FROM:

She traces the letters, collecting them into future wor(l)ds, into simulated captivity, a waking sleep. A new kind of cursive links them together, letter by letter, cell by cell, weaving an intricate network of neurons electrifying themselves into bi-polar mania—her head feels as if it’s breaking in two, the halves becoming separate but whole in themselves. Reproduction through cellular division. They are walking …

The word is a bridge. There are clues scattered through dead leaves and discarded lives, buried and bones licked clean, but I won’t fret over the absence. I won’t remember, I will be given pills that allow for the chemical compression of thought, to induce the constant mechanical confessions, the small and shallow rituals essential for assimilation into society, into civilization, into an act-less play of liars reaching out to the end of time like an infinite train collapsing upon itself at an unexpected point of termination. My mind will slow and swell to the proportions of permanent concussion. My skin will break and bleed, turn shallow, porous, brittle and unbearably alive. I’ll walk around in a blood red robe of bared muscle through rooms of the past, histories redecorated, rearranged or re-imagined. The Body will die and the I will become a definition in transition. The definition is innate in the identity, an identity which calls its own existence into question. I think therefore I suffer. Definition doesn’t equal existence, does it?

… through a field, over a stream, what remains of a once mighty river—tears.

Two looks back and her lover is gone.

* * *

COMMUNICATION FOR THE SPEECHLESS
Tyann Prentice
[handsewn limited-edition]

A story the mind tells itself, in space instead of time. Familiar office landscapes without proper pass code, no ID, a message scrolled on the reader’s arm in layers. Damp and dark motel interiors, and the dread of imminent sex. A detached and fearful movement irrevocably forward for better and for worse.

In the night-sea voyage of things manmade, of words, Two—the author’s surrogate and our own—makes her way. Messages pale, letters reverse and bleed through the pages, toggling the mirror and offering up another one’s self. Control is granted an occult reprieve, however briefly, and silence swallows its tail.

“I pick up a scrap of paper off the floor, and begin to read. I am born,” and so, in turn, are we.

$10 (plus $2 shipping)
[PAYPAL w/ address to typicalty@gmail.com]

FROM:

HE GUESSED THE best book would have to be a scab you picked until at last you had become its scar.

Pages ripped in new beginnings taking lost as what’s inherited. Doubt making itself something less subtle, less refined, more for the divinely fucked. A wrench thrown into the gears of an old machine assimilated. The new machine takes on the wrenching jam its function. The machine swells outward, wholly rendered to a cog in ever-greater framework.

I think I can, says the Little Engine, and thus I must. For I am. The furnace of thought knows only forward motion, no matter how each snowflaked lump of coal — each one itself a shadow’s fleeting fingerprint — is flung by shoveling in. Those miners what broke those bulky chucks of black from the malignant lungs of mountains knew no different. The pick-ax swings in constant night inside the earth until the last fat canary sings and keels over, and we get our fought for pension.

In this way, says the Little Engine, all is ordained. I can no more veer from the track laid out before me than the heartbroke boy in his Honda Accord can break his migratory pattern. The world as I know it is but a bending and breaking away, a single wave of the landscape goodbye. All places, therefore, from my single eye reach complete homogeny, and stillness, when the Captain sleeps, is death by stasis.

The smokestack chugging continues to roar its winding inquiry through the pines, the hills, following its wood-and-iron spine.

Forgetful not, an elephant is such. But as for the one who strays far from the herd to take up life among spiders and men, tightrope-walking a single strand of web — is he as much his ancestors? Does he also know those spots thought back by generation, or is the song he sings his own safety? Will these men, despite a surface kindness, not kill him, take his tusks — beloved tusks! — for a piano in some future that no epic past is able to foresee?

He wobbles on the wire, the umbrella clutched in his truck tuning desperately for balance. This is what it means to leave, he thinks.

[...]

ONCE INSIDE, DID Jonah did Gepetto come to know the workings of the whale? In wandering its hollows, one imagines stumbling onto the cave paintings left by those who came before: details of what the great beast’s seasons bring, when to harvest, how to please the idols of its organs, which parasites to kill and eat and which to be avoided.

How to watch, for example, for the light to shine through in those few precious moments when the whale breaks the surface to breathe.

