowstorms, missing bees. For solace and subscription. Here, loss concerns the heart-eye react as much as the dinosaur. Snowstorm is a person. Everything finds itself unshakeably sensory, and that whole heavy load — of being at all, of being here — is packed sleek into a Tesla. Chlorophyllia is an oil essential to any engine.

          — Nasim Luczaj, aka [underthunder] and author of SWAT SIGHT

The poems of Chlorophyllia love a green thought in a green shade almost as much as they pant to leap in daylight. What does the enforced reproduction of the shit we’re in mean when ‘Continuance is lightfast’? Lyric is truly sound against death but how do the interruptions feel when to persevere – the shimmy of life itself – only serves to hold up the wicked ceiling, the needles underfoot? Fuck extinction. Memory was always lossy. The desert is wherever we are. Find your friends in vernal places, ask each other ‘what familiar year is it / Another encore of the air.’ 

          — Dom Hale, editor of Mote and author of Time Zone, Firewall and Scammer

Now available for £2.00 digital download from the wonderful OrangeApple Press, edited by T. Person and Meredith Thompson.

Playlist: September 2020

Darklands

what if she entered  
the sliver of morning and haemorrhage
left for her

on the rooftop, signal
that someone was still coming in caustic shoes

theorising a free continuation 
of handsome disorder, to access the paywall
and free us from pain 

she could breathe here, just 

to feel like getting trains, filming herself 
speak only to speed 
and lag

in practice of relative motion, to feel it

“how all the protests ceased”
but not to look 
was to watch the hard tomatoes soften from green
and the weight 

to glow awhile, orange
and I miss

a strategy of oratory whereby someone has a line 
from beautiful afternoon television, like
“who would buy this house?” 
as if there were choices

next to the undiscovered 
shaven lawn

*

I’ve been having dreams about family
and scaffolds

how she just lay there
literally
until the child began throwing soft toys at her
in the 1990s 

anyone could come to life and be numb

I want to read Graeber’s thesis on magic,
slavery and politics

she didn’t say to me

do you ever feel free, for instance
in fugue state when brushing your teeth 

I’ve been dreaming about ancestors
stuck on trains 
killing rabbits and eating crackers
it was that easy

all season 
complaint of what’s coming, knowing nothing
of photography

when you can’t measure the wind 
by the grass

she had this enormous laughter 

*

dwindling into ambivalence
if this isn’t a dream exposure

and we can’t enter houses

I’ve been trialling sentences, Bernadette Mayer says 
I’m not faulting being periodic but sentences with caps and end marks do seem so bloodless to me

You swing gazelle legs over the actual
You wait in the room for the wine
You pull collectives out of the sink

distracted, I watch through windows
turn on my flash
to lead workshops on trash 
and poetry as finance, like
eons of speculation 
had brought us to nothing but numbers

and the anxious among us, cooking the numbers

I watch her slice an avocado in the dark
and the police van
opened to reveal us
with leaves in our molars, perfect hello
it’s autumn

in the bloodless sentence

* 

dreamt I was tidying the rooms
of siblings

this mad kind of everywhere acid 
I couldn’t clean up 

in the panic of rich, linguistic Monday, you are 
part of the story, too smart for me

the interminable smell of pine resin, kimchi
and menthol gum
yes, just there

in lightness rimming

I made this commitment to sleeping ‘upstairs’

taking pleasure
on my editor’s credit
before the treehouse snapped

*

I can barely listen to music anymore
it’s all error

describing her pain as shooting

when I smashed my thumbs in my eyes
you kept going
it was Jupiter

now

cruising down Alexandra Parade to send you 
the voice message 
of not seeing nightingales, a bathtub
attached to a car
I wish I could touch
between times is when I most feel ‘we
exist’ and just like that
the cornflowers won’t die

and we can’t enter houses

and you end 
with the fresh heat of illusory commute

I could say anything new

in dumb, erotic anonymity 
where all this falls

*

she had lit up the sad remains
of the tree

bound to other seasons, even look good

despite not hearing this live
I like it, finally
summer light on the same

even if we live 

in adrenalised versions of trying to keep warm
on the video call
or wavelength

of audit continuum

she was all 
“it is up to the unassuming […]
to represent reality” 
in The New York Times

and the well-oiled loss of taste

feels the same 
the shadow

years of tax avoidance
edible sundown

*

what if she knew before all of us
doubled in running away with me

I dream all my friends 
attending the burning

“where have you been”

and you could put this to archive

swipe left for the hidden
indentation of nothing happening

20,000 years ago

mostly I worry if she lived in the dream
I had to wake from 

cradling the ersatz animal, sprigs of rosemary 

having clambered reality over again
and knowing you survived the scaffold
GESTURES FOR LIVING AIR
as the art was told
“I just need to check
your temperature” 
a rough kind of festival kiss
that was listening

in the underpasses of everything
prior to millennium 

installs a magical feeling that 
:heart:
you would be at the station

and my bouquet emoji of blood
flowers await.

