BURNING HOUSE PRESS

excerpt from Coolheaded

by Sara Wainscott

Like a skull with grass in its eyes I pass my gaze. I’ll be caught by the arm for you, caught in your hot dirty ignorance, grabs me bleak. You understand that in any lifetime we are not friendly. Proximity is not simply a question of genitals. Emoji of two pink hearts, one diacritical. You who know my noises. Learning the work, being urged onward, a garlic bulb’s paper sheath, an ocean being indecipherable. No mystery in love should you give me the controls, should you hesitate.

Each decision wants and vice versa. Language is not for talking much, flat out feeling the cold air of being first. I have read entire books repeating my mind just as a carbon track makes two trips concurrently along the ghost pines, unison of longing. I mean longing rather than meaning. A plush, toothsome longing; a ripe and purple urge.

Longing can not concede reality should all I think is language.

If I could transfer myself to an adjacency, I could tell what the hell I’m doing wrong here. From above, ants disappear into their work, their home and refuge and servitude, ants climb that vast, unseen chain originating in the sky, a picture so expansive the details blur, a future life exists regardless of the future I need to plan my outfits. Everywhere the details well up, the tree’s deformities in the table’s grain, a yellow sofa grown dull where pet hair tangles in the fabric.

Eels escape through a predator’s gills, never offering to spring for dinner, having been dinner and having been a vomitous trigger. Writhing will do that, the stomach is the organ of sympathy, salutations!

Adjacent to someplace, alive in a nonconsensual narrative, alive with memory and alive through memory, alive with forgetting, alive in the erstwhile and its demise, alive in an anti-nostalgic unforgetting, alive in forgetting as propagation’s lever, then dead and dead and dead and dead and dead and and dead and dead, dead with nothingness and being lost noplace, quite dead with forgetting, very and permanently dead, totally beyond superdead. Anyway, by virtue of mentioning the ending again I must have certainly begun, possibly several times, a long walk through a tall field, my legs itch and I can’t make out the sky’s position. I let uncertainty propel me, uncertainty and spite (speaking of oceans). Anyway, I leave forgetting to one side.

And I take up the narrative. Soon I will take up the narrative.

We arrive somewhere beyond the beginning, inside some thrilling inexactitude of meaning concocted by change, emotions inside of shared weather. Nothing happens and then nothing happens again, but less so, very nothing, strangely nothing, black-eyed nothing white dog nothing, walking a curved path through a tobacco field to nowhere and turning back. Hot in the bedroom with the windows open while the comets pass, what am I thinking of and what I am so glad about, so bright and glad and still, that compels me to say the moon was bright on one side and bleakly gray on the other, so gray and bleak and still.

Sara Wainscott is the author of Insecurity System (Persea, 2020) and The Star Cabins (Rescue Press, forthcoming). She lives at the edge of Chicago. http://www.sarawainscott.com