* * *

THE SOUND EYE
Garett Strickland
[handsewn limited-edition]

A long prose-poem and initial incarnation of the fruit birthed of blackening, a proto sound-cartoon of text dictated through tumult and guided by the light unshuttered. Grotesque figures whisper and jeer lascivious as ever-vigilant the voice seeks source unto the midst of identity unraveling and finding its coat. A unique pedigree of putrefaction for those who like their literature with a sizable dash of surrealist alchemy. Presented in befitting negredo.

$10 (plus $2 shipping) SOLD OUT

Taking when and oft regarding not a word as necessary, what lives inside our mouths exactly in the moments off the trail? Flies could hatch there, surely, and have at past swarmed out. Of course we have our ways to deal.

And yes funny sad sad funny is the flight of those who scared of bridges would rather just prefer to swim or hitch their rides from Charon. But still, but true, the silence doesn’t need us to say what it has to make. One can pick any number of shells off the bows of trees to see. The films you spin inside are better than what’s playing at the plex. Nonetheless, we manage mostly to make our due with what we does, and the struggles therewith are our forgivenesses.

Some would say our fault a great regression, a measure taken of relative worth is better than nothing at all. This whale, though, ain’t goin’ nowhere, because more or less it’s all the sky from here and whatever counts to confront in one’s insides is sure enough to swallow. Though not without some difficulties.

The sea in the nowtime has become a calmness, thankful coming to us the family we had lost. But slow. Mercy. That what we choose is to strip off comfort, to ease up the compression of invisible hands. We cannot confess to being other than clay dug from the banks of native rivers, sure, or what unfurls itself between them. But we can always leave. As long, that is, for right reason.

Still, brother/sister, can you spare a paradigm? Who we are is who we’ve already met, and though they only know the words, like insects, swarm under our skin, seldom have they seen. Many will pass away untouched by prophecy. Still, breath. Still, a bat out of heaven. A dove out of hell. A purgatory held behind teeth will soon make its shift, both feet running up the spiral skies of the bridge we’ll build, my friends, together.

And so, on the solstice, we set out, with the only of us that was left, what we could carry on our backs, in our mouths, the space between our thoughts. The first day found two stories in the worst way in a bypassing barn. Regarding the wave, one was frozen: a man swallowing his own face. The coast was a graveyard for the wooden bones of whales, a picnic of prehistory. Our drive a stitch of sea and cliff, a whale frozen div(in)ing the air. This was and is a special place set up to watch. We wind.

Consider this a whinnied hymn in the face of sinister reason. It’s not about a footprint placed on what’s unreachable. Far from wishing to weaken that gift of internal crises which lay the groundwork for the future, that heaviness of mysterious disturbances of ideas and feelings, those disconcerting anticipations absolutely disproportionate to the struggles of real life, our plan is to cultivate to its furthest limit a certain power of penetrating the future, of forgetting the past, of calculating the secret motives that cause men to act. But within this music whose harmonies are so new, it is never possible to take into consideration the concept of number. We work on the other side of time. We wind our way around the devil’s punchbowl, a sunken grade the lighthouse keeps to itself. We trudge a safety corridor among the mists of sand.

A fire hydrant in the middle of the forest. The friendliest. An outstanding natural area. Wax works, a gate. Keeping to the little creed. A tent in town. Fire works. A man swallows his own face, an arctic circle. Pencil port, heat source. We cross a bridge and sight the ocean’s cervix.

(And now! what did we wish to say, that we were not able to say?)

No one has been able to know THE TRAVELOGUE OF AN IMMOBILE NOMAD as it was written in original. This mirror is a palimpsest, undressing by the skin of one’s eyes. Its place in the ARK/HIVE is final, but not shored. It pulls its moat, its sea about it like a skirt, the suit you wear despite the climate. One cannot dive alone, and hence untrulyknowable. This: a noble stenography of echos inside Plato’s fucked-up cave and hollered out its opening to the floating ear that lives there like an island. It is, in its own way, an accurate photography, for only aether traces can be artifactioned into ink. And, in fact, as the star climbs ever higher, one can see an unfurling ladder of silvery rays whose lower extremity brushes the crests of the waves. Whispering silence, an eye that clicks as it blinks between lines. Finally.