💐

Fenne Lily – Solipsism

Sylvan Esso – Ring

Gus Dapperton – I’m Just Snacking

Sufjan Stevens – Run Away With Me

Fleet Foxes – I’m Not My Season

Chastity Belt – Ann’s Jam

The Durutti Column – Sketch for Summer

Frog – Photograph

Adrienne Lenker – anything

Tim Heidecker, Weyes Blood – Oh How We Drift Away

Bill Callahan – Sycamore

Gillian Welch – Picasso

Margo Guryan – Why Do I Cry

Norma Tanega – You’re Dead

Elliott Smith – Speed Trials

Kath Bloom, Loren Connors – Tall Grass

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Darklands

Alice Boman – Heartbeat

Edwin Organ – Self Alarm

Broadcast – Echo’s Answer

Cocteau Twins – Aloysius

Yo La Tengo – Bleeding

Perfume Genius – Valley

William Basinski – Tear Vial

Oneohtrix Point Never – Long Road Home

Playlist: August 2020

Patiency challenges the body’s borders, the fantasy of which converges with a policing function. This means reimagining the body as process without a centre, not a discrete biological or social fact, but an untotalisable set of relations, the body not as a static object, but as the ek-static convergence of processes always in excess of themselves. 

(Rob Halpern, Weak Link). 

Patiency: ‘to do with the body as a situation of suspended agency and disabused mastery. If this illusion of mastery is a privileged delusion, then patiency is its refusal’. Halpern gives the example of Ban, in Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieu (2015), who ‘lies down on the street in the opening scene of a riot’. So begins the novel and another historical opening. Patiency might be, I am heckled on the subway and so I lay down in the aisle. Or is that too much of a spectacle? It might be that I is not-I, just as ‘love is not love / When it’s a coathanger / A borrowed line or passenger’. We do patiency differently. So love that is love provides more than suspension or structure; it isn’t the person sitting beside you or even the vehicle. Limerence on a borrowed line. So things are thrown. I am lying down in the middle of lockdown, which feels like ‘response’ as such. In these casual Zoom calls, these meetings, it is like “Oh, well I spent that day lying on my floor, sorry.” I stop saying “just lying on my floor” since, over time, lying on the floor seems adequate. Almost, to a certain thought. We used to call these sad naps and could take them at work, for instance, with head resting on folded hands, or perhaps in the little vinyl benches round the corner of the bar, under the picture of Dylan and the roses, and the painting with the cut-away eyes, whose market value would astound us. When I say I lay down in the middle of a global pandemic, who am I kidding? Sometimes I turn off my webcam and lie down with my eyes closed, still keep talking. 

I google ek-static and find a meaning for ecstasy, ekstasis: ek (out) and stasis (a stand, or a standoff of forces). So an experience of ekstasis comprises, as Alexander Riley puts it, ‘extraordinary situations in which one stands, temporarily, outside the normal interactional world in an existential frame of peculiar intensity and effervescence’. There was a night in lockdown I bumped into a friend and we walked along the river, bordered the parking lots of the broadcast buildings, looked at the false lights reflected in stout-dark water until I finally looked up and saw the huge harvest moon. This hour or so outside of the otherwise confinements of lockdown had felt ekstatic — for I was outside, on the edge of the river. I was talking again, for real and wheels were turning. Words, however everyday, had their electric shocks. But was this an extraordinary situation, this encounter? Context matters. 

