Friend Request? My favorite boys’ name, & my maiden one? Photos too, toddler to teen- how he’d have aged, if I’d left my son be?
(a techno-nightmarish updating of Ernest Hemingway’s Baby Shoes, as tweeted via Seedpod Publishing. more of a bad dream than a political statement)
An extract from Xanthe Terra, as published in this month’s Aspidistra X
- Giacomo Lee
**
August 22nd, 1924
The old man was surrounded by young men with machines. While the latter were checking dials and measuring radio waves, the old man made notes on the machines, and on what the young men did with their hands. His own meanwhile etched sketches, annotated with names and numbers, ideas. He was a respectful guest, careful to keep his stooped figure out of the men’s way, like a pivot in the middle of the observatory, an ancient space body moving in ever decreasing circles. Ironically, he was being respectful to men who were awed by the mere presence of him. It was the Camille Flammarion after all, and when one by one all these young men left, their ancestor in astronomy was left on his own with all their machines in matrix.
From Every Reason #9, March 2012. Annotations here
Second Night
Petrol station’s had it. The flames are jumping from the store bit to the pump part. We’re fucking howling, our feet never touching the ground for more than seconds at a time.
From Tsuki #6, October 2012. Annotations here
A bee as bulbous as the sun as bulbous as the gas tank it whizzes around, its company mascot an emoticon smiling down upon Yu Honda’s field, the colours of which it loses itself in through one fell swoop. Buzz zurr…
There walks Yu Honda, arm-in-arm with Yoko, cowed like her by the sun and general wear & tear as they cross through the apiary to a small cabin. This outpost of theirs is a little shack by the field’s white wooden perimeter, small and unassuming unlike the chunky metal and wire surrounding the pea-green gas sphere.
Yu presses upon a few of the knocked out posts which show where the break-ins occurred, Yoko unlocking the door to the cabin. Inside is nothing but a little light and two blue sleeping bags flat upon the floor, along with two small oak chairs, which Yu carries outside and places by the door.
The two take their places and take the other’s hand, looking out onto the field. It’s just them and the tank and the world, and me, the Bee Who Saw It All. Buzz zurr.
An elegiacomo exclusive, xoxo is a short sequel of sorts to my novel Red Trick, a book I wrote in 2007 that finally found publication February 2012. Consider it a catch-up session with the book’s main character MC Red Trick (aka Freddy) at the age of 26.
xoxo (seven years later)
Buster Keaton is blacked up in paint, on the run from the long truncheon of the law. He ducks round a corner, losing the fat flatfoot who then bumps into a black handyman walking down the street. Freddy can already feel the two guys from work shift uncomfortably on the bunk bed apparatus they’re sharing, so decides to laugh so everyone can feel fine, where really he would have smiled and shaken his head. He looks up at the busy glass floor above, and almost gets an upskirt view right above where he’s sitting.
From the Midnight Train anthology, February 2012. Annotations here
The dream would follow the same pattern all summer. I’d be seated on the train to work, riding the westbound route of the Northern Line. It was my normal morning trip, though the carriage seemed a little emptier than normal, and the scarf wrapped up over my chin meant it must have been winter above ground. In my stare: my foot, shaking, with both of my legs crossed as inconsiderately as usual. On my right: a man holding the Metro, but I could only see the front page, a blind spot for the brain, with its photograph and headline as indistinct as the reader’s face.
From Leaf Garden #12*. Annotations here
Registration for conscription in South Korea is automatic for men in the year they turn 18. Military service lasts two years.
One young man held down another. David Kang-Ho couldn’t imagine what was running through the patient’s head, a fellow soldier, his curse words streaked by tears of bile from somewhere above the voice box, a rattle tinged with the aftertaste of blinding alcohol, a sermon told in tongues, ripping up one side of the jaw to show tendrils and teeth never seen. A little peek in his head would have shown a similar sound but dragged out, that of chirping cicadas nesting up a mountain in the summer, and nothing else, and no-one else, just views and plant life a little rustled by wind, and rocks in the water, ‘til a purple night-time fell and tigers with glowing eyes of orange prowled the plains looking for home.
From The Filth #5, January 2012. Annotations here
I: Litzy Moo
‘American police found family photographs in the gunman’s wallet and previous residence with all of his relatives’ eyes and teeth pricked out one by one with the use of a small pin.’
I want to sit in my room and think of the girl’s photo on the TV, smiling at me but I pushed the button off cos mama asked us.
In my first nightmare I can see the murderer man just sitting in a car and playing with his photo, and he’s got the pin and just sticking it in all the eyes in this old photo he got in a wallet, but he doesn’t hurt his baby eyes in the photo. And I tell the died girl to keep hiding cos I can see him coming with his gun. Me and her are hiding under a lady’s skirt in the queue and I can see the devil’s shoes coming to everyone very fast and hard and invisible. The skirt is yellow and hot like sunshine. I am being Luna and I wake up.
From The Ranfurly Review #15, June 2011. Annotations here
War is coming.
During the breakfast news I had a flash of a war plane in a fly-over above London, an echo of the Blitz that beat inside me for one split second.
It’s the time of the September grey. So is it because history repeats that I felt it again - another attack looming as I walked by the vendor box outside Archway station, the same grey of 7/7, 2005? And the future Blitz, 2000 and when.
From This Zine Will Change Your Life, February 2011. Annotations here
‘The beaming globe and the clock face walk hand-in-hand on a summer stroll…’
#
My apparatus slowly pumps away.
My eyes flicker beneath my lids through catalogues of dreams never to be found or repeated.
I’m all tucked in, well looked after. I’m all blue in crisp pajamas and my sheets are green and crease-free because I’m a stone at the bottom of a riverbed.
Twinkle twinkle little star.
I pivot in my dreams as if I can hear what the doctor tells my wife in the room, what he’ll tell me when I finally skip from the hard road to this soft bed, awake again.
From Quail Bell, November 2010. Annotations here
ANNA
Heat plays tricks with the mind, its tics. Grazing by the ferns, hiding, I was 17, my eyes assembling through a collage of green beyond the path this: two legs stood like poles at the end of flatland, the rest of the torso missing, covered in khaki trousers with the belt still on. Their feet in black shoes faced one way as I walked the other, taking in all that was new around me. l fell asleep cos of the afternoon heat, like I still do now. Anna was hiding from her family, who moved here when their province was uprooted for intersecting highways. ‘We’ll be closer to the city’ the governors would say through mother. It was true - the village lay by the basin of the valley, fourty minutes on wheels through the mouth into the metropolis.
