“Memories resurfacing” … “coagulating underneath the meniscus” … “slowly lifting over the crest” … “kino eye gazes down upon my apartment” … “witnesses our inadequate sex” … “the timid approach and delicate placement of your hands” … “there is no good fuck” … “the fragments will have to be assembled later” … “Blondboy” … “Deadboy” … “Oldboy” … “Tommyboy” … “another silhouette waiting over the horizon” … “sunset is green or burgundy” … “they’ve stopped firing rockets in the middle of the night” … “I delay my need for glasses” … “the eye doctor tells me that I can only see the past” … “not what is happening in front of me” … “medical time is organized into a linear model” … “it becomes difficult to project myself” … “smut-maker gives his body to people he does not know” … “he collects these encounters” … “builds an altar from cum and diorite” … “attempts to summon a new boy” … “no more boys” … “stone turns luminous and then returns to normal” … “opaque and speckled” … “black and white flecks” … “he assumes that this must have meant something” … “and feels the motivation to begin projecting again” … “extracting his self from the corporeal and bringing it somewhere else” … “the next fuck” … “columns of cardboard and plastic” … “replicas of the human body” … “mythological images made from new materials” … “in the tradition of Katrina Fritsch” … “vibrant anatomies” … “dilapidated in overgrowth and the slow process of polymer decay” … “I don’t know where the path leads” … “narrator-fool sleeps somewhere in the woods” … “nowhere identifiable” … “smoke rises” … “disembodied voices map the actions of a beheaded deity” … “I am caught in the act of severing” … “it does not matter” … “you are not involved” … “Tommyboy is somewhere else now” … “somewhere north of Antwerp” … “rumors of defunct silos outside of Mexico City” … “or in the Sonora Desert” … “Russian operatives gift old helicopters to the Honduran government” … “they must have three or four now” … “this path is not tropical” … “we live in a high desert” … “in the shadow of someone unrecognizable.”

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“Post-Erotic Ritual Text” is an excerpt from Smut-Maker, a 72 act performance piece comprised of over 3,000 fragments, all spoken by different voices. Smut-Maker will be published by Inside the Castle in March 2020.

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Mike Corrao is the author of two novels, Man, Oh Man (Orson’s Publishing) and Gut Text (11:11 Press), one chapbook, Avian Funeral March (Self-Fuck), and many short films. Along with earning a Best of the Net nomination, Mike’s work has been featured in publications such as Entropy, Collagist, Always Crashing, and The Portland Review. He lives in Minneapolis. Learn more at www.mikecorrao.com.

Banner image: Oneirograph by James Knight