4

JULY 2019, SEOUL

 CONTENTS

WORD v

CONTRIBUTORS

Will Alexander 1

Aurelia Guo 5

Oliver Baggott x 7

Azad Ashim Sharma 12

Katy Lewis Hood 17

Harry Gilonis 18

Dona Mayoora 26

Fred Carter 31

Rhys Trimble 34

Nicky Melville 38

Sascha Aurora Akhtar 45

Tom Betteridge 51

César Vallejo / William Rowe / Helen Dimos 52

Jeff Hilson 58
 Helen Dimos 60

mjb 70

Amanda Earl 76

Jonathan Catherall 79

Kashif Sharma-Patel 81

Nico Vassilakis 82

Anne-Laure Coxam 87

Daniel Spicer 94

Jessie Widner 97

ajCarruthers x 100

Imogen Cassels 110

REVICULES 111
On J. Gordon Faylor, Lila Matsumoto, Luke Roberts,
John Bloomberg-Rissman, Unica Zürn, Henri Michaux, and Eley Williams
(CLM, Mandel Cabrera, Jonathan Catherall)
For how much longer will I entrust those crucial hypnagogic phrases to memory? To begin
from a point of voided excess—with all of the implied junking of the vernacular—is to go outer
Blake, vision rheumy in the canthus. Then you will arrive at the imperative: to make a music
around which the human almost accretes [italicization here as flailing grammaticule]. Do we
know how our ‘poems’ move? Tell, then, how these sentences might be a path back home, how
their textual currency might approximate the flows and disbursements of an economy that
poetry can or cannot know.

CLM
From The Ganges

"...no
I am not a storm obscured by vigorous bacteria & waste
descending
to 'streams'
& 'lakes'
& rivelets

as 'compressible liquid'
as 'solvent'
as 'ionizing agent'

but perhaps
as Shudra*
I am ' lavender'
'camphor'
as flowing diamond through oracular conclave
unlike cobalt traced as eclectic rigidity

unlike a sullen scorpion miner

I do not hope for better outcome or caste
aspiring as a youngish Dhruva*
conspiring at the river Jumna*
for result from higher carnage

& no
I am not a lizard at the Gumti River*
awaiting outcome from my sins

as seeming Chandala*
I am exposed to other substances & orders
to other burnings
to other chroma
lower than vicarious mirage

all I can say

is that my sources blaze

1
 EROTOPLASTY 4

& I agree to no outcome

neither
am I karma marga*
or bhakti marga*
or he who dwells as gyana marga*
fabricating scars through philosophical inscription

in this
there is nothing outside my own electrical momentum nothing outside my surge as
inconsequent charisma*

within this degree

I am neither moth or substance of moth
by which I exercise loss
or partial embitterment as loss

because I have not yet collapsed

by whispering gain to myself
I tend to combat restitution

for the 'eight million four hundred thousand' parturitions that claim the self through
suffering
I exist as no more than hyper-estrangement

unknown
to oblations
or personal sacrifice
or pre-engendered mantra

again
concerning castes
being Dravidian & Sino-Tibetan
I am at one with being Shudra
at the lowest cycle
at the sullen rank scorched by immobility

as for the Vaishya caste*

or the other double rungs
such as the Kshatriya's & the Brahmans*

2
 WILL ALEXANDER

nothing exists
in this regard
I am electric
feral
roaming beyond pre-thought conclusion

so if I am water & sin combined

how do I rectify & conform to unreal entropics?

how do I agitate other than by causation?

how do I claim disharmonic realia that now seals me?

& I mean
the gods
the demons
the godlings
the formed & disposable rishis

as per initial view

I inaugurate death count
I cultivate by disadvantage bubonic lettering & peril

as sullied hyper-annealment
as cause unknown to Brahma
as curious nauseant outside of Indra

of course the Gods accuse me of acataphasia*

of in-nimble surfeit
keeping company with the unordered

who am I to say that the Ganges is invisible

to its warren
to its creation of believers
to its correction of avarice & venality
all the while acknowledging
that something has settled inside my derma
misplaced resentment?
volatile in-cohesion?

3
 EROTOPLASTY 4

maybe I take into account

the worship of Shiva & 'the daily slaughter of goats'
or the 'social pressure' & imposition of varna*
forbidden to enter temples
or to walk down certain passageways
because my shadow is inclement & defiles

I can say
that I maximize seclusion
I practice in-born honour
according to hidden blazes
according to mercurial salt
that extracts itself from noise & error..."

Glossary

Shudra – An untouchable.
Dhruva – The child who was changed by Vishnu into a star so as to ascend above the station of
others.
Jumna River – "second largest tributary river of the Ganges..."
Gumti River – River in Tripura state in north-east India.
Chandala – Offspring of a Shudra mother who has mated with a Brahmin.
karma marga – In the Bagavagita this constitutes the "way of works."
bhakti marga – In the Gita it means "...love and devotion to a particular deity..."
gyana marga – In the Gita, "the way of knowledge."
inconsequent charisma – The very nature of the Shudra is institutionally demeaned.
Vaishya caste – Third lowest caste.
Kshatriya & the Brahman's – The upper castes. Brahmins are the preeminent caste and the
Kshatriya's are next to the Brahmins in status. Kshatriya was the supposed caste of the Buddha.
acataphasia – The "inability to connect words sensibly into sentences." In this context it means
disorder of all official pronouncement.
varna – "The Sanskrit term for caste." It "literally means color and refers to the caste system with all
the Blacks being the lowest issuing from the feet of Brahma. According to Macfie this "colour bar" is
"the most rigourous and cruel the world has ever known..."

4
Alive

Pain for a Daughter

Linda lived as an avatar to Sexton’s desires

and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?

She is raised by her mother, isolated in a tower

Alive

But potentially too traumatised to do anymore

Just drink soda
the gin I drink each day at half-past five

at blood heat
or the laughing bee on a stalk

professional growth leads to higher purchasing power, allowing one to invest in timeless, high-quality
pieces that one can then mélange with Zara

far from Greno and Howard’s shallow “what do you hate about your mom” interviews
She also claimed that her father sexually abused her, sometimes with his sister listening at the door
that life on the outside was too dangerous, too dark, and that Rapunzel would die if she left the tower

Bad things happen to pretty blondes with no parents. I thought Grimm’s fairy tales were written for children, as
warnings. But they were actually collected as folklore, and told to and by adults.

Grimm’s Rapunzel is banished from the tower by her mother after she’s caught making love to the Prince
Also, I believe it’s important not to do work in my bedroom. That’s my space to sleep, write, read, and meditate

between a rape in a Leeds hotel room

and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?

manipulative and attention-seeking

the memories and desires of an abuser
1998
1999
Neither of which is able to alleviate the suffering
Negative thoughts

5
 EROTOPLASTY 4

My mom was an artist. Though this was left dormant for much of her life. As a Vietnamese
immigrant in the 60s her artistic-ness was considered a talent, but not taken seriously, not made
much of. And she spent her life doing some job to contribute to the family’s income. It was only
when she retired that she took up these activities again, and then it poured out of her—
hundreds of paintings, and other creative endeavors. She was also autistic, in my unscientific
diagnosis. Maladjusted. Poor language skills. She only ever spoke with a child’s simple
sentences, and simple perspective. Highly private. The only company she accepted was our
immediate family.

I had adolescent depression, and this on its own, removed me from my family, from being close
to anyone in fact. But what I now see, is that I am exactly 50% my mother and 50% my father. If
you opened me up I think you’d find everything inside precisely composed like that. The years
before they died I had had almost no contact with my family, and I believed that one’s friends
are one’s family, the family that you choose. But I learned that that’s wrong. It sounds corny, but
what I learned was your immediate family and you are a tree—and chopping off any part is
monstrous

6
Barista Love

7
 EROTOPLASTY 4

Step in Pariah

8
 OLIVER BAGGOTT

Ex- Terminal (six tenets of modernism)

9
 EROTOPLASTY 4

Royal We

10
 OLIVER BAGGOTT

Puttin Out

[Note: Royal We and Puttin Out first appeared in the Crater Press publication Drawings. Other works can be seen at
the artist’s website.]

11
High Modernist Relapse: A Neuroscience-Informed Prosepoem

In the land of neurochemistry everyone is equally fucked. A physical material self walks through
the high grass in search of new neural pathways. Some of them have shorter stems growing over
the previously trodden-on versions of such paths but they now start to blend into the tall
flowers.
I like the idea of walking in recovery sometimes you make machetes from your soles
and chop through the foliage to feel your way through. Other times you follow someone else’s
clearing. But those old paths are pre-destined, you know where you’ll end up.
Sometimes it’s best to push through the nettle burn and sit down on the other side. But
there are moments when we’re vulnerable, hubristic and hysterical, unthinking and unfeeling,
repressing something ulterior in the sinuses of solipsistic stories. I often get anxious saying these
things. How can I write a poem about how I recovered from drug addiction without a strong
‘I’ in there? I can’t absent myself from a story about myself!
I tried to imagine the high grass that day when I followed an old path hoping for a new
endpoint. I made an old choice hoping for a new result. I went to a pub called the Junction.
The Junction is pugnacious and habeas viscus vibrates slowly over the rooftops. I’m
informed at the entrance there is decreased D2 receptor availability. I frown without really
understanding what that means. The Junction is the place where you can hear a culture of
quivering between history and ontology. The corporeal realm is littered with glass over amen
breaks. The advert in the window asks me if I want a career in leisure. The reward is deficiency.
The recruitment, suboptimal. Sure, I think, pay me to drink Stella in the sunshine or to snort
enough white so that I don’t have to share air with fascists.
The Junction is full of addicts, junkies, crackheads, day-time binge drinkers performing
mnemonic labour over the slot machines, trying to figure out if the phantoms are imaginary or
not. I swallow rat poison. We’re all drinking so much alcohol, I’m not sure what we’re
preserving. This beautiful escape from planetary death.
The pub is also full of plant-sellers outside doing tricep dips on the rickety benches
before stroking the filthy pugs of passers-by. I started to feel hungry, the bartender tells me that
‘the stomach is always already empty.’ I smile and he goes back to reading Heidegger whilst
counting the change in the till.
No one really planned on ending up here, playing pool with strangers, wearing our St
George’s crosses, going to crusade with the voices in our heads. The Palestinian equestrian

