Hey y’all,
Here’s another zine. My computer ate the first drafts of things. Age ruins us all, even robots. Here they are, reassembled from my rickety memory. Hope you like them. I’m 34 now.
-KJ
plans
after about three months of all of this, i asked you in the middle of a movie what you wanted to do. about what, you asked. i told you that i had been watching a lot of youtube to get to sleep lately, videos about tiny homes in particular, gunging in the slop with other whites who had never outgrown their boxcar children fantasy. you would work on your film and i would curl up with a half-mug of rye and a set of videos, each more insipid than the last: here is a subbasement mircostudio in downtown toronto for only 950 a month; imagine yourself in this parisian garçonniare, using un petit ladder to shit and shower; look at this walk-in closet in west east chelsea that’s only 750 if you’re under thirty and promise to suck off the guy in the master bedroom twice a week.
i fall asleep on the floor like i did as a child when there was no AC, stone still and cool.
you understand i’m really no longer in the living room but you ask again, about what though. oh, you know. i know what? if i die from all this. you shouldn’t say that. oh sure, i know i shouldn’t but i think it’s better luck to think about it than to sweep it away. when we lived in tampa, i’d assume you were in a car wreck if you weren’t home by six. this is absurd, considering how traffic works, or hobbies, considering how often i was out until one or two or four, sick of words, smelling like tobacco and chlorine, but there’s no more traffic jams, really, and those ideas have to go somewhere. rituals still have to be performed: i wipe my ass, i wash my hands, i think of things.
i pour myself another half-mug and you realize it’s one of those chit-chats, all me no you.
okay so what are you getting at. i mean the thing is—and at this point i sit down because why not—the thing is i don’t have that many things: like okay, that painting i made, and that other painting, and this chair my dad found on the street and like the coffee table is from goodwill so like okay, and then also this little owl rug and like my shirts but i stole half of those from you, and maybe the coffeemaker? so that’s like twelve things i guess. i think it’s more than that. i feel the rye in my fingertips, tears percolating from deep back in my neck: probably but like so much of it is old research and crap and who cares, what i mean to say is i wound up at a good job for once so you know, it’ll be covered.
the last time my friend read my cards something weird came up, for soon to now.
you start crying, too, and i say i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry. i say i’m sorry and i swallow the last part, where i think about if you first: i sit in the living room and it’s after six and there’s no traffic. i fit myself into smaller spaces, just me and a set of half-mugs and my twelve things and the ten of swords: here i go into the second bedroom, lay on the floor even though there is air conditioning, here i go into the closet, wrap myself in the clothes i stole from you, sit very very still, here i go into the broken luggage, the shoebox, the postage stamp, the jammy slime, the boxcars, here i go to live the rituals i built for myself, i go again, i go again, wash my hands, all me, i rent myself my fingertips i go again.
drift
“so. what are we then”
i ask and then laugh:
lick the words back up
spit them in your mouth
still warm, white & thick
“‘words are meaningless
and forgettable’”
“oh sure, dave gahan”
“oh sure, but you know"
“i know, but you know”
still. i remember
the word that slipped out
as we fell asleep—
we rhymed it away
in a fifth beer haze—
as you remember
what i came up with
after we woke up:
truth in exhaustion,
sleep lines, morning breath;
now. lock eyed smiling
finger by finger
we try on greetings:
“[ , .]”
“[ , .]”
quickies
*
a lizard: i just wanted to
give you a goddamn
lizard something
dick sized and green.
flowers cats bees:
easy, i stand still. i don’t
breathe. but a lizard:
we have to go to
the river we have
to stand by the murk
you have to say
look there i have to
admit i was yours first.
*
“this is you” i send a baby animal “this is you” you send a baby animal “this is you” i send you another baby animal i will not name any of these there are things we keep as our own because they’re too great too perfect too bright to look head on even a baby cat dog platypus even
*
meemaw held out
two hands beige
gotta choose baby
which one which
i tap left palm
quick cut cross
my face i yelp
baby don’t she
said baby
shut that goddamn
mouth unless
you want the right
who taught you
to act the fool
who taught you
to trust meemaw
*
third fifth hour in bed
look at you full blush
'there it goes again'
you smile as one drop-
let two three a stream
runs down from the tip
of my own timepiece
we have skipped dinner
'lookit what you do'
'lookit what you do'
'lookit what you do’
'lookit what you do’
*
my first lover taught me about neruda and i misremembered my favorite word: empapelarme, which i now realize he never wrote, though the memory of that word remains. i incriminate myself. now, years later, another lover, and i return to bigger feelings: entwine, envelop, enamor.
*
i thought i was and it was just that:
a queer shaped thing a somesuch
creature in & of my own mythology.
you ask me how i imagine myself
in bed and i cannot stop laughing,
i have five arms when i'm inside you
i have a double red chest when you
kiss me close i have no more name.
*
two faggots in a field
let’s suppose near dusk
barefoot and sunbleached
fall’s breezy break not quite
reaching under their arms
the late day stink now
on each other’s lips
almost too much
like the shared
plum as the
sun sinks
back
*
this was going to be a dick joke,
something about academic loss,
a poem about my ivory tower,
or closure and closures and
mourning
something where other scholars
in actual ivory towers, mourning
closures, take my loss as a joke,
closure as something, my dick as
a poem
*
to diagram what is and what is not, to draw the sentence with neither noun nor verb, to signal the referent without a sign, to hold the anchor and tell me to ignore the sails, to stare back and forth and know the power is in its wordlessness, what this is and even still more so
*
left hollywood beach at daybreak
hatchback pocked in seagull shit
snowbird cadre with shovels
and french canadian cigarettes
the shore foamy with ocean liner
spit up man-o-war pus whale
sputum left because free parking
ends at six because the sea
is rising more every day sunrise.
*
“whether across the nation!” i type onto the slide, joy of second grade coursing my fingers, faggotry become geography, childhood in reference books, home with no computer; teacher looks down at me, “hm not quite,” we’re wet until we’re dry, even at seven, life in monsoon country
*
That’s all for now. Hope you liked it. Here’s me showing off for you.
Can’t wait for you to see more. Catch ya later. —K