A line from Quentin Crisp
She wondered what it was
like to claw her way up from
being a printed mesh fabri-
cation, designed exclusively
in-house & based only on one's
own experience. She brought it
to the table to create distance, to
take the joke on herself as a way
to self-soothe. Pink noise is far
deeper than white noise, a sonic
hue that often only comes down
on the side of the outcast. The old
movie projector hums in the back-
ground like a dialysis machine
without the beeps. Ambient noise
in the ICU. She closes her eyes.
Topical nightmares
Discover their meanings. There
are twenty-eight listed in the pages
of the OED. What is going on in
the world? To start, don't even
think "How do I find something
now?" Combine different lettering
styles & simple doodles. Decide
which conjunction best completes
the sentence. Reduce uncertainty
by keeping it square through im-
pact. Swap any phrasal verb for
the unknown you're dealing with &
find out if they are actually married!
sedentary aneurysms
I hear the dog shout
blitzkrieg, & every
meerkat within living
memory dives for
shelter. I do the oppo-
site, get up & look
around, fearing there
may be spiders in the
quicksand that surrounds
me, or, even worse, my
sedentary lifestyle has
broken me free of the
crossword I am trying
to do, leaving me lying
on the floor, a victim
of an aneurysmal sub-
arachnoid hemorrhage that
has too many letters to fit
any of the available spaces.
The / erstwhile tracheotomy / of Jeanne d'Arc
She spoke through a tube
in her throat. The passion
that she felt was communi-
cated by the movement of
her hands, her arms. Her
anger was obvious. Finger-
tips glowed like tiger's eyes.
The air rippled. No one could
remember the subject of her
speech; but the gestalt of it
was talked about for years.