12
 EROTOPLASTY 4

chases the dragon on the lawn. I see a new pale ale called delirium tremens. The pink elephant
comes alive and fucks me. I give birth stillborn on the hippocampus.
‘It turns out maybe there isn’t a cure for this,’ I say to the damaged diachronic agent. ‘I
should know, I waited a whole year. Expecting myself to heal and get better – and I did in part
– but one sip of beer is five pints is two grams of yé!’
The agent peels an orange.
‘Its two halves are anisotropic,’ he says, ‘fractional, like your pleasure centres.’ The agent
is obsessed with aphorisms. He turns to me and says ‘what is organic is corruptible. It’s okay to
be off your face so many hours in the day. What is a face? What is being off it?’
I cast my eyes to the heavens praying for an exit from the conversation.
The agent keeps saying I have ‘an air of introjective dejection’ about me. I misheard and
said ‘I don’t inject.’ He says ‘the truth occupies every singularity.’ He pulls out Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary and – looking suggestively over the spine – he offers me a wink and continues:
‘mimetic poisons are the best sedatives or cures you’ll find. If you want to fit in here it’s probably
worth knowing how to talk.’
Such agents, however damaged or diachronic, are the subject’s entrance into self-
narration. It’s an automatic impulse to say. In order to eat from the broken orange you have to
pass an exam on Emmanuel Levinas by shouting the words ‘say’ and ‘responsibility’ for an entire
hour with increasing intensity and volume. No one knows why this is a test. The agents always
mutter something about ‘fractal interiorities and algebras of need, full immersion in the
recovery relapse recovery process.’ I begin to think this is all an elaborate ruse to negotiate a
temporality that fissures over our recondite fantasies.
I begin to wish for an indecent end to all of this.
Sometimes the agent switches to the subjunctive mood to get a point across. That’s why
you throw shrapnel at my knuckles, at the bottom of this well there are wishes. And the damaged
agent wished me well before telling me I should get this right now otherwise I might end up
like him, peeling an orange at the Junction at the age of 70 with veins lined with metallic
adulteration, wishing I had more time. The agents are libidinally invested in these subjunctive
moods, it’s as if the totality of the care provided at the Junction wasn’t enough to provide
comfort.
Away with dog fairies asleep in psychosis comatosed alertness.
The relapse is not meant to be part of this journey but it’s now part of mine. Friends
who love me call me and express sorrow. This isn’t for them to apologise. It’s for my lips to
crack over. Pale grey in their silence.

13
 AZAD ASHIM SHARMA

The palimpsests of joy confound a sober version of myself. I am never authentic and
battle the construction of two false selves. Each self is authenticity sous-rature. The more false
they are the more true they are.
I fall under the spell of the high priest of recidivism – the new avant garde founded on
a voxel based morphometric that saps at my resources.
The narrative suffers structural alterations.
I become hypersensitive mourning for the lack of protein molecule Nogo A. I
volunteered for victimhood in the meso cortico limbic system, the administrator tells me to
start forgetting things I used to remember in the morning. The administrator warns me that
my failure to do this would result in a lifelong illness such as was suffered by a patient who,
upon entering the Junction, recited Whitman’s ‘One Hour to Madness and Joy’ for a whole
hour and ended up cutting out his tongue.
‘Okay take another hit and then lie here,’ the administrator orders, and then I’m laid
down on a bed of rocks and covered in price tags.
After an hour I have to walk around the pub wearing nothing but the price tags which
are affixed to my body. If this doesn’t work I have to go and scream at yourself in the mirror.
If that doesn’t work I’ll be electrocuted.
In the state of powerlessness there might come a surrender to the process of quailing at
shortcomings, reticent but fully exposed to tides of thought that break across my brow with a
new tortured disconsolation. The fear that arches above a purple aura as sun sets on cheer like
a disconnected phone-call. I reverberate with the clouds, those tiny esoteric sacks of tears from
the sky, you move over my skin like a mosquito and maybe it happens again, the relapse, maybe
it doesn’t but the desire to find a lesson in this is quite hard to catch in my hands and I’m
reaching for some kind of comfort in the cortex of someone else who knows this affliction.
Hypertrophic obstinate abstinence implements the stringency of familiar wisdom. You
don’t sit in a barber shop not expecting to get a haircut. Why would you sit in a pub not
expecting to drink? Modest behavioural differences are swept under activated astrocytes. The
gibbous moon leaves oleaginous spots on my skin: a diffusion of sensibility paramount to
microgliosis. They take my blood. The test results come back positive and display increased
volume. I’m not really sure what I wanted the tests to come back as. I contemplate leaving the
Junction. The bartender looks over at me sternly and orders me a drink. I force a line into me
wondering what is this way that separates us? I’m now outside. I’m smoking. I feel on fire. All
the leaves in my body are shaking.

14
 EROTOPLASTY 4

Coke Dick and Otto Fenichel

I tried to tug at it shrunken and shrivelled,

damp chestnut rotted in the decay of autumn
a pharmacotoxic look insults my body
formed in the realisation that maniacal artifice seizes
the root of my delirium.

Coke dick forces me inside myself

when I want
to be
outside or beside myself.
It thrusts me into the morning after
into the horror show of waking up numb and cold.
Immiserated by breathing without fulfilment,
eating without nourishment, pain as permanence.

Coke dick is a veritable manifestation

of the masturbation conflict
as much as the endless debate
in the altered state to watch
violent pornography might be something
that represents what the addict is doing
to theirself in the process of fulfilling
an archaic oral longing. Deep fried
the fronto-striatal thalamic circuit
erogenously dismantle genital primacy as passive narcissism
amorphously breaks sinus and cerebral tissue alike
The neurology of drug addiction alone
partners it as a neurodivergence
Coke dick then delivers a fixation of libido
retreating inwards at the moment of climax
a sublative escape-retreat complex of the addicted psyche.

15
 AZAD ASHIM SHARMA

The original situation of intolerant tension

a need for external gratification
if you were to try and get it up
you’d have to via aggregate the latency of inhibition.
Coke dick is my retreat from the world and the beginning
of my longing for exteriority.
Coke dick is disappointment at the phant0m limb
button mushroom simulacra of myself,
In fact, you don’t really need to have a penis to suffer
from it, I suspect, thinking aloud,
There is no real relief or release from addiction at this
point, no taking the edge off
The comedown is there for me to see in its decrepitude,
it’s slow unbearable coming alone.

16
flared muscle of a leg does and does not lean
on switches of ancestors to violet vision
[the pin of the garment holds animals apart
slipping for air in thinning intervals between scorches
seeing fractionally below sheets of surface tension
[your more in common with eels than eels with lamprey
contoured, mimic of a jawless choreography
a mock-silk-backed waistcoat adhering
[the counterpose
the water asks not to be usurped by the head of a fowl
as though one were a thing and another were not ten bottles’ neck
already slid past its outlines
[request pelted transversal
iridescence a coating
drawn to extinguish, feeding
[beads of a plumage’s proof, perspirations
strip skin of the teeth of a print matte and tufted
fleshing out states of prey and illusion
wanting without extension, each uttered waves longing
sensitive pigment tuning spectral
[limb bared prone to unpaired fins
the shallow marine, the brackish underbite
tongue like a kick to the stone for salt
[lambently fracked sheen, leaded tissues
broke on the bank too short in sight
[scales fallen, operation over, petals glowing
radiant to quicken evolutions
curve of the small of a species’ spine might and might
not stretch too far for shaping
figure’s bloom toning
fulgid stream
17
From NORTH HILLS
quite a way after Hsü Hun (788-867? AD)

qua time

far night strings afloat

western style growing glowing
firefly perched on jade
feather brushing river silver
known told yet secret
many / even more / changes
fall leaf descending
cigarette-smoke-thread aware
for John Russell, guitarist

early fall

midnight zither far-off plays

west wind stirs underbrush
fireflies illumine dew
geese brush river silver
tall trees pay back dawn
light folds mountains (orogeny)
one falling leaf butterflies
effecting a storm

These are two versions of the same poem, intended to show something of the range of options which the polysemous nature
of Chinese characters and Chinese poetic syntax allow. See, e.g., the front-matter to Wai-lim Yip, Chinese Poetry, or to my
Free Poetry Vol. 5 no. 2 (2009): https://freepoetrycom.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/harry-gilonis-_north-hills_.pdf
18
 EROTOPLASTY 4

quite a way after Ts’ai Yen (? c. 170-215 AD)

reed-flute song 1

I was born
in the black used-to-be
Heaven fell like rain
confusion and disorder
‘all roads led to the mire…’
people fleeing / General Sorrow
dust & cigarettes
held, captive
(righteousness deficit)
I non- , not- , un-
daily violence & insult
my zither confronts their reed-flute
no-one knows my mind

19
 HARRY GILONIS

reed-flute song 2

compelled into marriage

taken to the horizon
clouds, mountains [re-iterated, re-iterated]
mile upon mile upon mile of dust
much sudden violence
arrogantly armoured … passive voice
desire … for extinction
heart-strings snapped

reed-flute song 17

heart sour acid

mountains - obstructions
mindful of dust
of sons never men
yellowed leaves
blanched bones, scarified skin
trembling with cold or fear
part-hungry, part-ill
after returning home:
exhausted tears