Types of lockdown ~ekstasis: 

  • Zoom calls till dawn
  • Recorded poems
  • Voices, hear say yes
  • The word haecceity 
  • Streets without vehicles
  • The first day I discovered the meadow
  • Golden hour
  • Bluebells, daffodils, cornflowers 
  • The innocent coughs of strangers in readings from a pre-covid world, if such a thing once existed
  • One infinite tin in the park with you
  • Oil pastel under my nails
  • St John’s Wort capsules
  • Parcel arrivals
  • Applause on the recording from 2004 
  • Misplaced pastoral (nostalgia) inside a sleep 
  • When we didn’t know which window the birdsong belonged to
  • Coffee, five times a week
  • ‘Like a cat can / See things out of order’ (Lucy Ives, ‘Picture’)
  • Soft sound twilight of notification 
  • Gentle ASMR of the rain
  • Tree climb
  • Carousels of apophenia 
  • The canal, the river

There’s a song that goes, ‘all that I have is a river’ and I remember it from more than a movie. An undergraduate, alone in my small room I was watching this video of a young Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling just sing this together and I thought it was an old song, oldest, the kind of thing you can only think when adolescence still is you. Almost ten years have passed since then. Ten long summers, more like winters…What a gift to forgo all but the river, to be young enough to possess nothing, cover it, or to let go for the water and what it carries. For you know everything is a new current is not even new, it was streaming before and now it is catching. And you let yourself into it or you don’t. You walk into, you walk by the river. You are carried, supine. Patiency.

I skirt the river in lockdown because it is a motion of passing when nothing else does except spirits and bodies, and the days are leaf, they are like easy to peel from the calendar, people are always saying O how the time passes, but into what? Time passes with you, otherwise I am waiting. The song that appeared in a search result. With you am I writing. ‘Dreaming is the best kind of waiting: it overcomes nothing, it does not try to separate itself from what it wants, from everything it wants. Dreaming just begins’ writes Sarah Wood, in 2007, which was a year I learned to starve myself among eons of bad indie. So I would dream hard instead; it was like whittling reality down to return to those childhood imaginaries whose nourishment was almost endless. To be almost endless, and good. It was the year before recession and so I had not learned the societal imperative towards ‘hope’. ‘If Hope can find oxygen, it will’, writes Lena Andersson at the end of her novel, Wilful Disregard (2013), ‘Starvation rations do not help […]. The supply of nourishment must be completely cut off’. You learn to breathe different air; you have to. Oh the rain really came today, I feel like saying / or send you a video. Told to have hope or having hope is different from living towards it. Soft falling hope was not that. In a 2019 discussion with Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, 

I learned that hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope.

I’ve had it with viral metaphors, in the sense that I live in the era of post-viral fatigue and my body is sick with the carriage, ‘but I can’t stop expanding with currents convulsive’ (Halpern, Weak Link). Lana sang ‘Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have’ and the question became less about hope and more about that ‘like me’, a little hinge. I identified with a neighbourly extravagance, hydrangeas, pale blue-lilac from a middling soil; I left the gate slightly open, I smoked in the rain. The danger was in hope without architecture, so a ghost came in. Hope requires a manifest scaffold, perhaps. Weather that rails against it. The trace effects of a fire, of dream languor, particle physics. It was in the sentences we erected, passed on, hammered in, lifted and lay still, remembered…‘my present tense contracting the way love contracts me to the future from whose point of view this will have not been terminal’ (Halpern). The person on the Zoom call, PST, said to say goodbye, If you’re in California, don’t leave your house, there’s smoke out there. Stay healthy. Hope needs to be more than just ‘in the pipeline’. Maybe we need to blow up the pipeline.

2007. I lived in the years of ambient war. Later, too young, I would attempt to read Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) and dream about pools of oil filling the end of my bed, like a menstrual stain. At school, we wrote essays in which we had to pick a side: for or against? The Iraq War, vegetarianism, a bypass for our town, surveillance capitalism? I could only think of deserts, not arguments; I wondered what secret plant could stem blood flow from a wound. I rarely watched television. In super rural mornings, December, the air smelled of engine oil, woodsmoke, fertiliser. Shit and snow. Something to-come that never was passing. I felt sanguine, calm without compare, sipping vodka + cokes against gym blocks. Back then, clouds were irrelevant. Instead, I scrolled the internet for answers and images. ‘That hope is just another bloated moat / is worth the ringworm, is it really so cute’ writes Nikki Wallschlaeger in Crawlspace (2017). Thinking in Sianne Ngai’s terms, is this ‘so cute’ ‘a sensuous quality or appearance’, or ‘a feeling-based evaluation or speech act’ (Our Aesthetic Categories). It’s cute that you dreamt it. The ringworm I mean, another parasite. So you circle in medias res, nibble a little of that time, but I thought I could jump the moat into future. Future was just a quality, like cute. Is it really so cute? The tiny things and changes. billie eilish in her video for ‘my future’ looks pretty cute, but it’s more than that. The soft falling rain would fill up the moat, the river, the lake. The dream was a body of water again. Speech fell upon us, fluid, then telling the nude and lime-before-lilac sensation. Something that gets inside us; a tooth around your neck, and pain. 

