Interminably tangled, the escalators wove themselves into a vast network, a great steel octopode either in conflict with or consoling itself. Heart rising to throat, sinking fast. In ascent and descent, a strange plant flowers and wilts in somnolent depths. Black handrails complement a fear-pale grip, a clouded mass of fingerprints lapping passengers into anonymity. Carried into oblivion on the scent of warm rubber, its calligraphy wisps of smoke and tea, ink and loss, I became a haunting of blown-out candle wishes. They crossed time as I glimpsed myself at other stages of life, riding paths into a Möbius distance of years past, years to come. I wondered if the I on this particular moving strip was in the present—a pitiful attempt at stability in the face of a restless metallic eternal. If it was, I was also long gone and not yet arrived, perpetually torn. Networks murmured as my limbs twitched and eyes swung metronomically behind closed lids, the punishment of movement in paradoxical sleep. No respite from the mind: free to spin its gossamer web-worlds, it captured a body enfolded in a caul of ravenous dreams inspiinspiinspiinspite of this in spite of world-infected minds in spite the tug of other worlds pulled at the body tugging it toward ever-deepening depths a lulululullalulling rise and fall gulls circle overhead kakacaw kacaw the tide crawls along the ragged edge of the land surf crumbles along the craggy shore breaking what is hard refusing the call of breaking waves a crab braves the break tossed and tumbled upon the shore gull’s beak breaks into a shell the hot sea-salt surfsmell of rotted fishflesh bones washed ashore microscopic filigree a tree (No road.) evening evensong of tidal ebb surgesweepgush stormcanticle tumultswirl and she.

She, with the cup in her hand, fingers closed tight, the cold of it, the porcelain. She at the railing as the great wash beneath her pulled back with a sound like no sound and the waters tugging, she could feel it, tugging at the water in the cup as she leaned on the rail and the water in the cup seemed to yearn for the sea, she could feel it in her fingers, yes, a dull pulling, a softness to the air, her arm moving outward from the rail. Behind her the sun was setting red and all the greens of the lawn and shrubs and the trees behind her were going blue, the trees dipping their crowns toward her and the rail and the sea and the grass reaching, growing diagonal and sharp, and the flowers bursting in the last light of the day going long and darkening behind her. And she extended the cup out toward the sea and the evening caught on the whiteness of the porcelain and she could feel the pull of the tide was very far away now, very far out across the shale. The moonlight was reflected in the dark liquid’s depths (how long had the cup been full, for a moment or forever?) and without knowing she was tipping the cup the liquid reached the brim and flowed over and as if pulled by the force of that pitch black substance the cup leaves her hands, the fall lasting for what feels like the most blissful eternity she will ever experience until at last it disappears into the abyss (how long had the sea been right below her, for a moment or forever?)

She is walking through a memory, instantly she knows it’s a memory she has entered – the square, the shouts first distant then everywhere around her, the sudden, explosive sound of violins, and the monument of one of the countless madmen of history stretching into the sky is all so familiar it gives her a chill. Taking control of her memory like a dictator, it obeys her: the shouts fall silent, the violins continue, now soft and serene, and in the center of the square the madman in stone, ropes wrapped around his arms and noosed around his neck, shatters and, like a whispered scream, crumbles to the ground.

She watched the Madman disappear into dust. Yet again. She ran to the spot of his remains and began gathering the stone fragments into her apron. She hastened to return to the laboratory in the asylum. Upon entering, she notified the Director that the Madman had managed to disintegrate once again. She placed the remains on the mortuary table. Using the blood of Patient D, she began working into the dust and sculpting him. She began writing into the clay. It was something sadder and more chaotic. This writing was ruined before the indentations of letters could fix themselves. Hideous lines erasing his destiny. The shape of his boyish coldness. But this was a book of calling. A new granite of becoming. She added more space between his ribs this time, hoping that a different alphabet of consciousness might make its way through them. But what sounds eked through were only partial relative to the whole, only the vowels that animate our cries, our agonies, our splendours, our dread: what consonants there had been in that sunken psyche that tried like the green fuse to make passage thudded dully against the shoals of his ribcage: B’s D’s and P’s dumb and bobbing along the weak waves that lapped in vain against the hard rails that barred the intercostals. Only that consciousness which spoke the vocabulary of the winds, only that old sigh of the snows and the layers of our atmosphere was then admitted. He shuddered like a fish, and in the spaces she had created there was a glistening like the viscera of the mackerel. A glistening, a gleaming, a glittering. The G’s and L’s had made it through.

 A gloaming.

She stopped a moment. Are we like that? She cranked harder, producing a hairline fracture. Is that what we are like? Her mind felt as raw as her hands. She heard a loud crinkling noise, like a thousand sheets of cellophane being scrunched together. She felt surrounded by the fullness of it, felt it as a presence. The ground shook and rumbled for a few seconds, then silence settled around her again. As she stood there listening, a wave of adrenaline surged through her body. She wasn’t afraid for herself, she feared for the others. If that’s what we’re like, then so be it. She heard herself whimper and knew at that very moment that she would not follow protocol. She could not comply, she would not. She grabbed the crank with both hands and forcibly pulled, fully dislodging it from its metal arm. A booming snap rang in her ears, hard and hollow, followed by a strange gurgling sound. She threw the useless crank in the corner and started to run. Time was of essence.