Ts’ai Yen, an Eastern Han dynasty calligrapher, ch’in (zither) player and poet, was abducted by Hsiung-nu nomads and
forcibly married to a barbarian chief; 12 years later she was ransomed and returned to China. The ‘Songs to a Nomad Flute’
are both a set of ch’in pieces and a series of poems, ascribed to her and dealing with her life and adventures.
20
 EROTOPLASTY 4

quite a way after Yu Hsüan-chi (844-869 AD)

rained parade

fenced chrysanths broken

paired petals fallen
radio on, news of rain
… can’t find the wine-glass …

gone fishing

Barbour-green water-flowers receding

back-watering boat
duck nears drake companionably
pair paired by the fishing hole

farewell poem

river chases its own tail indecisively

clouds arrive without meaning to
spring breezes / disappointment
lone duck away from the flock

21
 HARRY GILONIS

quite a way after Tu Mu (c. 803-852 AD)

travelling night

travel lodging alone

congealed feelings quiet(ly) rain
thoughts the opposite of new
worried by negative constructions
morning dreams infringe
calling home cut off
moon smoking by the broad river
boat (drifting) just close-by ...

travelling feeling

screen door open bedding cools

tired of being tired / memory streams
hills’ hues old and faded
hearts and minds allus hustlin’
wind pines half the night rain
full men fill the bar moon frosts
handy horse, head south of the river
chasing that scent of mandarin oranges ...

Yu, a woman poet, is best-known for her 8-line verses; and Tu, a man, for his quatrains. I’ve published versions of these as
Free Poetry Vol. 5 no. 2 (2009): https://freepoetrycom.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/harry-gilonis-_north-hills_.pdf

22
 EROTOPLASTY 4

quite a way after Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072 AD)

(to the tune of) ‘Cripple Creek’

lamp gutters blooms dangling moonlike

slight light delivered through thin curtains
helplessly intoxicated / she perfumes the air
hands paired (dancing over) grasped sleeve
after the song // money // “bottoms up?”
eyes turned in negative construction / a broken man

(to the tune of) ‘Moon River’

quiet thunder thunders off across the water

rain rains drops split by leaves
eaves angle cut across a rainbow
screen-door open,
waiting for moon to bloom

swallow arrives, roosts, looks from roost

moon a drip on a dark roof
not a wave on the carpetted lake
a doubled bed,
on which a hairpin falls: all there is . . .

23
 HARRY GILONIS

quite a way after Li Ch’ing-chao (1082-?1149 AD)

dream song (1)

remember dusk rising streaming

under drunk road returned
wild bright day ending
entering deep the lotus
struggled, cross struggled across sand bars
egrets startled a few
for Philip Coleman

to the tune of ‘Cripple Creek’

flaked gold reflecting light (its petals)

slivers of cut green jade (its leaves)
– bloom with a whiff of scholarship
haut-ton – how brilliant!

plums saved in poems (how vulgar)

d*cks drooped like lilacs (how coarse)
– its cloying scent fumigates my dreams
my thoughts brought to a .

The originals of these ‘songs’ by Ou-yang (male) and Li (female) are in the Sung Dynasty poetic mode tz’u, wherein words
were set to then-popular song tunes. In the intervening millennium or so all trace of the music has vanished.

24
 EROTOPLASTY 4

quite a way after Mao T'i (1642-1681 AD)

snow poem

((within)) (mountains) crows (trees) ((within))

I sweep up flakes // I brew up leaves
not fretted by Manchurian cold
fretted that frost'll hit the plum blossoms

***

quite a way after ‘Hsü Ching-fan’ (1563-1589 AD)

unsent letter

windowed candle bends low

fireflies measure the heights
still still deep night chills
blow blow fall leaves fall
no news / passes / for truth
sunk in gloom in room
“how is it far?” – dwelling in paradise
moon through foliage hollows hills
for Colin Lee Marshall

The original was written, and published, in Chinese (as was then customary) by the Korean woman poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn
(허초희), writing as ‘Hsü Ching-fan’. She was widely published and anthologised in Korea and China; this poem appeared in
China, in Nineteen Poems of Younger Sister Hsü. See (e.g.) http://www.columbia.edu/~sek2114/content/intro.html

25
26
EROTOPLASTY 4

27
DONA MAYOORA

28
EROTOPLASTY 4

29
DONA MAYOORA

30
kaonashi

the biggest power guzzler in the household is he

tell your darkling tacit

est secretion is it arc
tic frigid song or poly
mer partic
ulates un
bidding wit
less exocrine dis
ruptor
call these salad
boys as pic
kets practic
ally cross them
selves what left
then for to salv
age now

i see that you

have buried now
your tongue and
nose into your work
did you accept

31
 EROTOPLASTY 4

relentless torque
of scale dis
perse impers
onal from first
enjoinder
ed body
stag ring face
of corporat
ion gut they in
stil spirits dai
ly bread rise thank
is what accounts us

i wanted a rock
to be able to
say to the mining
industry look, this
is the bedrock

understand exactly
the scale on which
this matter had been
the subject

we must neglect
no opportunity
to erode

32
 FRED CARTER

now take the ap

titude test dec
lare love in
junction with
an austere thirs
sty bedsit
ginger lem
on fee simil
itude and voca
tive reform cur
ative tollbooth cha
kras fasc
ile imp
licate of
i

the concept of
a global impact
is not working
for us and, in
the meantime,
your body has
already eaten
the distance

[Note: Italicised sections include words from Michael Heseltine’s interview for On the Record, Daniel Graßmann’s
‘Solar Energy in Gran Canaria,’ Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body, national archive records of Ferdinand Mount’s
trade union reform policy, and other google searches.]

33


Mari Lwyd
shamanism is a kind of mental disease … the shamanic vocation is manifested by a crisis, a
temporary derangement of the future shaman’s spiritual equilibrium. All the observations and
analysis that have been made at this point are particularly valuable – Mircea Eliade

cthonico-funerary
anghenfil
cangen
â chyrn canghenog
chdi fysa’r
llwydni tu fewn
y benglog
lliwiau ar asgwrnwedd
ail-gydiad tanllyd gynt cynrhôd blwyddyn
yn cil-cnoi ein bodoloaeth e’i hun1
three psalter harp}}
(in the) ghost (bush) dance religion
mytho psych physiology
o galon y mis du
i galan masiaeth
certain notions about sacrament
arch their voice
in toxophilic lusts
noson calan ://
s scapegoated
deeptrip šurru
to begin”
akîtu
tempore
of the goat

1
cthono-funerary monster/branch/and branched horns/ you would be the grey mould inside the skull/ colours on
grey/fiery second burst before the circle of the year/nibbling on its own tail

34
 EROTOPLASTY 4

telyn rhawn
crwyn
skiningrove
exemplary combat
recited
redacted
“orgy”
“deluge”

Ritus
Tiamat or Marduk
Rhein
equum demonds drugs &c

god hath
3 keys
wnesi ddim
wnesi ddim
wnesi ddim2
kiss fire alter
Agni
& of 5 layers
fires &
lights
shield profane
time//

form “ (here the seed

tama
of the “visitor”

2
I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t

35
 RHYS TRIMBLE

mythico-rituality
East by easter
fixator allkiss
cosmovision &
retrogression wonderful
metaphor pryderi
dei pecccati
ek - wos
expect
significance
human torso
&
equine tower

pitch accent
reactualizes
iconographic
Bethan Mholaise
or Rhiannon
finely cast bridle
///butchery marks

lumina nocte
didn’t even know
they were moving

36
 EROTOPLASTY 4

gressorial

a little
calibration
caseg
marrow
/
glass

bedd for the year’s

turning//fuck cynddylan
oh yes
to stop one’s mouth’s mourning

37
From apisodes

4. MANIAC

1.

tired of here?

you
are
here

find the end

of your rainbow
to see
the deeper truth

a fight is coming
the voices are just
noise

reality works
with adjustments

meant to be
stopping smoking
in a few weeks

Anne Laure’s
stopped already

so amazing
very impressive

she smoked for 23

years

38
 EROTOPLASTY 4

every fuckin day1

just reach out

and make contact

there’s a woman smoking

in this

she looks good

the odds are

here

you are
the odds

welcome subjects
you made the right choice

2.

another smoking woman

there’s a lot
of smoking in this

fuck you

healthy people read

books
take care
of their
minds

tired of here?

sorry Sigmund

1
Harry Dean Stanton in Twin Peaks: The Return, though he had smoked for seventy odd years.
39
 NICKY MELVILLE

no one
sees
in your head

identify
map
and confront

another fucking
buzzard mewl!2

what is it with
that shit?

is it a message?

we are the bodies

there’s another one

keep calm
and carrion

over and
over

North by Northwest
in the background

unless I am
mistaken

3.

enhanced interrogation

is that the test?

2
see ABBODIES and ‘apisodes 2 & 3.’
40
 EROTOPLASTY 4

none of this is real

none of this is real
none of this is real

BLIP

brief
and limited
psychosis

mindlantis

odd experiment time

4.