Dreaming just begins. Derrida is beginning his lecture on Joyce, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, with the signature of a date. This feels arbitrary enough – a date in lieu of a site specific. I would send letters in lockdown for the sake of sending a date. It was an act of patiency, a claim against time that could turn it inside out, let somebody else pop the bubblewrap for you. 

I was looking for postcards that would show Japanese lakes, or let’s call them inland seas. It had crossed my mind to follow the edges of lakes in Ulysses, to venture out on a grand lakeside tour between the lake of life which is the Mediterranean Sea and the Lacus Mortis referred to in the hospital scene, as it happens, and dominated by the symbol of the mother […]. You will no doubt know better than I that the whole pack of postcards perhaps hints at the hypothesis that the geography of Ulysses’ trips around the Mediterranean lake could have the structure of a postcard or a cartography of postal dispatches. 

(Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’)

The difference between the lake and the sea, is it tidal? Say I wrote to you by a general lunar insurrection: I refuse to be governed by hormones alone. I am lapped, turned over, the hours are upon me in wavelets. For a long time, months, the word ‘hospital’ also conjured ‘field’, and ‘crisis’, and ‘overstretched’, ‘overburdened’. Many fled cities to avoid this. What would a postcard from the pandemic look like? This sounds like the afterthought of a conference happening years from now. Send a postcard to your future self! I would rather dwell awhile in the mystical, sub bass pastoral of a common place that is billie’s future. The transparent dew in the process of dropping, clearest blue. But it was also the artist’s imperative, mid-March, to say something. To who? A postcard can be read by anyone, if they get their fingers on the mail, if they would risk that trace or touch. 

You could circle the drain, if not the lake, like in the video where Soccer Mommy is at Palm Springs Surf Club and conjures an existential state by the weather: ‘I wanna be calm like the soft / Summer rain on your back / Like the fall of your shoulders’. A desert gets cold at night; its ochres turned deep into cobalt. What happens in the turn of those lines is the fall of rain is a bodily gesture, the fall of your shoulders. Like sigh before sleep or hold me. Both kinds of soft between element and form are just memory’s fall, and a longing that is ambient and prolonged like those four hour looped videos where the song is slowed down and rain sounds are added. Its weird twist is dark ecological: I love and you as the other with your shoulders, their fall, I love I am rain old rain we are just that falling or were. There is a sense, if vague, of when it happened, of summer. Somewhere. I would send a postcard with those lines and make a cliché of the feeling. Clichés are like rain; they fall all around us and that too is cliché. In London I learned to long for the rain. 

My trips around the Surf Club, is that a name for this desert, some place out and aching, are not knowing what I’m looking for, the lake of life or death. There was a body of unknowable time at the beginning of pandemic that felt like a lake, a dark one with monsters inside it. You were scared to touch. The virus was a hyperobject and it lived in the lake and became us. So I thought what it meant to carry the lake. Like if you could tie it to your Kanken and drag the lake on a walk every day, make it lose weight. Could you test the lake, dump chemicals in it, starve it, piss in it? Was this abuse? My poor lake, resting at the edge of the desert. The lake was too much: overstretched, overburdened. Eventually I would bathe in it, but that was July, just before a morning of rain and the fall of your shoulders / brush back hair. Aeolian breath above the lake.

A thought crossed Derrida’s mind ‘to follow the edges of lakes’ in a novel. A very long novel but only a day. Sometimes we say ‘it feels Mediterranean’ and is it a warm breeze off the sea, a quality of something vermillion splashed against turquoise? Like Dorothea Lasky (if I remember her essay on colour correctly, perhaps there is a colourblindness to memory) I always loved that combination. But it grew too much and mostly I stopped painting in those colours. Can there be too much blue in your life? We compare eye colour on Zoom and there is what, somethingsomething pixelation of the soul, which is almost good, is it. The inland sea of WhatsApp green, or the rising tides of Facebook blue. An irritant gets into the ocean. This is how a pearl is formed, and we worry it into August. 