But of course they have their own problems. But how beautiful it is this morning – you have only wanted the best for them – but a morning has hinges, it shuts you out sometimes. The blue of outside. The sound of the cereal and the milk and the spoon hitting the bowl. But they’re off somewhere, and you are alone. Off somewhere in the blue, which is fresh and warm. Mornings like this are a gift. But you decided yesterday that you wanted them to clean the house. Quickly, quickly. You muse on time. You never have enough of it. You feel you have been eating breakfast forever. They left forever ago. You have been alone, out of the reach of the blue morning, forever. You’re not in a good mood. Not in any mood to enjoy such a morning. They have left you to work out your mood. She will be at the friend’s house – the one who visits her when you’re not there – talking about you, your mood. You shouted, yes, but it’s not a crime. But the house was not clean. But it’s a blue morning, and a broken and empty bowl in the sink.

That the image should bring to mind the perplexing impossibility of the bowl’s unbreaking. As the blue morning beckons.

That between the broken bowl and the blue morning, this impossibility should interpose itself.

Like a dipteran bzzzzz.

That laws allow for the unbreaking do not, in any case, render it possible. Which might mean something. But almost certainly doesn’t.

That any of this on a blue morning. 

Into which, birdsong would be and is a euphemism. Birdscreech. Birddrone. Birdcackle. Else I’d still be asleep well into this blue morning – as is my custom in the winter months. My mind at leisure and liberty to make what it would of a bowl breaking or perhaps unbreaking where it might, in the dreaming mind.

Yet here is the impossible blue morning of not winter. Beckoning.

Maybe I’ll go for a run. My mind poses my body. Our little in-joke. An image of us running out into the blue morning of our mind’s eye.

Or maybe I will. Because even though I definitely won’t, I could. Look, there’s no such thing as a conceptual orgasm. If you don’t understand what I mean by that, then I have some literature you should read, or else I could just kiss you.

You ask me how to live. I ask – is there a life unquestionably perfect, a proven gospel of the everyday? If so, let’s hear it: tell me how I walk down Avenue of the Americas on a 95-degree Thursday to grab the last everything bagel while embodying the grace of the angels along with my own mortal stink. And if there isn’t, if there’s no hope of immaculacy, do we leave to balance our infinite yearnings against – what? – the featherweight fictions of civilization? Or are we really not such a big deal as all that?

I’d be a good man if only the world allowed me. That’s what we say. Like we might draw a salary from this business of living, but first we demand a generous expense account.

It’s obscene to be so beautiful and young. Don’t look at me like that.

Anyway, in the end, I wear cologne for a reason. No man believes his own bullshit, even when he tracks it into his house.

A woman’s bullshit stinks just as bad, manifests as monstrous she-ogre, dripping blood all over herself and others, as the bullshit, swells, throbs, morphs and burgeons. If a baby is there to drip on, all the better. For it is the baby that threatens, tries to forbid the woman’s bullshit, by its very existence, coercing her to care, feel, bond and babble. The baby is an obstacle, a hindrance to the bullshit, to which the woman is entitled, so perhaps it is wiser to forbid the baby admission to this world, to deny that which is expected of her, so that she may have the same entitlement of bullshit as a man. With no small, cute bundle that has grown inside, become so much her component, with whom she cannot disunite. With no needy, sweet-smelling, innocent-eyed helpless package, trapping, harping her heartstrings, instigating weepage, joy, pamper and swaddle, she may be free for committing lick-your-lips crimes.

Instead she heads to the fridge, opens the door, gets in, closes the door behind her. There’s a large piece of blue cheese, maggots popping out of its holes. She takes a bite, then another bite, then she bites off the head of a maggot, then she’s no longer in the fridge but sitting on a bench, her back to the Seine, at the intersection of Quai D’Anjou and Rue Poulettier. There are American tourists all around; there are always American tourists everywhere — even in the fridge. In circumstances such as this she should be sitting facing the other way, smoking. But she doesn’t want to surrender to narrative demands. Just like she won’t surrender to you. You see, I’m afraid this is a fight you just can’t win.

You can devise elaborate plot machinery, you can trick out your appeals to her in the most dazzling pyrotechnics of style – I know your powers, I know what you are capable of – but in the end, I promise, the veil will be swept aside, and you will discover that this great palace of words you’ve constructed is in fact a labyrinth, a chaos of blind alleys, swamp gas, sinkholes, tunnels that lead to nowhere, disjointed ends. Worthless, but even worse than worthless, because it is a maze in which you yourself will be forced to wander, and you will go mad in there, searching endlessly for your elusive host. For have no doubt, she will be the host and you will be the guest in this hall of mirrors, and just when you think you’ve got her cornered, you’ll find out you’re the one who is trapped.

