The twilight which precedes fascism
Homage to ibex
Hospital
Windjammer
The firebombing of Genesis
Actual water
Killer of birds
War in the offing
Horizon line
The castle
Heliopolis
Babylon Sisters
The twilight which precedes fascism
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A blue curtain. Not torn but merely open. Left so by whom? I don’t know but light streams in. A corpse’s bare foot screams through white sheet, a gun, copper-wiring, a shred of scarf, an extended arm, a red tongue beckoning me closer. Waxed boots in a black and white photograph of policemen holding flamethrowers against a backdrop of wildflowers and olive trees. I count two people whisked from the warmth of their conjugal bed. They stand for the very first photograph taken of birds midflight—an unsteady blur. I open the door to a movie theater and wait to be taken outside and shot again and again.
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transistor radio tuned to some fabled frequency
airplane music is what you called it when
astronauts still manned cloud-
shaped ramparts around the moon
you still fill me with dread and wonder
a feeling tantamount to pure syllogism
a feeling more buoyant than
being sacrificed upon some dry lawn
upon the kind of plastic grass
we used to kill all the romantics with
something bleaker than death
is coming out of the woodwork now
something from the sky crash-landing into
our teeth robotic in its pretense of nakedness
we will never be as poignant as we are
in this brief state of elopement
fluent in our own language of astrology
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I dream of two nurses in the rain
one holds a Marlboro up to her
lips while the other tries to light
it with a fraction of a xenon bulb
my father lies dying somewhere above
and I think about how cockfighters
affix gaffs to their rooster’s legs
in order to maximize the damage
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my hands (the fingers) smell like airplane food
those prepackaged meals that come wrapped in
cellophane: bread-like things with ersatz meats and
cheeses and translucent little lettuce leaves
the plane lands in Denmark—in Copenhagen
where Brecht left all his books about everything
Lucretius (for instance) bound in pigskin
and his Leica camera for exposing the soft white
radiance of the Finnish countryside
the first thing you notice is the houses are all
painted in primary colors—where we come from
houses are meant to blend in with dirt and sky
or clouds imprinted with memories of suicide
fathers and ghosts of fathers leaping
from rooftops crashing through bay windows and
sucking on the business ends of Walther P38s
here the houses are not kindred spirits but
implacable enemies and the skeleton keys are all
liminal which is to say products of magical thinking
as it is with the detective who uses
a lockpick to enter the mausoleum or dreams
he’s using a lockpick to enter the mausoleum because
he no longer has access to his monkey wrench
the detective is barefoot and winged
the detective is winged and blowing nitrous
the detective is blowing nitrous and imagining
Oberon dancing with fairies
the detective enters the gleaming hall and is
instantly re-traumatized by memories of the intake
process at the county jail in Marin the county jail is
in San Rafael where the entrances are controlled
by vertical grills of gold anodized metal
this is where Dark Star was written and
performed for an audience of two around the time
the art building was being breached by community
college students chanting no justice no peace and
bring us the head of Tommy Smothers
this is how we got into that whole business with the
Panthers this is why we’re still in Cuba holding
onto ice cubes and a small phial of sodium thiopental
this is why we’re still in Cuba shooting
rum into our lungs and ordering salt cod from the
maritime museum
this is why we’re still in Cuba wondering what that
woman in the lambent tiara is doing with the
lamprey and the satellite dish and the little baby food
jars of red and yellow paint
this is why we’re still in Cuba watching The Good
Person of Szechwan at the Great Theater of Havana
the Mausoleum is a butterfly collection a collection
of stick figures a glass menagerie of three-legged
donkey figurines and mutilated hydra
a collection of Christmas ornaments
the detective takes a miniature clipper ship and
rides it like a jet ski into oblivion which is just beyond
Hispaniola past the British Virgin Islands, etc.