Sam Beckett

what a babe

6.

confrontation
begins
buzzard
mewl again

confrontation
boulevard

you
are
here

I was lost
in me own head
again

41
 NICKY MELVILLE

7.

the entire world’s

mad

but I’m not

but I am

was looking up
maniac episodes
and looked up
manic episodes
by mistake
instead

came up again

it must have been

my phone

applied for a job

about witchcraft

after
to relax
I did the quick crossword

one of the answers

was witchcraft

augury?

ceci n’est pas un drill

says Gabriel Byrne

in a sudden
and shocking
violent scene

this is not a drill

in translation
42
 EROTOPLASTY 4

what is not a drill?

now he
Jonah Hill
turns into
a buzzard!
and flies toward
the moon

Annie I’m a hawk

or an eagle it changes

in one shot
it’s a red kite

but the main bird

looks like a buzzard

9.

now the hawk

that he saved in ‘real’ life
in one episode
becomes an alien
in an other
episode

with the looming

alien invasion

I’ve been blinded

by my mother’s
toxic love

sometimes people leave

and we don’t know
why

there’s no way
43
 NICKY MELVILLE

this is a coincidence

one final buzzard

then there’s
a hawk at the end

I don’t think
it’s a buzzard

more like a harris hawk

but I could be
mistaken

10.

afterwards
I read about the series
on appocalypse.co

Atlantis is
also mentioned
in the new season
of The Good Place

for those
that have
it all

Foreverspin3

Inception
anyone?

this is not a drill

3
Foreverspin is a company that sells little metal spinning tops, for those that have it all, which look exactly like the totem
Leonardo Di Caprio uses in Inception to work out whether he’s awake or dreaming.
44
45
EROTOPLASTY 4

46
SASCHA AURORA AKHTAR

47
 EROTOPLASTY 4

I Am Not A Prose, Poem

Visiting places where things remind

You of your childhood – miniscule, wild
Strawberries, many tiny seeds that

Crunch in your mouth -the image of

Them a memory of the
Excitement of discovering
Something to be plucked &
Possessed & possibly eaten

When you too were wee,

like the berries.

In Monaco, the surreal is

Apparent in everything, in
All aspects. In the confluence
Of dramatic, natural monuments &
Assiduously built levels & levels of
Concrete nestling eerily in the
Midst of the wild azurite sea &

Jagged coast- natural opulence &

man-made ornamentation, compete.

The sculptures are testament to

This – everyone knows they are
Living in a Surrealesque window- the
Window frame massive & empty
To frame Monaco or Monte-Carlo from
Afar, placed carefully upon La Roc
Is testament to this. Le Musée
Océanographique is a Raymond
Rosseau example of architecture perched
As it is, built into the cliff, a mammoth

48
 SASCHA AURORA AKHTAR

Repository in which to house

the fruits & vegetables of the sea.

The Monaco Cathedral built with

Stones from natural La Turbie near-by,
Where a princess was recently married. We
Lit a candle to St. Nicholas. Did we pray to
The Father of Christmas? Adorning the
Corridors, prayer stations to
Other saints Dévote
& also Christ – further
Down the corridor the
Buried dead of the famille
Royale – as if to say we built
Here, we lived here, we loved
Here & here in the heart

of our opulent fantasy, we die &

are, entombed.

At the surrealist peak, which

Is the cathedral, an absurdist
Fantasy & their graves the perfect
Icing on the absurdist cake of

hope & glory.

And if you look up, you see La tête

De chien – it is always possible
To see the head of the dog from
Any aspect on the ground, everywhere
You look - although I wonder
Who first saw the dog in the
Cliff and why they saw a
Dog and not a dragon
Or a cat or a gooseberry, Le tête

de groseille à maquereau would work just as well.

49
 EROTOPLASTY 4

I get particularly enamoured of a

Georgio di Chirico sculpture in
The jardin exotique where a faceless
Knight shielded by his helmet consoles
A faceless woman, her face buried
In his shoulder – it feels like a
Moment, very rare that I will never see

In this lifetime.

***

The other sculptures are equally compelling, their placement perfect. A naked woman holding
a hand mirror out to the side looks straight into it, strange bronzed children sitting alone,
another naked woman whose exposed back you see as you approach the nook where she sits
looking forever out to the sea, her hips perfectly formed.

the festive paper butterflies,

mangled
in barbed wire
just outside Le Casino –

I realize I have been searching for the vivid magenta of bougainvillea- half here, I am half not
here but in another place, I have been transported to my childhood and I am a child surrounded
by houses cloaked by bougainvillea – but here, there is no bougainvillea.

***

50
From DRESSINGS
1.5
full scene stay here hard light throws up con-
scripted turbines each blade lint against
sky beige sea the shingle’s strange flora
blue as latent patchwork fresh algae’s
hue under the still pane blemishes
where seahorses gather ultrasound
or fall sick within bright cornflower
clamped abdomen out of home dumbstruck
at the margin high winds teethe and knit

1.6
phone in the audit one taut pixel
veers needle point against full red of
burgeoning autumn defer stitches
for open mouth as red lumen blaze
enzymes growth factors and hormones
that seek company tack through ingress
no sham network this wild buildout
fresh reds course through deep no-fly zones
fill their boots or hold one another

1.8
orange segments and talcum I throw up
against the sullied dovecot’s peeling
bars cream grid I abdicate and call
and in violent wrongdoing then raise
up slickly trauma from deep tissue
as cipher as glistening welt as
gewgaw swaying as promise of our
open speech medallion the mediate
stand-in red centre for loose healing

51
Note: César Vallejo’s Trilce was first published in 1922. Each translation is followed by a gloss.
The translations are by William Rowe and the glosses are by William Rowe and Helen Dimos.

52
 CÉSAR VALLEJO / WILLIAM ROWE / HELEN DIMOS EROTOPLASTY 4

Trilce I Trilce I

Who’s making that racket and won’t allow Somebody’s making a noise that stops us hearing what’s
the islands to be dumped and a testament. really going on.

A little more consideration The noise might be most poetry, it might be language, or
as it’ll be late, early, prison guards who won’t let the prisoners shit or write in
and the guano will be better peace. When Vallejo was in gaol, prisoners were allowed to
assayed, the simple stinking corpse of finance use the toilets only four times a day.
that the salty gannet
proffers without wanting,
in the insular heart, The guano boom of the late nineteenth century injected
with each hyaloid liquidity into the Peruvian economy and allowed
buffeting. capitalism to take off. Guano is bird excrement, deposited
on islands off the coast, exported to Europe as fertiliser for
intensive farming.
A little more consideration,
and the liquid compost six pm
OF THE MOST MAGNIFICENT B FLATS. Something half-heard starts to be audible. Dead matter,
money, pass through the poem and Peru: real external
forces traverse poetry. Are we capable of hearing them
And the peninsula rises up before it’s too late? It’s a life or death question.
behind, muzzled, fearless
in the mortal line of equilibrium.
The poem resists the subsumption of life by the
accumulation of capital. In opposition to capitalist desires,
is there a relation between the absence of fear and wanting,
and the truth of poetry?

53
 CÉSAR VALLEJO / WILLIAM ROWE / HELEN DIMOS EROTOPLASTY 4

Trilce II Trilce II

Time Time. Prison punctuates time with its physical order; it creates
a time that’s equally subdivided and empty. Language
administers it.
Mid-day stagnated between sun-glares.
Boring pump of prison reduces
time time time time. Whether one is in actual prison or not, prison-time is a
static present, an empty time excised from the continuity
of time’s movement. It is held in place by a fixed rhythm,
Was Was. which the poem’s metronomic repetition of words
embodies. Vallejo was imprisoned for 112 days for a crime
he did not commit.
Cocks crow scratching on in vain.
Mouth of the bright day that conjugates
was was was was. The poem wants to wake up but prison-time has imposed
itself on language: where is ‘the present’? The sounds of a
new day do not bring a new day.
Tomorrow Tomorrow.
But there’s something that exists before naming. This other
The still warm bed of being. thing wounds us, makes our hair stand on end, and itself
The present thinks keep me for suffers language.
tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.
If language shapes time, can we find a new language. The
Name Name. E at the end of namE is a small emblem of that possibility.
The exact repetition of words has been broken.
 
What’s that called that prickles us?
It’s called the Selfsame that suffers
name name name namE.

54
 CÉSAR VALLEJO / WILLIAM ROWE / HELEN DIMOS EROTOPLASTY 4

Trilce IV Trilce IV

Two carts rasp against the hammers There’s a grinding noise, made by two things grating
all the way to the trifurcal tear ducts against each other. There’s also a third thing that might
when we never did anything against them. reach beyond division and make the lovers into One, but
Against the other woman yes, unloved, the child cannot complete the circle.
bitternessed in a rural tunnel
by the One, and in harsh glacial
spiritual trials. There is grief in the poem. The child cannot be a seamless
part of the One, nor can he separate from it. He refuses
to ingest the mother love, yet there is a painful relating to
I lay down sounding like the third part these unchosen conditions. The situation is unresolvable:
but the afternoon – hwat’s to be ddone about it – the circle cannot be squared, despite the false certainty of
makes a ring in my head, furiously family logics.
not wanting to be made into doses of mother. They are
the rings.
They are the nuptial tropics utterly chewed. But adjacent to grief something radical starts to happen:
To go away, better than everything, an interference has broken into language and stops it from
breaks as Crucible. becoming an object of desire which can take the place of
pain. The rasping the poem begins with makes a non-
subsumable grit. The poem asks ‘What can be done’ at
That not having discoloured the point where surplus noise and redundant letters stop
for no reason. Side by side with destiny and weep words being smoothly absorbed.
and weep. The whole song
squared in three silences.
In itself, that would amount to an avant-gardist stance.
But the poem does not stop there. That the family cannot
Heat. Ovary. Almost transparency. form a seamless trinity, that there’s no alchemy to join
It’s been all wept. It’s been all waked over what is separate, that personal and historical pain cannot
fully on the left. be healed: to make the poem the place of non-suture is to
place us inside a true questioning of what is needed.

In several Trilce poems, ‘left’ is invoked as a minus space,

to the left of zero. A negating action, that constitutes a
traversing of past meaning. At the end of this poem there
is a marking of a mourning that has taken place.

