From “The Notebook of Cherry Androgynous”

Alexander Benedict | The Notebook of Cherry Androgynous | Jagged Edge Press | June 2026 | 29 pages

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Cherry Androgynous Writes to You

Cherry Androgynous, Prince of Distortion, 
          Priestess of an Anti-Order, 
          Organ and Void of Christ. 

Cherry Androgynous, the mother who was never born, 
the anomic growth in the waters of the printing press. 
Peel them from the rollers.

Cherry Androgynous tries on old dance costumes 
from under your childhood bed and writes to you in their notebook: 

          This is a tangent world. 
          I want to be desired by the spirit of emptiness. 
          I have become dear to her. 

          Crush a frog named Kusala. 
          If I told you they were made of stone, 
          would you believe me any more, any less?

When reading, always have recourse to another delight. And I am always reading. So often that I have nothing to say of myself. As in funerary paper, I punch holes in my memory, my home through which a world of purity penetrates me. Its interiors are all pornography. Its exoskeletal walls are an unheard density of spirit. Its wells are of an unknown depth. I toss a stone to the only point of light I have known. This is the light I read by. I live among these cisterns. 

Pass the bottle born from your eyes. Clouded, clotted. We will make America pay for its crimes one dinner party at a time. The nights are unendurable as ever. I imagine circling this valley with my tongue, my tongue whose grooved roof gives way to no canopy. A room that has no place in a nonexistent home. We meet here. Our feathered tongues, our feathered mothers crushed underfoot. 

I watch, I dream of watching the tortured photographs of our former lives peel from your nails like the gold paint of a saintless triptych, your skin without surface, your eyes without season. We will be laughing with the birds floating on the lake! I have made a table on which the Doll Tome may rest. I will write our history. The history of a daughter’s laugh from a family without history. You cannot decide to be a child, but discover in yourself the need to be fantasized. 

Consort to Kali still swinging from her neck, my wife’s intestines forever digesting an orphic stone, my wife who is not my wife, who sees nothing in my eyes but ivy, whose intestines digest themselves. I coil them around my wrist and make a charm of them. A charm for what? It says to me: Aspire only to be the sometimes mistress of a subterranean slave to a microminiature, parasitic worm. 

And you reply: I see only in splinters. I see you. I see splinters in your face. My still awkward letters and short breaths caught against you. You . . . for you I make a corpse of my letters. I make it look difficult but nothing could be any easier. 

I am photographed in derek jarman’s garden. I am photographed like derek jarman in Monet’s garden. I am photographed. I am photographed like Williams among a tree of white flowers, smiling, but I turn back to you now, expressionless and wreathed in Wisteria. You photograph me without asking, and nothing could be more pleasing to me. 

The mountain parasite to another dawn. The parasite parasitic to another of its kind. The tongue-mimic. The assimilated limb. The parasite not feeding on its host but giving all that remains of its life. This body that is cemetery to the timeless aspect of your dovelike death. My funerary pen parasite to your impressions. The lace tablecloth on which we place our clay cups. The calendar of our sacrifices. The sacrifices for which we plan and all those we know we cannot. I still have yet to sacrifice anything. 

There, where all the coffeehouses and bars are buried under the squall, and the lake is rising, and the sound of your footsteps fill your path once again, and the lake is falling and footprints other than your own still litter the streets. But the birds do not return to us, let alone for us. They rise and fall in the sky without a thought among you or I.

All that’s left for us is to climb the anal staircase. Disabuse myself of living in my very own purgatory. In adoration of sorrow, dissolve my psychoempathic emanation. Give me frontiers, frontiers . . . borderlands, borderlands . . . valleys, valleys . . . . pass with me through the eternally deferred and all-embracing moment of this promise for space. Promise yourself none of this. Promise yourself only to leave. A quiet departure, our faceless returns, our passages through the doublebound walls of memory. 

Can a life be recovered? Not redeemed, but traced to its source, already exhausted, or so completely withdrawn into the heart of itself that the blood provides only for this: 

          A Bud       Ein Kern
          A Child     Ein Keim

An open grave dug in the rain, the angelic hole in the machine bored through with a weapon so softly, how pretty lately its pregnant shame and faint my static hatred. The bulbous television screen caressing my cheeks bloodless. 

This is insomnia speak. I cut my way out of sleep. I cut my way into words. They who entered the book and couldn’t cut a way out, carrying, no, dropping suitcases of lavender suits and emerald talons and birdseed. This is the confusion I carry with me like a curtain of borrowed eyelashes. But could you wear them nearly so well?

How sweet the sounds of the city an hour before sunset. How bitter to live in your grace. Wrap for me your discarded bladders and stomachs in a wolf pelt, and set them down in a field of colons. I may not outlive you, but my death has outlasted you. A single night of rain. Your eternity falls and rots like the trees. Let yourself fall onto the floor of pine needles. Nothing could be more comforting than this eternity. Now come to me as through a screen of monarchs. Rest with me for awhile. I cannot rest. 

Accept nothing from me but this kindness. Expect everything of me. Accept nothing from me but a kind of hatred that I cannot understand, which rises from my voice like frost as I begin to speak in the words of twice dead friends. Twice born and twice dead myself. 

