MANON: If this keeps up,
THE WRITER: says Manon, who looks at the sky, which is not letting up at all, not lightening anywhere,
MANON: Because it looks like it’s going to keep this up.
Today my hands have nothing to do. Nothing to cut. It is almost winter again.
You were born from the light barricaded inside our nation’s fading grace // Someone always placing hands on you //
chog an experience in eppy set: {x},{x} smeers to {yyyyyy}, concresscing, cryssle (CR) to cemend (CM). i positt a numbmur (n), it hings
Then I realized “Damn, that’s fucked up” and ruminated, chewed on grass like a lilac cow in the Alps.
The Icelandic word for lamb is “lamb,” but the village where I climb down from a tall, hot bus is called “Hvammstangi” and I’ll never learn to pronounce it quite right.
I didn’t remember ever actually introducing myself to Lizzie, didn’t remember telling the barmaid about my tenuous tenure in what passed in X for an art world, though I must have, at some point, because there she always was, hovering stern and sudden above, everything she wasn’t asking me aloud blaring through her glare.
Smoke. Morphine induced reflective flashback. Restricted area. Observe > feel > transcribe > reflect > repeat. Hospital bed. Breaking news. Large blast. Conspiracies. Message boards. Static. Dread. Cybrids. Phantom limb.
I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered. My goal was to write a book about middle America during the opioid epidemic. I ran cars full of dope boys with fake MRIs from Ohio to Florida.
I’d like the work I do to matter somehow, which is all the proof I need that it doesn’t.