55
 CÉSAR VALLEJO / WILLIAM ROWE / HELEN DIMOS
Trilce LV
Samain would say the air is calm and of a contained
sadness.
Vallejo says today Death is welding every edge to every
strand of lost hair, from the dish of a frontal bone, where
there’s seaweed, lemon balm singing sacred mastic trees on
guard, and antiseptic poems without owner.
Wednesday, with dethroned fingernails tears its own
camphor fingernails, and through dusty sieves filters
echoes, turned pages, limescale,
fly buzzing
when there’s dead person, and bright spongy grief and a bit
of hope.
A patient is reading the News, as if on a lectern.
Another one is stretched out throbbing, longfaced, near
enough buried.
And I notice one shoulder’s in its place
still and is almost ready after this one, on the other side.
And the afternoon has passed sixteen times through the
patrolled subsoil,
and one is almost absent
in the yellow wooden number
of the bed that’s been empty so much time
over there…………………….
in front.
56
EROTOPLASTY 4
Trilce LV
The poem begins by quoting a line of Albert Samain,
French symbolist poet. In the same poem Samain writes,
‘the golden leaves […] fall, slowly, like memories, on the
grass.’ The scene is ‘a hospice or a prison’: the words induce
a pleasing melancholy that wants to conjure away pain.
Actual experience of both hospital and prison cannot
accommodate the genteel music of late nineteenth-century
lyricism, which seems outside life, history, and experience:
‘antiseptic poems without owner’. The poem strikes from
its own place: ‘Vallejo says today Death is welding every
edge to / every strand of lost hair’. The thought does not
flinch before the absoluteness of death which will place
every molecule beyond the limit of language.
Actual Death, which has been severely occluded inside
capitalism and especially inside the modern hospital,
appears here at the beginning of the poem and again in the
end, in the emptied yet visible signifier of true absence (‘the
yellow wooden number’). In the poem’s middle a living
death is shown: patients so dead in life half their body
has already been left to slip into the other realm. The fly
buzzing through the ward visits a later poem of Vallejo’s,
“The windows have shuddered”. There, the fly ‘serves the
cause of religion’, as here, its sound unzips the beliefs of
those clinging to ‘bright spongy grief’ and ‘a bit of hope’, if
they had ears to hear.
The material substrate of the hospital is being endlessly
patrolled. Yet surveillance and the murdering of death
cannot touch the place of real death. The end of the poem
traverses this place in its ongoingness. The suspended dots
let us see it.
 CÉSAR VALLEJO / WILLIAM ROWE / HELEN DIMOS
Trilce LXXV
You’re dead.
What strange manner of being dead. Anyone would say
you’re not dead. But the truth is you are.
You float nothingly on the other side of the membrane
that hangs from zenith to nadir and comes and goes from
sunset to sunset, vibrating to the sound-box of a wound
whose pain you don’t feel. What I’m saying is life is in the
mirror and you’re the original, death.
As the wave goes and the wave comes, how easy to
be dead with impunity. Only when the waters divide at
opposing borders, and fold and fold, then you become
transfigured and believing you’re dying, you perceive the
sixth string which isn’t yours any more.
You’re dead, not having lived, ever. Anyone would say
that not being now, there was some other time when you
were. But the truth is you’re the corpses of a life that never
was. Sad destiny. Never to have been anything but dead. To
be a dry leaf without ever having been green. Orphanhood
of orphanhoods.
And yet, the dead are not, cannot be corpses of a life
not yet lived. They have always died of life.
You’re dead.
57
EROTOPLASTY 4
Trilce LXXV
These dead persons have no relation with the real
integument of time and space. They vibrate, but it’s to the
sound of a wound they are incapable of suffering. They are
unreflective material, dead to thought. To them, as Emily
Dickinson wrote, life is always ‘over there’.
The membrane could separate Symbolic and Real, life
and death, conscious and unconscious; yet the thought is
complicated by the ‘coming and going’ of the membrane
itself, as if these are pulses in which the passage between
worlds is more possible? Yet the dead of this poem do not
approach even this. To be dead in life (incapable of full
life) and dead in death (incapable of full death) are brought
together; so to be alive in life, and alive in death (not
immortality) are brought into relation.
At the point where life is most intense, which could be
actual death, or a symbolic death inside life, these dead
think they are dying; they perceive their lost life only in its
closing.
It has been suggested that the dead of this poem represent
the intellectuals of Trujillo, where Vallejo studied at
university. But the poem goes further. According to the
common belief that time is a continuous chain of cause
and effect, present deadness must have originated from
some previous living state. But there’s no life of which these
dead could have died. To be dead without having died is
to be outside the cycle of birth and death. The condition
presented here reaches fully into the deadness of our own
time.
Two interludes from Organ Music

(interlude)

on john & james by toots & the maytals when

confusingly they sing john james went up or down
to london town I know it doesnt mean the poet
john james/among the girls the last time he went
down in high shine vinyl on the organ of saint
georges in the east now he’s just a memory like
an eighteenth century baiter of bulls/everybody
heard about the two king rameses/no one ever
heard about the two john jameses/on the a-minor
voluntary with vivaldian energy one john james is
rhyming in the back of my saloon the others at
home like any ska original abroad with the ten
commandments/thou shalt not finger me in the
angel or the harp with any junior tory thou shalt not
psycha & trim/from chimney to chimney westward
on the cambridge line I dont know either which red
stripes mine/the coolest ones the one in ripolin
blue/under heavy manners quickly/this john james
revivals over too

58
 EROTOPLASTY 4

(interlude)

in this heat & out of tune during the hosepipe

ban playing esthers nose job on a vox continental
mike ratledge doesnt even have a fucking english
water meter/softly mike ratledge/using the concise
british alphabet to robert wyatt I want to report
a leak in 1973 but held in a queue I’m progressively
untitled/again he values my custom again hugh hopper
is using a sprinkler/about the empty watering cans
of elton dean thank you for calling the gentleman
farmer in england & wales my lawns all yellow
because of the daylong baths of emerson lake &
palmer/instrumental in this heat mike ratledge is
on a deluxe lowry holiday/why are you sleeping
mike ratledge/he isnt hardly on holiday he isnt even
in this fucking heat he’s just the organist in a big beat
combo/in the european economic area playing fletchers
blemish we did it mike ratledge/like united utilities
water ltd we did it again/o why are you weeping

59
From Intermissions and Things

Thing 14

Paul Sutton: “Stupidity isn’t innocent.”

60
 EROTOPLASTY 4

Individuation. Principium individuationis

~the manner in which a thing is identified as distinguished from other things
~how a thing is identified as an individual thing ‘that is not something else’
This includes how an individual person is held to be distinct from other persons

“A student asked me
What is fascism

I said
Our sanctified twoness”

61
 HELEN DIMOS

“If love is supposed whole and unfragmented, it is bound from the outset to fail; if it is
jettisoned in order to be won, there is no guarantee that it will return; it is lost insofar as the
individuated love does not on its own, without any deus ex machina, go over into the
universal. The sole path of success that remains open to love is also that of its progressive
impossibility. If recourse to the pre-given universality of love has long been of no avail, the
radically particular love verges on contingency and absolute indifference, and no intermediary
provides for compromise.”

62
 EROTOPLASTY 4

A room of bookshelves

printing press rusted corroded

strips of
negatives
machine gun corroded
wheelchair qua needles corroded
lead blankets corroded
box of bracken corroded
safe with burnt documents corroded
lean anchor
lead anchor corroded
medieval weighing scale
how much does the witch woman weigh
corroded
lily-of-the-valley
maize
forget-me-nots
Nester
Nic
Maus-nest
snares
tones
Balder
I
Funghi
Minz
Nachtschatten
Night-shadows
Thor
metal frames on which
the drawings are placed
University Street
roses
Moos
Schilf
broken crystal chunks
a canon ball the size of your
giant’s head corroded
stuck on a thick lead stilt

63
 HELEN DIMOS

corroded & inside glass

one polaroid
pliers to take the giant’s teeth
out
scrolls of photographs as
knee-high linen
made of lead
chrysantheme
chrysanthememe
film reels
the only cartoon in the room
blueprint xray image
satchel of burnt papers
maïs
tomatillos
nightshade
60 millionen
of catfeed

who will wear the mud coat

with 3 sets of arms

64
 EROTOPLASTY 4

Something has to break

become so flexible
pressure of lips pressing down hair
American goldfinch yellow cluster of blood warmth
matter turning liquid – gas
inside-music recoils
remaining one is an insanity
must memory
be inside most accord with things outer

‘I need to work it’s the thing I do to stay sane’

one said.

[I want to ask
if you thought I would be
enough,
talking to me

65
 HELEN DIMOS

Please give me the music that will blow all the shit out of my head.

66
 EROTOPLASTY 4

“In such times of progress and successful development it is necessary to work and make the
best use of the time. The time of INCREASE does not endure, therefore it must be utilized
while it lasts.

While observing how thunder and wind increase and strengthen each other, a man can note
the way to self-increase and self-improvement. When he discovers good in others, he should
imitate it and thus make everything on earth his own. This ethical change represents the most
important increase of personality.

Where increase is thus in harmony with the highest laws of the universe, it cannot be
prevented by any constellation of accidents.”

67
 HELEN DIMOS

A group of people including me are walking through a crypt. Underground darkish bodies in
coffins set in slots, alcoves, with clouded windows sealing each one. People are putting their
hands on the darkened windows & something is being communicated. I am growing afraid
because if some sequence or number of these windows are touched some very bad thing will
happen. It happens. The people have put their hands on the windows and the right formula
has come to unleash the thing.

68
 EROTOPLASTY 4

There are days a grayish thing hangs from the ceiling behind the curtain of the visible.

