Her long nails click on the keyboard. He goes for a beer. Rain or sleet in the streets, depending, and not one church bell ringing, not one. And that for weeks.
Her story spins but she keeps the clicking going and six beers later darkness enters the room. He does too, but the clicking keeps him from putting his hand on her neck, keeps him from speaking. Her story begs for a response.
The tape-recorder in the steeple broke. It can't play its ringing church bells, so the reel spins madly, up there, day and night: Slip-slip-slip. Slip-slip-slip.
People come out of their houses. Did you expect that sleet they say. It's rain, some answer. What about the bells, they ask. Let them be, some say.
She keeps on typing. It's essential, you understand. Her nails shorten. The clicking dims. She hears him say I'm going for a beer. Story of my life, she clicks.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, A New Hunger, published by Ausable Press. She has taught at several colleges and universities, including Sarah Lawrence College and the Solstice Low-Residency MFA program at Pine Manor College.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Monday, August 6, 2012
No News Today - Guest Post - Keith Nathan Brown
A Basic Guide to Cosmology and Sexual Reproduction
A vacuum of space and time along a horizon of empty bottles. Lost in a sniffling,cry-ogenic environment of nothing and nobody. A spark, a quick glance—the flash of a smile from across the bar—clumsily followed by a cosmic accident, the Big Bang. The event lasts a fraction of a second. The aftereffects, a lifetime. A seminal cloud—residual of the Bang and indebted to the ballads of dead rock stars—seeds the void with the following dynamics of growth: Frozen grains of space dust; Molecular gases; Heavy metal; Crystal meth. The crystal upon contact with the space dust—aka, angel dust—hits the street like a new phenomenon: “sticky ice”. Instead of breaking up, two incompatible bodies end up stuck together. Violence ensues. Chairs like massive chunks of rock fly through the air. Objects in space—attracted by mutual gravity—crash headlong and grow twice in size. Arrests are made. Yet within the clarity of confinement, as the nebular cloud sobers and cleans up, as the stellar outbursts fade into the past, the bond returns a bit scarred but stronger than ever. An orbit is traced through an illuminating flux of support groups. In the new life-affirming atmosphere, a realization occurs: to see oneself not as a victim of life but a source of life. On that very night, the primal mater bulges at the core and, under intense gravitational contractions, screams out obscenities, grows infernal and feverish, lashes out with blind fury until—rising out of an ocean of magma—a tiny cry emerges like the birth of a new world.
This, our noosphere:
Keith Nathan Brown received a B.S. in Physics from Marlboro College. His essay, “Network Subrealism: Sketch of an Emerging Literary Trend,” published in Puerto del Sol, traces the philosophical and technological origins of a new branch of literature. His hybrid texts and visual poetry have appeared in Word For/ Word, elimae, Unsaid and elsewhere. Embodied is his first book. He lives in Brattleboro, VT.
A vacuum of space and time along a horizon of empty bottles. Lost in a sniffling,cry-ogenic environment of nothing and nobody. A spark, a quick glance—the flash of a smile from across the bar—clumsily followed by a cosmic accident, the Big Bang. The event lasts a fraction of a second. The aftereffects, a lifetime. A seminal cloud—residual of the Bang and indebted to the ballads of dead rock stars—seeds the void with the following dynamics of growth: Frozen grains of space dust; Molecular gases; Heavy metal; Crystal meth. The crystal upon contact with the space dust—aka, angel dust—hits the street like a new phenomenon: “sticky ice”. Instead of breaking up, two incompatible bodies end up stuck together. Violence ensues. Chairs like massive chunks of rock fly through the air. Objects in space—attracted by mutual gravity—crash headlong and grow twice in size. Arrests are made. Yet within the clarity of confinement, as the nebular cloud sobers and cleans up, as the stellar outbursts fade into the past, the bond returns a bit scarred but stronger than ever. An orbit is traced through an illuminating flux of support groups. In the new life-affirming atmosphere, a realization occurs: to see oneself not as a victim of life but a source of life. On that very night, the primal mater bulges at the core and, under intense gravitational contractions, screams out obscenities, grows infernal and feverish, lashes out with blind fury until—rising out of an ocean of magma—a tiny cry emerges like the birth of a new world.
This, our noosphere:
Keith Nathan Brown received a B.S. in Physics from Marlboro College. His essay, “Network Subrealism: Sketch of an Emerging Literary Trend,” published in Puerto del Sol, traces the philosophical and technological origins of a new branch of literature. His hybrid texts and visual poetry have appeared in Word For/ Word, elimae, Unsaid and elsewhere. Embodied is his first book. He lives in Brattleboro, VT.
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