The Queen of Ticks, An Interlude

     You remember, I loved the soil so much, and I would dig 
     up the flowers, just to be able to plant them again; you 
     remember, I often said: If I were a little bird, you would 
     put me in your pocket where you go. Oh, my love, I am 
     here in the good soil like a black seed, and I am waiting 
     to be a little bird. 

     — Marcel Schwob, The Book of Monelle, 
     translated by Kit Schluter

I’m never satisfied with what I say
I’m
I’m never satisfied. I am the . . . . 

Queen of Ticks, Daughter of an Unopened Letter

If you pierce me, pierce me with your rusted awl through the 
heart. Let nothing of me spill. I will pool into myself. I will 
provide my own binding.

Queen of Ticks, In Devotion to the Mother of the Unborn

You who supersede me. You who precede your own act—the 
sinless birth. Could there be any greater heresy? Perverse in 
prayer the closed heart conceals its faith in broken lampshades.

Queen of Ticks, My Undiscovered Tongue

They who stumble through the streets, make the sign of the cross hurriedly, and spit on trees . . . . witness the crowning of her deathless sacrifice. These gestures are not ticks. No burnt bread or shattered chalice. All these gestures are ticks. All my words scraped off like ticks from the infant curled in the cup. They who still have yet to breathe or feed from their own mouth, the changeling who prays at the tongue of your altar, ready to strangle the tribunal of judges that awaits them. Yet to be born, though conceived, from its own mouth. Its own mouth? What could live there? Those agonizing pillars impatient to fall. The bitter stone on which the child bites. Its very heart, its own anxious necessity, they who wear the rosary of fetuses, and wean off the rhetorics of faith. 

In devotion becoming of an apparition, revenant, she divides herself into fifty-two fragments—drowned in locks of the canal, buried in the frames of doorways. Hand over hand, blade over blade, she is her own audience. (She was her only evidence.) They were the Queen of Ticks. I am their courtier. They are my tongue. Yes, mine is a lost art, lost even to me, but it is the only way for me to recover my memory. She is lost to me like she is lost to herself. 

But my memory does not return to me. And now my wounds fly back to me. My wounds crawl to me, if they must, they watch me from within the shower drain clotted with hair as dark as water. Oh, my wounds, they crawl to me, under my skin, gathering in whispers of grey blood. Hallucinated insects over the grain of a false wood, printed words and whorls, my wounds which appear as wounds to you have no greater reality to me, my blood which pools so darkly and so still, still gathering against the image of myself, my self-image irrevocably adjoined to her. To me, to me she comes in white. My Sovereign. The tick that never feeds. A living gemstone. She comes in black. Her blood suspended as a veil in the air in front of her. She arrives clothed in the future of all nations. She leaves clothed in the past of your palms. Sacred nails and soft wood of her gaze, wash your hands in her selfsame innocence. She undresses into you. But that comes later. 

Already black angels crowd your bedside, confused for these pages . . . . surrounding you in the severe silences of their clipped hooves. Your umbilical tether drags me toward you. Oh, how the way of heaven takes its inevitable course without mistake! What fresh mornings and masks you pose to me! What endless bliss, what sleepless heavens! What narrow halls of the heart! I open them only to the spirit of her lost child, my still-to-be-discovered tongue. 

I recover her child, and the child of myself. I am the child recovered from her. All that could be recovered . . . . in a small wooden box engraved with a rose I found the heart she birthed, my heart—fossilized like an ancient tooth. And in a small act of mercy I was guided to her box which I found in a flooded cellar without flooring. In a puddle bellied with pale leaves no smaller than her heart, I cut open the atriums of this long abandoned organ. Here, within the rooms of my heart, I found a smashed walnut, a silver hawk, a soundless sleighbell, and a perfectly preserved frog skeleton. In the fatal rest of an eternal moment I only want to become the walls of our opened heart. But I am lost in a city no less recognizable now than myself. 

     Places I have never been seen but have always lived. 
     Places where I will never be seen.

     I no longer remember dreaming. 
     I no longer care to remember.
     I no longer dream.

     There was no ground there.
     There never was ground. 

     My name was irrelevant. 
     Your names will be irrelevant.
     The names became irrelevant once 
     your life changed. 
     The names are irrelevant. 

     Under stagnant waters of the heart, 
     I return in a lighter green.
     My name is irrelevant, iridescent. 

     I’ve never been colder than this, 
     sitting beside her: 

               My Majesty of Abducted Shadows 
                    and Other Luminous Absences . . . . 
               She pretends she is living in another city. I pretend 
                    I am living. 

               You are dying, anywhere but here. I am dying. 
                    I want to die 
               in a photograph with your angel and never 
                    be recognized where 

               I carry to you the rinds of fruit rotting in my pockets. 
                    They do not dry into my skin. 
               I want to press them into your palms, 

               but fruitflies cover me and my 
                    words. I brush them off, 
               but they return to me so gently as living silk. 

               What covers me still lives. Would you be 
               so kind as to wake me, my Queen of Ticks?