bechamel
I found it wandering. Me, an object sans context, a character without plot. It, an open container to fill. The rest of all you, gas. This morning, tiny ants. Last night, a fan sputtered out in my sleep. Not everyone slept, the street, evidence. Forevermore every comma a questionable connection. I don’t want to be guided, you say, but pushed out: either staying until the meter is up or leaving before the party is over, one of the two, but never led out to the foyer and down the 4 flights to the street, where a train might wait at the next station up to whisk me to my bed. How trite, how sedentary. More like liking the haphazard, tingling, the devout; these are the words; the plot, bechamel. Setting the sun toward the back of the window frame, the back of the room, back of the head, back of the mind, how is planning not like setting the scene? Such markers pretend to describe aliveness but fall al dente. We put ourselves in a paper bag and leave each other on the counter, setting the conditions for emotion to ripen. I know just what to say to make anyone at all think there’s a plot here and I know too what to abstain from. I know it’s a mystery and I know I don’t care about solving. I find it as wandering as my tiny ants, in a stale room, above the street noise.
CURSE WORDS
Like any other boat, the words anchored themselves in my mind and stayed afloat for as long as neither weather drowned them nor rot took root. The sentence, at first, just kept hanging around, named but still mysterious, its sailors fled to another climate more temperate. I started to form myself around these words innocently, like a habit picked up from an early age, namely, my bruxism. The habit then formed into another form of trouble, something like malpractice. I consciously neglected anything that didn't lead back to the sentence; or, I always found a way back to it, the mental gymnastics enough to distract me awake on a calm Sunday during siesta, which I hate to skip. What is it about these words? The words, combined together into the sentence, didn’t have any explicit sonic appeal. The words weren't poetry. They didn’t carry symbols heavy in their folds. They didn't even convey a feeling of truth inaccessible except by a foreigner’s writing translated twice. There was essentially very little special about the words, but they held me in a low-grade thrall that left me myopic and sometimes humorless even in the midst of friends. What is their power here? I wondered with an eye toward logistics. I sorted through etymologies online, read up on grammar and balanced sentences, I even slipped questions into conversations. “What are the implications of these words in this combination?” I’d ask my interlocutors. Caught, and probably bored, they rarely offered me anything more than: “Sounds like a reply to a question.” I turned up a lot of little with that line of attack. Stymied in my search for meaning, I plotted. Like any other boat, what storm could I conjure or process could I hasten to sink this sentence? I could flood my waking hours with new words. I read the Dialogues, the Folios, and volumes of autobiographical materials by an English bureaucrat. Then I worked abstractly, picking books at random off shelves. I learned about many topics, but still woke myself up with my teeth gnashing, even in dreams flipping my sentence over like a sleek fish dying in the sun. Without, of course, it ever dying. I thought I might hasten time by visualization; I’d imagine a life without the sentence and then allow that reality to set in. I blocked off a weekend, formed my house into a retreat, a retreat where not just my sentence but no sentence could linger on into sickness. I contemplated, I fasted, I learned and chanted mantras, but gave those tactics up on Saturday. I didn't want to empty myself, I wanted to fill it to distraction. On Sunday, I turned on the stove, the TV, the stereo, and I sat in the shower under hot water while the kettle whistled. I pretended to achieve relief. But it got tiring, and hot, and loud, and I knew the sentence was waiting. So here I am writing this short chapter on how I am unwell due to the effects of an unrelenting sentence. I know I did say that the words aren't special and the sentence is unprepossessing, but here's the truth: I'm really embarrassed by the modesty of the sentence. Embarrassed even to the point of deceit. I’ve hidden it here, in this short chapter which you've now almost finished. I know you've been waiting; I really am sorry. My thinking, brutal and exacting as it is, is that should I, earnestly seeking release, write it out so plainly, I’ll only continue this cycle of logical attempts made in vain. I’m trying a new logic. I want to bet the intensity of your puzzling, fine-toothed as you can make it, about which paragraph, and which sentence, and which words, by the same alchemy ruling the lives of genies in lamps, might actually pry the sentence from my mind and dissipate it. Your deference to the sentence will distract it from its hold on me. Gods have, I’ve heard, been known to travel to their acolytes, not always the other way around. Again, I apologize. Here it is, again.