Then there are the lions that stalk the mirrored hall – a matched pair, emblems of her birthplace (she’s a Venetian, as I know from a report that reached my hands this winter; I hate to talk like a policeman, but life isn’t poetry). Believe me, I’ve seen them in action. When I was quite small, my father took me to the zoological gardens – before they were removed to the hall of mirrors. The air was hot, the other animals were sleepy: only the two vast lions stood in their enclosure, breathed through their gleaming fangs, eyed the rats that dashed past their bars, idly pulled them apart. “The fate of the vicious,” he said, pressing my scalp, and now she guides them on leashes down the mirrored corridors, lets them lounge on the furniture (museum pieces slashed open by their casual pawing). Their backs arch with a radical purity of line. If someone has to tangle with her lions, I’d rather it was you: I’d prefer not to witness their tails bobbing in the quicksilvered panels (wheat blowing in the wind) or hear their bellowed copulations behind the mirrors.

The elevator mirror made the periwinkle dress look less maniacal. An ugly man carrying a metal spoon pressed the button for the ground floor. As the floor started falling, I remembered having written a letter that claimed the only viable Requiem is a profanation, and using this claim to justify my need for the dress to myself by attaching an additional condition, namely, that I refused to see Walter when wearing anything else. As a color, periwinkle is tender, disarming, generous – but the plant is like a tiny leather chain. Pervinca, meaning “to bind around” in Latin. The man kept moving the metal spoon through his mouth. In Bordighera, the mourners huddled in black and carried a tiny wood coffin across the cobblestone street in front of the cafe. The waiter said they were taking the dead baby to the cemetery at the top of the hill. When I stood to pay my respects – and drop a few coins into the coffin –I noticed that the baby was wreathed in periwinkle vines. It was as if someone had rolled the baby into a tender binding. Fioro di moro, the waiter confirmed, clacking a metal spoon against his teeth. In the distance, wind twists and bends the trees as if to render them in the shape of something different, a collective body of branches and leaves and echoes; the corporeal home of a voice that says: I want to live as long as possible – I want to die –

I stop wanting; unbeknownst to them, the memory of the world projects itself on the faces of those kneeling at the altar of singular perceptions; while I, tempted as I am to rush to their aid, to erase these markings with my hands, remain enthralled by the poetics of such a spectrality and choose to watch it unfold; a voice that says: the haunted house is not the body, but what the mind accepts as ghost: the word that lingers, on the tongue, in the palm, across the sea; a voice that says: all the poet can offer is this image, always already lost, always already passed, this continuous embrace of a suffocating absence; this image of reality as language, of time as rhythm.

There is an echo that counters, sibilant: not even the capricious sovereignty over words will be possessed, saddled as it is with compromise; hereafter, silence.

Silence and compulsion.

Sun ablaze, the slant, hair outspread, the gold and glimmer, road traversed, the rustle: the finger slides throughout the surface and slows near the wet, tender eyelid: the ring, absent: the strand slackens toward the neck, discloses pale crimson: the decline into a caress: fraught – a bus slathers the pavement with oil as limbs unfurl as flowers wither in anxious holds as stilettos slur any trace of neighboring heels as brakes impinge upon the senses in syncopated succession as claxons call and demand and cry; then half-opened lips, then empty seats. It happens. And thus it subsides.

She steps off the bus and into a puddle of oil, thinking this can’t be happening, it must be happening as memories seize her, unspooling in a flickering tapestry of an afternoon spent strolling past a wall of etchings: of a prisoner in shackles, of men as bats, of ghouls and demons, of a desiccated old woman seated in front of a mirror, crowning herself with a bundle of bows, knowing that one day the darkness would subsume her and wanting to fall into the dark cross-hatching of those etchings and feel the scratching against her skin until it tore and she might feel again, as she sets into motion the beginning of the end with all of its permutations and throbbing trace lines, a final release, she melts into the passing crowd, faceless again.

Then, after this ecstasy of indifferentiation, terror. Half a step ahead of her, to her left, a white oval rotates over its shoulder as if to look at her. Where a pair of spectacles might once have balanced on a roman nose, she sees only two black, diagonal lines, culminating at a point on top, connected by a bar. Where a pair of reddened lips might once have parted to tell her the time, or to give her directions, or to compliment her dress, she now sees, on the rotating oval to her right, two parallel, horizontal lines, connected by a diagonal slash. Above a neck that has disappeared into a wing collar and a bow tie, a single vertical line. Beneath unevenly-cut fringe, two diagonal lines crossed at the middle. There is an oval with another oval on it, holding hands with its sibling, an oval born with a small tail.

The relief she feels when she discovers the pattern is momentary. She looks into oval after oval, grabbing them by the foci, turning them to her with increasingly desperate violence. Fishhook. Horseshoe. Crescent. Serpent. She will not find the one with three horizontal lines.

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Contributors: Austin Adams, Name-Of Author, Israel A. Bonilla, Emma Devlin, Frank Garrett, Judson Hamilton, Tomoé Hill, Ben Libman, Adam Moody, Seph Murtagh, Róisín Ní Neachtain, Ryan Ruby, Fernando Sdrigotti, Vik Shirley, Yanina Spizzirri, Alina Ştefănescu, Christina Tudor-Sideri, Addison Zeller, and Isaac Zisman