….½If you want me to watch my name ½….

kirkutz radium. three stones on a field

this was her stone. assembled randomly
their underside
a greeny blue
color
not of this
earth.
they were the writing.

69
Clay Scars

feather statue
identity landscape def[r]ames blooded particle
dusk noise fractal ulcer
flinted somniac bark

70
 EROTOPLASTY 4

Emaciated Motion

peeling poster genuflectus in hipsway

kip secretions flies
false motile complex skin integument hides
carbon drunk

71
 MJB

Nest Migration

copper faultline harrowing complex snow

hack copy claims weak signal
p/roofed progress creeps fragments
chameleon whistle
outrooting waste portrait

72
 EROTOPLASTY 4

The Next Episode Odes

medusa tech jacked l[o]ung/e

in dancing twiglight riffle hists
tongueburst cloud yield

73
 MJB

conditional #7

diagnosis shot when hop/p/ing

runs the creature wilds
it habitat clears sky order
whilst we can
piss in the bushes
green turqoise colours
of the sea flooded
in the substance
where it isn’t matter
but can only
be cinema doctor
_____ _____
delicate hand drives
sequences oak leaves
or oak leaves some residual
profit in blind suitcases
charcoal my lightingered
angel
careering serial out takes
release spice pressure plaything
unadorned
_____ _____

grabbing loudests decoration

frills the mulch
mind emotional cannibals
spit. sexual froth
arcane justice me[so]zoic
in gestate gestalt
_____ _____

74
 EROTOPLASTY 4

conditional #8
serotonin seams quickly and[or
slowly into
hard sky
recognition abstracts beyond the
single body decomposes
into dispersed diadems scattering
blanch rapid common screams
in terrorising cloud cameos
densing pressure
waters in these tepid night
bears rabid molecules
crying like a sorrowful tree
bear branches bowing in
spiky silhouette
neurochemicals coal egg layers
free to imagine only
_____ _____
threw mossfrost
flowering fungus-grasses
bog floodlevels rising
grit dry stream silty shallows
parch cicada
mayfly oak
kernelsketch walls desolate bracken
hunger still kneading
_____ _____
absence along trajectory of slingshot
collective ages and seems
orange embers as
the song fades
wilde perky lusts its detached
meetings dark terraces
mossy corners
rising symptoms bud swells lacquer sheens
pinked in alleys
down the wild boulevards
direction libidinated

75
From The Vispo Bible

Genesis 7

76
EROTOPLASTY 4

Genesis 8

77
AMANDA EARL

Genesis 9

78
Unnumberable

In Superman III, Richie Pryor invents a programme

that sucks all the part-dollars in transactions across the world.
Shaving. More frequently and in more places. We know
what you read last summer. And there is evidence
that the way you more modernly defecate is
storing up problems. Resembles a layering, builds
to a head. I am interminable. And the crisis
of liquidity that swept. Keeps asking and asking
so finding oneself in the Tesco Local in a sort of
amiable haze, discussing the non-fungibility
of the various asset classes. In my third playthrough
the Oracle. Gathered to an intimacy I haven’t at all
earned to with myself? Hesitate to fully gauge
the sheer January afternoon is there something more
interesting I could? Parcelling out rectifications.
The wilderness and then some. Might be different
in French. The project team worked through the night
to deliver, I miss exquisite grammatical propriety, there
was a time when the small things meant something
and could be lived in like a vole establishing
the ring of its name over a territory chirping comes back at us
grafted onto the next resilient afterwards looking sheepish.

Fear parts the operated stakes like a brownfield site.

A denuded animal is the sea of its easy figures,
though you also left that job in a huff. Yon moorland
cuts both ways. Building the Wikipedia page in a hurry to
means utterly arrived and to be undone by a retasking
of the satellite. I would like to evolve a pouch and
climb right in it, such is the constant building a personal
website building a personal brand some kind of Laserquest
narrative, a fitting tribute to a fallen comrade in those
salty days of the party wall of innocence Alyosha was
shamed for dancing to the Beatles. Doesn’t the real
assail us every so often as if it’s a Rilke poem?

79
 EROTOPLASTY 4

So that building the confidence back up in SMART steps

such as meeting a friend for coffee such as a clearly
expressed single-origin such as building a Lego fort
with my building a daughter such as she is.

In the desert, seraphim harbingers of respectable

heat death aptly approaches the rendition of music.
More than a century-old Victorian fruitcake the media
describe as ‘almost edible.’ Wreathed in unnumberable
outtakes, word tracks at the clever-clever hoard in
the republic of banana flowers really taste like things
were bound to get personal. Cannot pronounce humdrum
without a subtle sense of satisfaction, dark like the notes
of a roasted Guatemalan from the plantation. Irreplacable
the tantalum we are left to our devices, and deep
profits under the fingernails. There is an us, and we milk it,
until the sins you have forgotten how to send this batch
of troops with a right-click. How does that exemplary voice?
Out of the fastness flashly comes the fusion lance
that boils from the research tree. Vendors of all shapes
and sizes cluster in the galactic diversity market, a voice
in grey calls wavelength and frost-seasoned there is
despite all of it a sense of unity, non-negligible array
of utterness and selfishly resplendent within the prosperous
undoings. To achieve past the wildest imagine a diplomatic victory
backed in shiny elephant hide from selective reuptake inhibitions.

80
garba in-script

religious doldrum
overexpectant returns
re-evaluative returns
durational faculty
rejubilant surrogacy
sanctity

the re - turbulent
field in monotonous
entrapments sat tightly

in confidence satiated
spilling circles of parse - ness

bedouin errings
in the slur of spring whip wind
half step contained walks
in fragranced contrast
the half brothers and parish
families cut across cloth
halfspoken toilet ushers
in bellicose floors
misapprehending alignments

creaking breezy words flying for the postexpectant gratuitous slumberers where
worldly irritants pale in pusillanimous chuntering ushering in futures implicit

plumstead motion sickness semi detached marquees patio premature mike leigh suburban
dreams – veg biriyani / chips at morley’s / momos at kailash / vine tomatoes on the go /
himalayan abodes – blessings in oil down axioms / separative foods / in shredded chicken and
salt beef and sweet breadfruit / local honey to whom / outercity journeys with manosankar

81
82
EROTOPLASTY 4

83
NICO VASSILAKIS

84
EROTOPLASTY 4

85
NICO VASSILAKIS

86
passenger to

the versions of Martha’s life differ

but for certain
she died
first September 1914
even if she survived a stroke
in Cincinnati zoo
her male companions died
in 1909 and 1910
after which tragic event
a reward of $1000 was offered
to find Martha a mate
her dead body was frozen
by the Cincinnati Ice Company
sent by express train
to Washington DC
she was skinned. her skin mounted
her internal parts dissected and preserved
from the 20s through the early 50s
displayed
on a small branch
fastened to a block of Styrofoam
Martha was paired with a male
a male she never met
as he had been shot
in Minnesota in 1883
Styrofoam is a trademarked brand of
closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam
commonly called “Blue Board”
from 1956 to 1999 Martha was displayed
in a long exhibition called The Birds of the World

she was moved to San Diego in 1966

to be displayed at a Conservation Conference
then back to Cincinnati Zoo for the dedication of

87
 EROTOPLASTY 4

the passenger pigeon memorial

Martha was back in Washington
on display from June 2014 to September 2015
for the exhibition Once There Were Billions
Martha was the last
known living passenger pigeon
“passenger pigeon” derives
from the French adjective passager
meaning brief
ephemeral or fleeting
passenger pigeons were once the most abundant bird
in North America before Europeans
hunted them on a great scale
and commercialised them
as “cheap food”
the passenger pigeons’ flocks
were so dense they covered the sky
and hid the sun for days
Europeans found it
amusing to shoot
blindly at the sky
being sure to kill a bird
competitions were soon organised
with a prize for the man who would kill
more than 30,000 birds in a day
worshipping followed destruction
as Martha was the last passenger pigeon
authors writing about extinction
often make a “strange pilgrimage”
to see her remains in Cincinnati zoo
if I was the last known living human
nobody would be there
to preserve my body and place it
on a Styrofoam bench next to a male
shot before I was born

88
 ANNE-LAURE COXAM

safety

a woman and her mum

went to the Brexit shop
to buy a brexiter
to brexit people
and social services

the brexiter is delivered

with instructions

read and
retain
for future reference

before brexiting
social services
with your brexiter
ensure
there are no
bones

Brexit
only a few
nuts
hazelnuts
peanuts
at a time

always unplug your brexiter

when fitting or removing
access(t)ories

do not put your fingers

in your brexiter

warning
the cutting is sharp

ensure
your access(t)ory
is well positioned
89
 EROTOPLASTY 4

before you turn on

your brexiter

never use
a damaged brexiter
get it checked
or repaired
see social services

never use
an unauthorised
access(t)tory
with your brexiter

misuse
of your brexiter
can result in
injury

do not play
with your brexiter

brexiters can be used

by persons
with reduced
physical
sensory or
mental
capacities

or lack of experience
and knowledge

if they have been given

supervision or
instruction
concerning use
of the brexiter
in a safe way and
if they understand
the hazards involved

