Pain rests within me like toxic algal bloom in the wine-dark sea. It courses through my body fleshing out the contours of a poetic impulse akin to renaturation, it screams in color—it screams in Homer’s presumed absence of blue. On some nights, it resurfaces the mind-body problem and reshapes it into a pseudo-debate before my eyes, into something that in its strive to go beyond experience, beyond the place where reason and intellect reside, erases itself in chaotic movement. In the midst of a flare-up, the mind-body dualism mutates into an illusion—illness both becomes and expunges the hyphen. And henceforth, it would seem that the ontological problem of hurting and aching and throbbing gains a curious and rather tragic destiny as well: that of being able to exist and be established solely at the cost of illusions, at the cost of reason’s chimeras. That of being unable to possess clarity except by analyzing its own decomposition, by disintegrating and dissipating its own chimeras, and thus obliterating all fantasies. Vertical like a pendulum’s rod, I let myself be worked on by death.[1] Pain possesses and abandons my body at will. Before my eyes, philosophical creation becomes neuropathically synonymous with the confusion of the patient.
Continue reading “PATHOGENESIS by Christina Tudor-Sideri”
of two orders
something else entirely. some other thing to see. not only at night or when lost in the basements of this world but in the bright day. in the brightness of the day. to see something else among the common. to see something else even there in the light in the house in the street. something revealed. something that in the past might have inspired a new line. a new belief. to see it. so that two visions could hold me. that of the eyes and that of this other sight. whatever it might be. whatever it might have been. Continue reading “of two orders by Clark Chatlain”
KETA-ME: My Ketamine Experience
I’m not certain of the order of each moment once the ketamine infusion began. But I do feel certain that I was aware of everything that was happening and that I was consciously guiding my experience and my thoughts while this mind-altering drug was filtering through my bloodstream. This, of course, stems from my penchant for controlling everything. Continue reading “KETA-ME: My Ketamine Experience by Joseph Ellison Brockway”
Faith Is An Egg With A Thin Shell
Faith is a word I hold in my hand, safe in my palm, enclosed by the nest of my upturned fingers. Take faith to the lips: said, spoken, delivered, a birth of song spills from a secret mouth. If you speak faith, the five letters advance with an F, stridently like a French ‘fanfare’, a lawless, troubadour’s marching band. Then the word melts in the wind of aaaith, an elongated, rushing sound. Faith closes with the delicateness of th. Place the tongue, feather-light, by the teeth. Faith, faith, faith.
Rilke said, “Have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you Continue reading “Faith Is An Egg With A Thin Shell – Susanna Crossman”
Rings
We hadn’t wanted to go out, had even considered changing our minds with a lateness sure to offend, in order to enjoy the cool inside of the house with its scent of fresh cedar, its hardworking fan. But we mustered the resources we had, slipped on our sandals and passed over the threshold. The invitation had been extended to us with such excitement that there was no choice but to attend, despite our prejudices against classical art and the theatre, here found in the same work. Continue reading “Rings – Jessica Sequeira”
I am not from here. I am from somewhere in between push and pull. I am a thrust not yet experienced by what people usually call ‘home’. I am exiled. I am exile. I reside not in my consciousness, but in the lingering smell of last night’s cigarettes and rain drops. In the burning of pages. In the hunger for belonging, which I feed with matches, flames, and the ashes of what were once my journals, my essays on the flesh of the world, my notebooks, my manuscripts, my resolutions, my shopping lists, my thoughts on the nightstand. Exile. Soft, felt in my hands. Felt in yours. Grasping its shape, fingering its texture, sensing its temperature. Exile, mingled with memorabilia and all the angers of the world. I live with it as one lives with a strong sense of physical presence, something to cling to until I get better. Something to keep me going. Being a gesture, becoming an extension of its flesh. That’s what exile is to me. A grave. Luscious. Infinite. Sarcophagus of blessed souls. I am pulling you into the depths of it. Exile, exceptional euphemism. Continue reading “Exile, intensive care by Christina Tudor-Sideri”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 