ft ground

Nose was single brown hole sifting down to black in the depths of the head in a funnel sort of a cascade right down from leathery mummified gums and enormous wind-bleached and moonlit teeth lacking saliva that glitters for the living. This trustworthy face couldn’t cast shadows on itself. But as sand creeps it crept in tangential wavelets with leading edges like the hems of sheets being drawn across the sand and the face and feet begin to disappear in tomographic phases. Each wave was preceded by the telegraph of a shallow crunch through the mantle of the dune. The plods were far enough apart as to divide the rhythm into the dives of isolated desert creatures into the sand as the rising moon stole the cover of their night shadow, each separate and forgotten in a distinct world whose only cosmology is the distant memory of the last crunching sound which may or may not have been the fore-echo of a single escape. Each sang more perfectly the shape than the last, more imminent until they ceased altogether as much as an interrupted sequence can fool the reverberant surfaces to forget it. The moon at its apogee rang over the dunes without shadow, without error, trustworthy. The face and feet are gone. Only in the acceptance that flaws, even sunken, are enduring, and although in the flash of the believable homogeneity the body, or the feet and face, are now questionable, a hopeless breath-high sand geyser puffed and built a shallow crater above the repressed nose hole.

[pdf]

enjoy this first full draft of the short fiction piece i have been working on [pdf]

There are long blank roads inside of his body enough, that before full dayswell, he coasted into a motel parking lot in Amarillo. A long, low, alone affair again, or for the first time, for in this ink he existed only in the secondary orbit of Jack, drawn by a blue fascia against the cloudless Texas sky, compressed the bank of motel rooms into a trace of cells that transient rogues could only sit or lay down in, or begin disappearing from their crown down. (more…)

In a breath of deep sickness you feel the appendages of your body as small stubs barely propping your thin shirt out into a windblown landscape, but in the mountain starlight rising, a faint speech of light, you see them fully formed and shading through the outerspace of desert evening, albeit slenderly like dried liquid flesh over bones. You sank below the crest of one last dune and the smoke above the reflected green of John’s white eyes hung in a corona over the dune and the empty straight line of his mouth cleaved your eyes. When you breathed you coughed sand. The green smoke rose to tie across the Milky Way in the sash of a foggy icon that you could only see by looking briefly, then away, so that your mind could tease its image out of the apparent emptiness. (more…)

Then you proceeded on foot and the scenes passed slower, painfully immersive after the rush past of the whole basin in an airless wind through the cracked car window. From far out in the sterile dunes John’s car glittered, the only defect along the shoulder, and you watched him from atop the crest of a dune as he walked from the edge of where the sand gave way back to the alluvial gravel of the valley floor toward his car along the rumble strip of the road. You measured the shadows of scrub and other dunes against the landmarks of debris or idiosyncratic wind prints to mark the time as the sun set. It dangled across the axis of the valley, still high enough to burn white, and reflected off of the dunes’ sand floor and washed back into the air as radiation that tightened your exposed skin noticeably.
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From a crouch of a fire stair John enters the hospital cafeteria like a paste extruded into a denim ensemble with paste still for hair, taking a lidded plastic glass of thin orange juice from a chilled cabinet, alights at a too large round table the color and texture of souse, where two ample black women in scrubs beam. From the distance, where every body can be seen from head to toe, the measure of proximity in a hospital, he could be seen as immediately shaping the moments as they came, with his arms speaking like a conductor or puppeteer to draw out voluminous shrieks, moans, exclamations, through the undulations and ripples of the womens’ squinting bodies. And also he spoke, with a singularly human distraction, in words that, from where the gallery sat around the perimeter of the hall, arrived in concussions on the antimicrobial air that blunted the nuances of the tale or fragment which had the women rolling out glee from the cavities of their legs and sucking his full excrescence of words from the air in their tremendous gasps. He held court. Daily immemorial and onward daily they danced. (more…)