August: the commonplace between seasons. What was formerly meant by holiday. Halpern’s weak link is something about tendency, which is a quality of patiency, surely:

[——] = a common place we can’t sense, but upon which all we perceive depends

In the book, the double em-dash is more than that, because there is no gap in the line. I don’t know how to recreate that here. Rachel Blau DuPlessis often uses the commonplace of a line, this continuity, asking questions like 

Did these years have to happen
the way they did?______________

______________. The poem, unwritten
is concealed by the poem,

written.

(Surge: Drafts 96-114)

This is from a poem called ‘Draft 100: Gap’. I feel urged to fill in the blanks, but then suddenly don’t. Mind the gap? I am mindful of my tendency to make lines into rivers. This is a temporal effect: ‘The body of water a particular time of day resembles’, writes Lucy Ives in ‘Catalogue’, not answering the proposition except to parenthesise ‘candida’ in brackets (). Parasites again. You can’t starve them so much as you must cut off the oxygen altogether. They want sugar! Like rubbing words out of your poem is a kind of excision necessary to let the reader in: an exchange of space. But is a blank also a body of water? Let us lie down in the blanks, one or more acts of patiency. The edge of my body at the edge of the lake, which was almost erased, became two-dimensional. Was it the politicians who did this, or the semioticians? Surge, surge, surge…

Without touch, I could not plunge into the body of water for several months. Returning was two-sided, flickering. It was turning the river to a mobius strip. The river that led to the lake? No pictures were taken, but words were written…

The other’s body was divided: on one side, the body proper—skin, eyes—tender, warm; and on the other side, the voice—abrupt, reserved, subject to fits of remoteness, a voice which did not give what the body gave. Or further: on one side, the soft, warm, downy, adorable body, and on the other, the ringing, well-formed, worldly voice—always the voice.    

(Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)

In his telegraphic dashes, Barthes evokes the voice on the line, between lines, electric crackle. I am on the end of a telephone listening to what I thought was rain but was only white noise or the manifest difference of space between us. For once, not time; though still there was time between us, before which we could meet. The body could always give more, which is why Derrida would venture the IRL lakes to follow a postal cartography. Here where I received this text, sparkle emoji, a picture of sunset forgetting I’d sent… But what if the voice became a body in tender distance? A kind of tendering in itself? If it was all we had of those months, and could cradle ourselves to sleep in it…

We look back on the years that are happening and wonder if they ‘have’ to happen this way. There are divisions, revisions; something that gives and receives. A year is impossible. The depth of a lake without measure. I could not tie it to my horse and ride away. Salt and sweet. The difference between lake and inland sea depended on your idea of ‘freshness’, but in Cancer season I delved in the water. We called it a loch, though named it was ‘Lake’. Always the voice / settles cool on the water. 

Down becomes a colour. Peach stuck, clouded. A snapshot from my enviro-diary in spring: 

I realised there had to be exits from ‘lavender country’, even if I felt implicated in the earth forever. What had I otherwise written of the wild mountain thyme, the purple heather. I had. 

What Andersson wrote of hope, ‘If Hope can find oxygen, it will’ recalls Angel Olsen’s song, ‘If It’s Alive, It Will’ and you can’t help thinking about the ‘it’. This thin word of the thing itself. Love? The song, the poem? ‘My friend you are unique but not always / Some stranger in the well has surely felt your pain […] And all the things you’ve once said / Your thoughts exist in someone else’s head’. So we are parasites of a mutual speech, second body, patiency. It’s going on elsewhere,, echo,, echo. I saw the police queuing for pizza. I saw mothers outside supermarkets, I saw masks trampled into the towpath. I saw your breath left a mark on the bathroom mirror. If anything is taught now it is that pain is not unique in its total uniqueness. It is also a misting — these noticing moments like the colour of your eyes on webcam, or when I saw a friend by the river or the cygnets when they were still small, and charcoal. Touch, know that we live. ‘A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful’ (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse). The weak link ( — ) of ‘a common place we can’t sense, but upon which all we perceive depends’ (Halpern). The more we send, the more links accumulate. This is not some metaphor leading into Connell’s chain, or the blockchain, the chain of being or food chain, but something like when I recently went to visit my Nan for the first time in nearly two years I saw she was wearing the gold chain I remembered. It remains a ghost fact against my clavicle. Gilded, some arterial link between times, the artefact worn of all years, not mine.

And did that path or the other
lead anywhere?_________________?