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my dear brother I call to you
from far away—from where I’m not quite sure
for it is nameless and the streets are all wine colored
they have mathematics here a terra cotta skyline
and etchings of jackdaws and starlings
on all the cinderblocks
poetry is neither dead nor close at hand but
like leaves on a cactus I would say it is strange
but where in the whole wide world is it not strange
imagine as a traveler seeing for the first time a
pineapple or the melancholy structures of Chichén
Itzá where they threw boy siblings to their deaths
here we touch tongues and there are no crosses
(only grids) they say I have gone native
which means I have submitted myself
to the engine hum of mothership hallucinations
if I told you they had glass tractors here
would you believe me—I’m afraid you wouldn’t
or that the goats are garlanded with hollyhocks
and there is no gunmetal to speak of: no bolt actions for
deer-slaying or for sucking on in cases of emergency
I am learning what I did not know about subjugation
I am learning about fairness and femininity
here there are buildings like glaciers that float in pools
of ceremonial liquid the color of sheep’s blood and milk
here I wear my bootstrap when I pay my respects
to the deer fawn cenotaph—
there is a whole sediment of felicity here
where the air smells of phosphorous and
sincerity and even the flophouses are all ordered
according to the prescience of a god or a ghostwriter
who survived the firebombing of Genesis
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Two women with seraphim voices walk and talk. I turn my head to the left and there are no mirrors, just a window to deflect sound and light. The stereo plays sacred organ music. Leaflets demanding we abandon this place are dropped from the sky. While the two women with seraphim voices continue to lacerate what is left of my heart Neptune emerges from beyond the clouds. No, you say, that’s not Neptune for Neptune only shows its face above actual water. A man with a sawed-off shotgun leaves a knife on the gate. He says there are little yellow flowers growing in the dumpster across the street and I thank him.
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I hold the lark or whatever it is I just shot
watch it breathe slowly through
aerosol bones and equine beak
I watch what I wrought and reap what I sow
I knife with my glare and hate myself
lowdown to the tiniest little speck of
woodpecker at the heart of my berserk
I shot the lark because I can no longer
hunter-gather or cellophane the mechanized
bull for I too am lost in the hardship’s
contrails debasing my eyeballs
with hypnosis and other stigmata gleaned
from pure psychoanalytic pleasure
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I took a shower earlier in the day than usual and then watched a video of a man cleaning blood off of a hospital room floor. Next he took an acetylene torch and began the process of melting dental fillings. I watched this man smoke a whole pig in the afterlife. I thought I would never get out of bed. I thought I’d die right there in the blazing aftermath with the T.V. on mute. But cleanliness can also be an act of holy solitude.
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cut my hair to look like yours
from a picture of you touching a horse
looking back / no wave
touching a horse with your good hand
that’s where things stand
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The minimalist prefers Elegance. Elegance is a brand of cigarette manufactured in the UAE. I would never trust a philosopher who lets herself be photographed for a general interest magazine sitting in a gold gilt banquette surrounded by pictures of deceased popes—an assignation of ideological heartache or thirst for prestige. The surrogate takes in the desert from a cut-out in the rocks. There’s not a cloud in the sky. I take off my shoes and show her my shins—an allusion to torture. The philosopher is a show-off—red tunic, dun-colored boots, hair put in a French braid, onyx tiara. This I cannot respect. When the surrogate feigns panache I say heather is a flowering plant or low-growing shrub out of which the castle ascends nightmarish and red. The castle is a prison where they extract confessions through intense prolixity, where violence is a dreamscape. Can you believe there are still Freemasons who perpetuate a culture of extreme secrecy; or a culture of extremely ironic secrecy which itself perpetuates a nostalgia for immense interlocking conspiracies the likes of which were once thought to melt towers. The world used to be round and populous. The world used to be luminous and polyrhythmic. The philosopher believes the body’s inside the mind and the mind is prefabricated. Like a unicorn.
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it smells like something
plastic is on fire
something tiny and pink
something porcine and inelegant
something is ruptured
a topography of viscera
everything is gray
I see two birds glancing
at an airplane—doves bathing
in their gutters streetwalkers
match their petticoats
Christ in his headdress is
invoked more than once
(more than twice)
Burl Ives in red seersucker sings
over the radio drowning
out the work-ethic of airline pilots
almanacs fall from the sky
all printed with the same
lonely word: awl
which means you dreamed
of a house once whose
corridors smelled of yearlings
and there was nary a honeybee
love (says the motel manager)
has so much to do with solitude
but also with vandalism
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sometimes when I am in anguish
I will search out a video of an orangutan
driving a golf cart in a circle
listening to Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters”
I don’t keep a diary I keep a list though
a list of attractions I write down
everything that inspires me to disappear
a list of seductions there are no
fugitives on this list no proper names
no proper nouns nothing to capitalize
I would very much like the wind
to drive me into the distance
to make my body supine and fragile
I would very much like to write you a letter
put all the words in alphabetical order
so no cryptographer could deduce
what it was I was trying to say to you
Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Glacier, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.