90
 ANNE-LAURE COXAM

the empty chair

is between
the veg garden
and the path
in the dusty space
(it was hot that day)
which is neither nor

the empty chair

is a photo I sent
to a friend
to send her
my love after
she lost
someone dear

she replied something like

thank you for your message
you too know the sorrow
of the empty chair

yesterday in the bus

thinking of these emails
and of the empty chair
I wondered
how is the experience of living
if you don’t understand
simple metaphors or
how life would be without
the common understanding
of signs and symbols
and simple metaphors

the picture of the empty chair

was taken near a village
where I have memories
a house so damp
the wall-paper tears-off
a house full of gigantic spiders
a peasant’s heavy wooden bed
which years later
91
 EROTOPLASTY 4

ended up in a barn so dry

the wood cracked slowly
became dust

last summer
(actually not far from
this village and the place
the photo was taken)
we spent a few days with friends
in a similar house
fresh and haunted by spiders
(we had a long conversation about them)
surrounded by heat
even if the damp
was lying in the shade of trees
where mice were moving
and birds hiding

anyway
one morning
I said “shall I make more coffee?”
and I know what it means

I know what it means

but it feels detached

if I say “je refais du café?”

it’s not detached
I don’t even notice it

my ex from Manchester
and I parted
my mum (my mum!) drove
us to the airport
on the backseat we cried
endlessly I cried
until he passed security
then I joined my mum in the car park
eyes dry practicalities in mind

a few month later

my ex from Manchester
92
 ANNE-LAURE COXAM

sent me this single line

“I’m sorry for your loss”
I looked at this single line
on the screen
I felt he had no idea what
he was talking about
likewise in the car to the airport
I had only glimpsed
what I was crying about
there was an absence

if I say “shall I make more coffee?”

there is an absence

93
After the Vanguard

It’s an incomplete history of the rain on my glasses, held

in place by Elastoplast, smeared in late Vaseline
friendly.
Time enough for protest
/or a tour of the suburbs/
it’s hard to fold over when the world stands up
with nuts at midnight.
Times Square no longer a red nub
Kissing still not allowed
but my feet plead clemency –
a buddy chair honest outside Katz’s makes sense when
your hair tingles
your blandishments are foreign
your best bet
is a last minute hoot.
Oh man.
Did that dull euphonium hang there when Afro Blue
split the world ASUNDER
?
fuck it, give me some of
that underground gibber practice
two hours daily in
Nuyorican dedication heaven.
A non-nicotine splash up reeling
Madame hark-out udders appealing
Bet up, get up, no longer het up
in spelt gout,
munching the mane of a sedated
big cat menu.
It’s said that there are racists in the corridors.
If I go there, I will let you know.
Meantime, I want thin magazines
of vague discontent
comfortable protest – gulag proof
(Kim as catalyst, silly hats, cuffs in fish sauce
poon toon pit put of course).
Out here at the end of time anything is possible.
Don’t let me down, fat one.

94
 EROTOPLASTY 4

Blancmange wobble scoop-up

Give that boy a thousand chocolate rabbits,

O, my overpowered senses!
How his neck joins his head, shoulders, his Brahmic aperture
(wet ring in a smoky language picture)
rolling around like potatoes in a bucket
skinhead cousins in a Waltzer
thin-shinned Romeos, blousons forever soaped and, oh, how
Madame appreciates my years of solitude,
how many times I lost count of nature’s quiet tantrums,
the ways I caught circular revolutions in time,
the hairs that grew like mould on my own slow fingers.
Give me cardinal directions! Describe papal dimensions! How many crippled horses does it
take to spark an election? Help me decide on a number!
When
he’s down to his hundred smallest rabbits
I’ll apologise to the mandem:
your shoes were always a barrier,
white vinyl schooners up-ending the night,
aloft on a puffed ebullience,
eyes too fresh in the morning –
lunch time may never come
or might vibrate forever,
but the sandwich is still made of atoms.

95
 DANIEL SPICER

Testimony of teat-heartedness

I admit that I want a cartoon Ginsberg,

Chops on hairy knuckles, greased for
back-room slaughterhouses.
Some Sicilian monobrow festival,
winner picking sand in toe-cercise
honesty: just a hat band
plastic bopping plastic round the ears,
not even space aliens would
PEE-WEE-WEE-PEE
::: hump over moon :::
Concern me in your simple heaven.
Allow my shit to settle.
The stink to unwind,
downwind
up river
rug-lovin’
empties.
People of all kinds let their impulses speak.
We could lick till dawn.
Unransom our fingers,
fail to wave flags of protection
shall be the whole of the
lawnmower felonies.
We could blow a blue corner,
We could tickle a high sweetness,
Massage a bleak improvement,
Manage a mock genocide
Leak psychic conditions
peak situations
neat dialects
meat reminders.
Never let me die. I am always alive.
I am happy forever. I am looking at you.
I am always alive. I am always
alive. I AM ALWAYS ALIVE
I AM ALWAYS ALIVE
I AM ALWAYS

96
Oceans

97
 EROTOPLASTY 4

Emotional Sewage

98
 JESSIE WIDNER

Mutter

99
Ink Wish

I
Immediately attitude moving, prominently at quality

II
Accordeoned
Incautious, rebreathed theoretically minarets diametrically gustily

III
Presidency
Liquefying, lilt
Brot, sweated-superscription pontificating understandable
horizontalising copying
Bracken and borealis and interrelationship beacon
Bale
Bail

IV
Irritatingly supermarket-softened manalgia ' doomsday-dismantling
heavily remembers
Didn’t poetry caterpillars
Schopenhauer learnt-Alcibiades ' manalgia-dismantling situation
electrocuted

V
Various page
Atom refrigerator arena instrument educational
Alienation on pronunciation
As carefully as
Alongside

100
 EROTOPLASTY 4

VI
Ministerial so
Ministerial so
Gram addresses addresses receptivity proportional
Gram immediately wish wish experience so
Gram inadvertantly uni-dimensional ' falsified uni-dimensional

VII
Longevous solidification longevous minutiae
Minutiae

VIII
Organisation bothering
Familiarity that
Hostility completed
Familiarity admonishment
Familiarity outside outside gradually gradually
Familiarity gradually Residuary-Long, daily-Ignatius goes gradually

IX
Typewrite firedint combination diamond in
Epithalamion hanging entirely ' epithalamion inclination inclination

X
Occasionally at ordinarily ordinarily
Salon salon salon in in
Electrically electrically discourage ' electrícity complétest necessity

XI
Associational as composition, composition immensely
Poetical poetical austrian, associational as
Operas vocabulary
Operas autobiographies Oceania apologises
Calligraphic Oceania ' identifiable detecting commonplace bundles

101
 AJCARRUTHERS

XII
Proportional timelengths
Tacet

XIII
Gathering unnecessarily scenario ' predominating unnecessarily
Complainingly extraordinarily Versailles expedition predominating piano
Cutlet anything predominating writing

XIV
Patience characteristic Chaucer
And amiable
Lashtender-chanceqúarried amiable Chaucer , amiable
Inevitable melody
Inevitable inevitable
Mammon, mammon flúshes-on-a-sudden

XV
Escorial autobiography nór-largely-nor-foot-he
Encyclopaedia to encyclopaedia eliminating elimination
Moonmarks road-rút-grapy-duty
Moonmarks it, experiencing perpendicular acceleration

XVI
Love easily grammar, pomegranates, externality

XVII
Separation nutricious
Simultaneity responsibilities allo-allbuminous continuous, continuously,
continuously
Simultaneity

XVIII
Peninsula peninsula
Insular peninsula

102
 EROTOPLASTY 4

XIX
Peripheral inch
Salt agitation gisaltan in is tenant
Penumbral salum

XX
Theyrethyr

XXI
Rationalisation Constantinople
Repeat, repeat revolutionary sarcasm
Repeat paleolithic paleolithic aerobiology ' graniittipatsas, graniittipatsas
Salvándolos schwa
Sarcasm

XXII
Systematic grapholagnia, systematic
Pulsoria ' pulsoria pantogamie pulsoria
Circular plah, character, psalmody
Circular rhesus on radiotolerans disharmonie
Circular negligence, horizontal
Pulsoria plah omnium, omnium pli

XXIII
Physicalism piccage
Radiotolerans, radiotolerans
Gotzig extravagant sup pillow shading astonishing

XXIV
Ireland’s inflammation ‘ conspicuous tropical frippery
Fright

XXV
Dice-box Germanomania zollverein yaf’fle-yaff’il ‘ E-wríck-ríck-críck

103
 AJCARRUTHERS

XXVI
Peng periodical vocabulary presentational exercises e-mail
Situation examination abasia-astasia
Gao appointment Little moderator heavy biodiversity
Beverages

XXVII
Strong warm goat.
So grain an go.
Strong warm goat.
Seat a creative an own.
Which kneals of Cornelius yet took. At flops speak.

XXVIII
In on on in.
Ore paean in Jon in inn.
Inn in on pylon.
Iron on inn pyns Jon in.

XXIX
Not at oats.
Noodles at oats.
Noodles at oats overplus.

XXX
Reckon but but aswarm.
Deacon do did do,
Deacon slid did scritched did do do.
Feckless did but Greek.

XXXI
Saucepan lit Jills hat.
Saucepan et Sylvester.
Saucepan et throughed Sylvester.

104
 EROTOPLASTY 4

XXXII
Saucepan et Sylvester.
Saucepan such lit.
Saucepan such yis yinz.

XXXIII
Saucepan et whiffletree.
Saucepan multum ipsum ye et alto multum.
Saucepan yinz.

XXXIV
A dub file foot flush.
A fret gab.
A rear park rock fluke.
A mow bow.

XXXV
Venery tyre Pole had.
Venery had tyre tears. Tyre type winds pole. Police
Venery

XXXVI
Gallant fiber.
Had had had had had belay that is is, had had Police, is that police.

XXXVII
Roses Will patrol rows.

XXXVIII
Flung saint first.
One twicely flung.
Flung saint swung.

105
 AJCARRUTHERS

XXXIX
A I. Auto.
Horse bit buffalo flies.
Past, shall pour buffalo fruit.

XL
Can cans outshine.
Can big balloon that fell.
Can bread outshine in turn the ideas.
Can sleep outshine in turn the bread.