________________? The other 
side of words_______________.

(Blau DuPlessis, Surge: Drafts 96-114)

A path can be dangerous, like hope. So I see it not as a route so much as this mark of the common place, where you enter the poem. Echo. It is not so much I who is writing. Someone is pouring clementine fizz into the glassware someone else will inherit. An embrace is made possible because of this. If it’s alive, it will. The other side of words or the strangers in the well you threw a coin into. I was always wishing on fountains. Could I eavesdrop on what went on inside your sleep? It was trouble enough to listen to mine. Quiet plash. Your breath like the ocean beside me, etc. 

Hope and not-hope. I am obsessed with this passage from Verity Spott’s forthcoming Hopelessness (2020). ‘I hope. You hope’, she writes:

‘I wondered if it was enough to extract a sentence and hope something would ramify from there, like crystal’, writes Brian Dillon in Suppose a Sentence (2020). That word ‘hope’ again! To put faith in the art of essaying, you manifest from the sentence, say. But isn’t extraction bad? Verity writes an incredible sentence. Love contracts, there is a terminus, there is no harbour, is it that thoughts overfall or flow before water. There are strange moments where you fall into iambic rhythm, ‘would shrink like necks passed out’ and find yourself taking perverse pleasure in the pulse of that action, complicit. I fell asleep at the desk, put a crick in my neck. If Verity’s sentence is a crystal it is so splintering hot that to hold it I had already thrown it towards you like catch and here we are passing those lines between each other like ouch! or whoosh! as it goes through the air then starts to stream — is it light or water that sprays off the sentence, falling or lifting we get it back up we get going again, so being itself is contingent, there is a feeling of tilting, just touching between something like what Adrienne Lenker sings in ‘Mary’ — a most verbose song with the lines the lines the lines like fractals, repeats, alliterative, the rhymes inside it — ‘The violent tenderness / The sweetest silence / The clay you find is fortified / We felt unfocused fade the line’, it’s a blur then, even if the object is hard, ‘my vested shot’ like bullets are thoughts, ‘get fucked’ (a reminder that we die or desire, no, we could be ejected by the speaker, why not), leave holds inside us and the ullulation maybe of lift/leak/blink/light/love/cryssalis/live/like/laugh/will, hear the undersong packed inside the block, LA LA LA LA CAN I HEAR YOU? to put this in the kiln of language and wait, tender, splintered political speech is the romantic filibuster of ‘on and on and on and on’ worn in a ring without rose, lust, health, being messed up by time and order, ‘and change not come it not does come to who those wait’ as if to be the subject doing object to the thing itself, no is that not right, I’m in the stream of it, ‘where else’, ‘that change’, well I feel gentle to read this to you aloud and think poetry is it never could smile like lift this up what’s underneath, ‘screaching night’ of fizzy things in vessels, ‘pouring thoughts I made them up, so what’, a fall of your shoulders, softly, who cares, ‘wry out’ did I twist that humour is lyric always sincere, I care (?) is it the very empowerment or dressage of the poem that makes it ‘shot’, tongue tangled, get shot, ‘hurt the air’, ‘get fucked’, I love you, whole world is metamorphosis. It’s for love or dream or death, ‘if you fall great down’ a white-hot crystal. Stammering light of I love you. So keep repeating the sentence forever it’s the estuary (ex)change in my head where the diamond melted; I go out like a river, a light, it’s so many; I lift crisp, iridescent leaf to find you in process…‘scarless along the rib, as if to say’ (Halpern). Small wet thing w/ almost wings. ‘Soon come’ is a charm I have held all summer, ‘Where goes? I guess’ / the flight, the train, the swim, the breath… 

According to my diary, in 2020 I had nineteen dreams about breath. These are some:

but maybe this is a lesson in being able to let go and breathe deep and keep going, rather than hinge on another lag. Oh hinge is another app right, maybe I should get that. 

 I started to do long deep breaths.

I would come out in the breaks to breathe fresh air among the tumbling ivy. My aching head, my burned-out lungs. I eat too much!

A lavender girl with this expensive complexion and a close-shaved head was underwater for a very long time and when she bobbed to the surface, numb and curled in the foetal position, she moaned something about “I wanted to give up my breath”. And we realised this was the currency of all these submersions: losing your breath. There were many people doing it, just bobbing to die in the water. 