Excerpt from The Term Quarry
Reader: Wait. We skipped a scene. Writer: What’d we skip? Reader: The scene of the wood paneled room, where black-clad men put their heads together in solemn talk. Writer: It’s early. The bedtime story. Babysitter: (reading) People go to Mekka. People walk up Mount Patrick. They go to lots of tops of mountains. To bends in rivers. To icons on sides of roadways. tourist traps. To tiered Mayan temple and dream place. Unmarked graves. People make pilgrimages. Into another time. Out to the Barn. In the early morning on the 14th day of the spring month of April, the month of opening and buds, and all kinds of goddesses of dawn and hares: A person lay on the ground bathed in rays of sunlight that set diagonal columns of hay stuff and dust bits to fire. This was the kind of light that made a person remember things they thought they had forgot. A dapple grey mare feeds in her trough. The barnmice, busy packing already. The sun, having been up for a length of time, had warmed a dark green coil on the person’s chest, where a serpent slowly came to day. “How apt for plot advancement,” one might say. “How limited are the kinds of vocabularies available to your use while speeding down dark freeways,” one might say. You might say either. The person was gripped with anxiety. What was to be done about the snake. On top of that, the person had no proper recollection of how they’d gotten to this barn, to this early morning on the 14th of April. You see a plastic tarp ripple in the brittle sun’s wind. You bet. The person lays their head back onto the packed dirt. What’s happening to my memory. Something— under amber streetlamp, a checker-vested man leans against the brick of a roadside bar—a pair of headlights sweeping down a two lane country road—a slim jim wrapper gawky and spent in the cup holder of a truck. Reader: What kind of truck? Writer: A Ford Truck. Babysitter: You avail nothing by these memories alone. The snake speaks, at last: Snake: Youuuuu Betttttt. Babysitter: How american, how saloon-grin, how transient, how ripe. Snake: You found the place you’re at by your own reckoning. You bet! Never. Break. Two. Laws. At the same time. Babysitter: The snake scolded, and snuck its head up level with the person’s eyes. Snake: You have no clue the ground under you is level because your whole body is made of curves. Babysitter: “That’s completely too obvious to write in,” one might say. “That’s not what the topography in the atlas indicated,” one might say. Somehow, you think it’s both, and that doesn’t help. Sunken down into your curves, you imagine you’re a riverbed. It’s comforting. He slithers over to the barn doors, and pushes one of them open. An anonymous shaft of sunlight breaks through, and the snake sighs. Snake: Ssss- ssss –ssss-sss Sssss-sss-sss-ssss. Babysitter: You can’t remember: this could be the truth or it could be a dreamed-up dialogue between the wildflowers and the riverbed, an exchange you’d certainly like to see onscreen. A nature program would be so dope right now. Nature Program Host: Lavender. Lavender’s blue. Then it breathes and breathes, and fills itself up and down with its own scent. Breathes into every crevice of its stocky stem. Up and up and up and up. Lavender’s blue breathes until it’s periwinkle, then rests. Sunken valley. Laying under the shadow of his brother mountain, the valley’s chest dips in at his sternum. He’s not shy, but he’s in love with the wind. It’s so, unconfused, ancient, logical. He waits for it all night, quiet, not even the cranes in the pond of his shallows stirring, and in the morning it comes, as clear and refreshing as ever. But it rushes over without resting to feel the downy prairie. Geologically, he had grown lower while his brother, The Mountain, grew up. Sunken Valley knew the mountain and the wind had been on and off for a while, but he takes after their mother, glacier, and he’s gotten to the point where he’s ok with the waiting.
Lisa Brenner 