XLI
And and then then there.
And the.
And there then the than.

XLII
Beaks of gas.
Gas chaplain gets.
Gets chaplain green.

XLIII
Bean bean been bean bean
Been bean bean been bean
Bean been bean bean been
Bean bean been bean bean.

XLIV
Late pallet figs ' five end if.
Late polish light kob ' dok track else if.
Late parser pack. Hang dangles dag bags scraunched trains
Late purpler pile schlepped dust up brown louds. If whiskey trains stalled
Palate’s palette.

106
 EROTOPLASTY 4

XLV
Mosaic mosaic mixed may.

XLVI
Refute hadding to extra trembler have of may. Tuple
Second
May mend might is have does. Might if at eight. Mixed gain.
Fax
May France. May France. Fore chute flu.

XLVII
They that up twice not or all is not glass out. Noun in
Spong out.
Sibyl, span as an about leaving leaves out.

XLVIII
Thomas hugging hugged Kim hugs Eve, Thomas hugs hugged dog hugged Kim
[hugs, hugging
Eve hugged Kim,
Kim hugged Eve’s dog.

XLIX
Flan we flan we glace.

L
Megan’s white horse baffled as Jack bought. Pecan.

LI
Loafe fig at hungry Feste, sat sprung hungry as at spring.

LII
Thank bleak ease, grey prune scan and Ninja Turtle.

LIII
King long.

107
 AJCARRUTHERS

LIV
Could did.
Could wheat rainer raised shouldn’t wouldn’t cloak oak.

LV
Verbs verb very vain veins surprised.
Shall tout the suite.

LVI
Every good face, deserves all grass, always cows eat fruit
Always

LVII
Next blossom catch air.
Next bloated as b, Selah pale c met lean fayre.

LX
Arthur’s wide side wets. Arthur had gas on a g. Arthur.

LXI
Gram out out out out.

LXII
Beakleavèd, beak-leavèd, beakleavèd, beak-leavèd.

LXIII
Flother it at its if.

LXIV
Tuck sprang billing. Let barn Schwitters seek.

LXV
Lone don rind, don rind in’t denote.

LXVI
As much as much as much as more an, long dord bluck lot,
Laughed liked hired
108
 EROTOPLASTY 4

LXVI
Maze is breeze is maze breeze.

LXVIII
Querl nim haut bis zél bis karst. Birl shail dol blain ség seine
Doit.

LXIX
Those that throw, Those though those hopably through that jow
Thro few
Threes. Turning the corner through these that throughed thee neap.
Thurl thrum
T.

109
so much implied
for Nate

nate rosadog nail she’ll work or chew on buck sage

crying yeah yeah. the santal corner better shiver
in its sparkplug, bright eyed with something. you
come out reading without made of tears; the ring
and green man. along me darling bound like a skin
fluke as amethyst or marble bluejohn—we’re o new
build heron and the sedge like a prairie raccoon dog
fox fucking whatever. as if it might turn out this time
and fall to some grand jeté but as ever underwater;
know I make a habit of its matter. that I love
the tiercel his un-blue streak of recognition fastened
darkly to futility, this long move out into the sun.

110
revicules : strictly 150 words or fewer : submissions welcome
Registration Caspar, J. Gordon Faylor (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016)

Registration Caspar is a document of undeniable gumption, redolent—in its near-total eschewal of any recognizable
linguistic economy—of Finnegans Wake. Instead of the seductive oneirics of the Wake, however, we get a cold
mechanoglossia, a text as clinically churned out as it is mesmerizingly sui generis. Through language evocative of
spamdexing, machine translation, keyword stuffing, and pre-emptive domain name neologization, a ‘narrative’ emerges,
tied together around obsidian (yet suggestive) nodes like “Clessiexecs” and “Dosepucks”. The text’s dollar signs and neto-
capitolocene propositions seem to register language's attempt to perfect itself as a chrematistic technology, something purely
tropic to and generative of money. But this lurch towards perfection is undone as we read—the fiat undergirding the
linguistic-financial nexus cannot obtain when the figures of reification no longer make ‘sense’ to us. An astonishing text
that shatters the fiduciary bonds of language, forcing us to impugn existing notions of linguistic ‘value’.

Urn & Drum, Lila Matsumoto (Shearsman, 2018)

A particularly noticeable aspect of Urn & Drum is Matsumoto’s unheimlich reworking of the mundane. Defamiliarization
is often elicited through additive linguistic units: noun adjuncts (“resuscitation oven”); duplicated prepositions (“peers in
and in”); mimetic verbs (“griddle griddle”); etc. If these heightened forensics suggest a safely domesticated surrealism, they
also betoken the opposite: intransigent contraflows in the oikos. The book opens thus: “This upbeat, glitzy sleight of hand
/ is what I call stump work / or a battle cry”. The speculative category of “stump work” is incarnate in the prosody, the
lilting cadence of which becomes progressively coppiced into a recalcitrant “battle cry”. This battle cry inflects the poem’s
concluding line—“for several more centuries of women’s work”—wherein “woman’s work” functions as its own antonym.
One of the book’s more direct bouleversements, perhaps, but nonetheless indicative of the important work going on beneath
Urn & Drum’s deliciously ludic surfaces.

Headphones, Luke Roberts (Visitors, 2018)

Roberts tells us in a prefatory note that Headphones emerged after the loss of one of his notebooks. The project thus
constitutes, in the poet’s own words, a “work of reparation”. This fact feels doubly poignant given that the titles are all
specific dates—some of which Roberts admits to having “faked”. Big questions such as “What are poets? […] / “What are
poets for?” (which can yield ephectic answers at the best of times) seem particularly Pyrrhonically loaded in this context of
compromised documentation. Unsurprisingly, there is hedging aplenty (“it is the duty of poets / to know what year it is
[…] / it is the duty of poets / to be uncertain”). And yet, even at the poetry’s most melancholically defeatist moments,
shards of resolution burst exhilaratingly through the expertly crafted lines: “These tests are literal. / I’m failing you all.”

Zeitgeist Spam, John Bloomberg-Rissman (www.johnbr.com and elsewhere, 2011-)

There is surely no wider ranging commonplace text of contemporary poetry and related omniana than John Bloomberg-
Rissman’s Zeitgeist Spam. Unfolding both online and (at least partially) in print, the work comprises several sub projects,
the most recent of which is the ongoing With the Noose Around My Neck. Bloomberg-Rissman’s mode here is
essentially poetophagic: he voraciously ingests works by innumerable contemporary poets and other creators before
eructating it into something different. This method allows for weighty and dizzying entries to be created at a considerable
clip. The prima materia often becomes transmuted in uncanny ways—tissues of text are spliced, mashed, or perforated into
eerie echoes of their source material (all of which is credited). To quote an example from the work here would be to betray
its capaciousness. Suffice it to say that Zeitgeist Spam constitutes a considerable achievement of rogue poetic archiving in
the era of the Internet.

CLM
111
 EROTOPLASTY 4

The Trumpets of Jericho, Unica Zürn, trans. Christina Svendsen (Wakefield Press, 2015)

Hans Bellmer used Zürn’s body as a doll to be bound and deformed with rope for his photographs. However, even as she
was thereby integrated into what Susan Sontag described as the “wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares” of her more
well-known male Surrealist contemporaries, she blossomed as an artist. This illustrated novella was published only two
years before her suicide amid severe mental illness. Zürn, having suffered several back-alley abortions during her
relationship with Bellmer, writes as if Rahab trapped alone in Jericho’s walls. Seven trumpet-blowing priests are replaced,
though, by seven lovers who’ve impregnated her with a “many-fathered abomination” clawing at her insides. She induces
labor with quinine, casts the infant aside, and lies in a bed soaked with her own filth, dreaming myths both violent and
whimsical. Finally, like Athena from Zeus, she’s reborn from her uncle’s head, and gives birth only to herself in defiance of
him.

Life in the Folds, Henri Michaux, trans. Darren Jackson (Wakefield Press, 2016)

In this series of brief texts, Michaux distinguishes himself as a master of the short prose piece to rival Beckett, Ponge, and
Borges. It begins in youth, and ends in old age. In reading it, though, we don’t find the testimony of a single life. Rather, as
suggested by the name of Pollagoras, whose old age the final piece describes, we find the chatter of many marketplaces. Its
hubbub recounts acts of imaginary violence practiced since childhood: surrogates for the genuine article that make way for
joy. But then, in a turn, it tells us of nevertheless being haunted by apparitions of suffering, and then embodies that suffering
in the Meidosems: a race of beings made of ever-shifting collections of fragments who wander in flocks, seeking intensity
and elevation. Eventually, they escape the ground, leaving behind an abandoned landscape, where somewhere Pollagoras
waits for death, assaulted by the ravening dead.

MANDEL CABRERA

Frit, Eley Williams (Sad Press, 2018)

Frit announces its linguistic multiplications with three definitions of the word itself: as mixtures respectively preceding
glass and porcelain, and as a colloquial past participle of fright. The poems embrace the friable materiality of language
rather than aiming at a transparent or austere state: fear seems to lie in the fragility of poetic, verbal, and love objects. Here,
as in Williams’ book of short stories, Attrib., definitions and wordplay are the crucible of interminglings between the earth-
bound and possibilities of the sublime. The poem ‘ad*’ begins with an apparent retort: ‘the chemical meaning of sublimate
was my intention / not / <vague mime of aboveness> / <vague mime of within and then without > // the menu calls it pollo
ad astra / and we order purely for the visuals’. Cunning in spinning ‘queer, wonderful misunderstandings’, it is also
resolutely unafraid of clear lyric notes within the grainy composite.

JONATHAN CATHERALL

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