I don’t have a shortness of breath or any particular fever beyond what you usually wake up to after too much sugar

Last night at four in the morning I finished A Breath of Life in a sort of tired rapture, still very awake, leaning back into my eyes and my soul a while, the sense that it might go on forever, whatever ‘it’ is, cross-referenced of course with Àgua Viva

Started to have trouble breathing, a sort of slanted weight on my chest. I guess sometimes I suffer from very minor sleep apnoea, like the Beach Fossils song

Disorientating to wake up from a dream with so many people, almost like I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing, I had to pull off my jumper

I feel this pressure, like I won’t be able to breathe and I won’t. In the dream I was between two tribes and there were guns I suppose, other weapons. Loosely I was in love with someone on the wrong side and so my loyalties were confused and I knew my life was at stake, the others having pressed knives to my throat to warn me, given me a bracelet I knew contained a location tag. I want to be dazzled by leaves and tiny pieces of unmentionable silver.

She went away and I was sort of left in this state of zero energy, desperately trying to gather up selected marbles to give out to whoever was still left in the boarding house. And then I sort of dried up, paralysed, barely able to breathe. 

 A few people joked about moshing. I miss the rupture of something going shoulder to shoulder. I miss the general blaze of sweat. How is it to breathe in a basement.

I want to feel like the blanks between dreams, ekstatic spaces between sleep (fall asleep to yr voice again), are bodies of water. Àgua Viva: running water, fresh water; variously translated as stream of life. Another writer who wields the dash, flies on the line, which is also the spray, the beam of light, is of course Clarice Lispector: 

Today I finished the canvas I told you about: curves that intersect in fine black lines, and you, with your habit of wanting to know why—I’m not interested in that, the cause is past matter—will ask me why the fine black lines? because of the same secret that now makes me write as if to you, writing something round and rolled up and warm, but sometimes cold as the fresh instants, the water of an ever-trembling stream. Can what I painted on this canvas be put into words? Just as the silent word can be suggested by a musical sound.  

(Àgua Viva, trans. by Benjamin Moser)

Who is she talking to, writing to? The fine black lines of moth wings draw up a thought. It is a cashmere reality and I am tugged at the holes. In the subjunctive, only ‘as if’ writing to you; she can preserve the stream, the weave, the cold splash of secrets. This is only towards the act of communication itself. All works of ekphrasis, all spirals of daylight, all times I turned on the tap and for what? Could I wash myself back into a blank, or what luxury to preserve in the mud on my shins, the marks of ink up my arms, mascara’d tears around my eyes, the blood running down the inside of my thighs? In the water, it would all run into trembling lines, purple blur, it would circle the drain, would never stop————————————

~

MUNA – It’s Gonna Be Okay, Baby

Tim Heidecker feat. Weyes Blood – Fear of Death

Lens Mozer – All My Friends

Disq – I Know What It’s Like

Martha Ffion – Nights to Forget

FKA twigs – Water Me

The 1975 – Frail State of Mind

The Kundalini Genie – Can’t Get You Out My Mind

Bright Eyes – Just Once in the World

Lucinda Williams – Overtime

Joan Baez – North Country Blues

Elliott Smith – Pitseleh

Sia – Breathe Me

Bloc Party – Biko 

John Prine – Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)

Joanna Sternberg – Nothing Makes My Heart Sing

Big Thief – Mary

Angel Olsen – Waving, Smiling

Sarah Davachi – Play the Ghost

Tomberlin – Wasted 

billie eilish – my future 

Yo La Tengo – Nowhere Near 

La Force – You Amaze Me

A.G. Cook – Crimson and Clover (cover)

DJ Shadow – Midnight in a Perfect World

Playlist: July 2020

landscape painting with green triangle

lime green triangle

 

and Spicer says, ‘don’t worry I will tell you everything’. this is the dream where you appear as a lime green triangle and there is nothing I can do _ lime green isosceles learning spelling looking at the great internet for hours, very lightly _ lime green isosceles learning your angles /

 

                                                                       \ if you appear to me lime again, full-flesh of note

I know a great red splash will appear on the side of the morning, best side, coffee breath not four hours on call, or shepherd style. So how a triangle holds me like every brushstroke, something gestural in lieu of a writerly end. July, july, like who is writing?
(so nice
out of your window the mews were, smoke-warm lung
just one
accident) is a landscape even real? where is my juul, my eye?
There is this line in Katie Dey’s ‘Bearing’ (mydata) which goes, ‘I am warm by her username’.
None of ever disembodied; always a record of brushstroke, beautiful people on the pavement outside and bouncing a trite kind of fungible language, who goes. To shop for that same geometry. It tumbled out of the wow so luminous. this dream I kept having about going for half a Guinness with you / and all pretty drunk on aphid dependence
is jangle
is jangle                     expensive impressionable air!
look up from the mic it’s there, like yellow flower
went in tesco wearing a mask
felt lux of outside
purchase protect like
there is so much of so little bread in the world
‘But I write
you tomorrow, I always say it in the present’, says Derrida, of a bookleaf letter.
Look who’s shining back, sarments of a username. what is the use value of
removing the bees from the kelvin meadow? sweet carb, sometimes
I am barely iris
growing sideways
and the milk is sour trochee / streak of copper
want to draw us a room to live in
depth of field, dappled motion. Like a ramen hack
all it takes slight pinch of telling you everything. like we camp this close to the website
with duckmice, star anise . . .
growing sideways
that season I got everything early. and it was all good, kind to me
very bloodful much dawn, little saltish, waking only to sleep again to vague
dreamnote will you go
sent up to Parkland or like
a sluice of weather, let me swipe it from yr brow. wild
reclaiming the word for thyme vibration
abundant / gold sounds / this
you is more / Disentangle
prettily the screen again, hair in fist and first / make space for your
space it_ Don’t worry I will tell everything
by the sheen of my wrists a bracelet
of upstroke acoustic lines of steel, latching sun.
Best side, coffee a short breath upon pale-coloured air is how have you slept,
synchronise “morning” for warming, always already
I had that poem about the warm London air and
wanting to kiss us, where did it go
the poem
cut thru a land &
dumb smoke without snow as it was in Glasgow, then
lemon balm smoking a natural data by summerised fountain, four
in the not now morning
O wow like salt lakes
look at us float!           no money
you can or can’t say swim
you swap pronoun for leaf
Like
leaf is barely iris
leaf is barely eating
leaf is barely anyone
I was so happy to just say afk :                                    )
breathe me / is only the accidental priceless picnic
of being barely alive like
somebody taking a polaroid, here in my doll’s dress
I-i mean leaf never felt sick as america, except to say sickening!!!!
the worry of telling you everything, that’s practice
so much I would crisp by it, hot swear
everything bluegrass
nude in the
locket of
new soft animal shapes
“golden green, red blue”
These are just lights! growing sideways
you pull up slick at the station, leaf coming
before say come
round the corner you
narrate my emails
deleting erotic gasoline, plainsong smelled of triangle
caught you in chord. lime green over Laura Nyro
say what I held in my hand was just
neat spliff
or tiny bird
the heather all over the heather
wild I keep wanting to say it would never go
just about purple
best thing I ever saw or heard
no name of a name
learning to spell say oxeye by the layby
eat three almonds, live in Japan
to jumpstart
liked songs make wonderful life / it’s coming

~

Aye Nako – Sissy

Tacocat – I Hate the Weekend

The Kinks – Rats

Orange Juice – I Guess I’m Just a Little Too Sensitive

R.E.M. – Crush With Eyeliner

CAN – Moonshake

Khruangbin – Time (You and I)

Klein, MONG_WOONG – V3

PJ Harvey, Thom Yorke – This Mess We’re In

U.S. Girls – Rosebud

King Krule – Stoned Again

Sonic Youth – Bull in the Heather

Thee Oh Sees – The Axis

Sun Ra – When There is No Sun

Fire-Toolz – It’s Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer

NNAMDÏ – Glass Casket

Thanya Iyer – Always, Be Together

Christelle Bofale – Moving On, Getting On

Toro y Moi feat. Old Grape God – tron_new_rose_hifi_v2

James Blake – Are You Even Real?

Porridge Radio, Lala Lala – Good For You

Immaterial Possession – Tropical Still Life

Sharon Van Etten – Malibu

Silver Jews – Animal Shapes

Modern Nature – Halo

Fair Mothers, Faith Eliott, Esther Swift – Monochrome

Magnolia Electric Co. – Josephine

David Bowie – Wild Is the Wind

Karen Dalton – Little Bit of Rain

Christian Lee Hutson – Northsiders

Portishead – Deep Waters

Elliott Smith – Whatever (Folk Song in C)

Sparklehorse – Sunshine

Joan Baez – The Wild Mountain Thyme