[Body wRites]

new issue of Short, Fast, and Deadly

sex scene

His weed is sick, insofar as it creates a foot race between her head and her stomach to see which will disengage from her body first. Right now, it’s dead even. South Park is a blaze of indefinite pixels and the components of the living room – a dusty bookshelf, generic cityscape and Japanese woodblock print posters, something that might be an old fraternity paddle or a snowshoe – are in similar states of blur. She braces against him to avoid feeling like she’s tumbling off a building or maybe just the couch they’re sitting on and he grins, blushes, wraps his arm around her shoulder, squeezes. At some point there’s a crash in the dark hallway and a squint-eyed roommate creature emerges and requires in so many croaks that they remove themselves to a fucking bedroom because the creature has to be up for a fucking conference call in two fucking hours, which means they must have been laughing or discussing something pretty loudly for long time and she doesn’t remember what it was and it doesn’t matter because she’s just happy to have her head placed on a surprisingly comfortable pillow in a room dimly lit by Christmas lights that outline the ceiling. He slumps over a laptop at a nearby desk and she stares at the blue and orange elephant and Celtic tapestries that line the walls, a décor choice she’d normally describe as mid-2000s-poseur or post-post-modern-bro-out, but which now seem to be helping stabilize the substance hurricane pounding the base of her skull. An electronic remix of a George Michael song sifts through the speakers at a reasonable volume and he lies next to her on the bed and they stare at the ceiling until the song changes to a dubstep version of t.A.T.u’s “All The Things She Said.” He starts to apologize for the playlist and she grabs his crotch, rough strokes over his jeans and he pulls her face into his mouth, the shock of chin stubble, whiskey tongue, tongues, her fingers fumbling with his zipper, cupping the once-familiar pulsing heft, him plying at the black lace and the skirt and thong collapsing in one motion onto the Persian-ish rug as she arches away because she’s forgotten that she hasn’t shaved in weeks – she remembers Kandi gushing about the puppy-drool reactions her bi-weekly waxes never fail to engender – but he pulls her hips against his, spreads and enters carefully, mumbles stale heat against her neck, how tight she is and she grunts in agreement – how long has it been since Brian? –  and she wants to add “and wet, too,” but his tongue’s in her mouth, nibbling at her neck and she can smell herself, his sweat, getting closer, her fingers down there, bucking, still coming as he pulls out and releases a meager spattering on the plaid Ralph Lauren comforter. He rolls over and she stares at the ceiling, panting. The pants give way to chuckles and then to flat-out laughter, but it’s like she’s laughing at an image of herself because as the wetness between her legs dissipates she feels herself floating up with it until she’s somewhere near the Christmas lights laughing down at her pants-less self, at him giving her this oddly shy glance, at her rubbing his stomach, saying, “Congrats dude, you just bagged your first lesbian,” at his uhhhh mouth, at her giggling – still more than a little tipsy – and gathering the clothes on the floor, putting them on while he finds his jeans and takes out a notebook and pen from one of the pockets, him (avoiding eye contact) asking, “How does this work, can I, uh, get your number?” as he scribbles Chris, a phone number and what looks like his Twitter handle on a piece of notebook paper, at him handing it to her and her stuffing it into her bra, at her mumbling something contrived like see you around and him lurching up to get a goodbye hug and remembering, “Hey I never got your num –” but he doesn’t finish and slumps back onto the bed because she’s already gone.

one of us will have to destroy this shell

No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear

By J.A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods

Jaded Ibis Press

Released January 13, 2012

124 pages

Reading J.A. Tyler is a hardcore meditative discipline-inducing experience like that grizzled old dude you see in the park sipping from a brown bag and staring at the same chess move for several decades until his head explodes and leaves a pulsing trail of elegantly jarring (i.e. read this 5039403832 times because it’s that good) and unsuspected verbiage leaking onto his idle opponent’s scuffed white New Balances. It might not be the easiest shit to get into and you might not remember any specific phrases once you’re done, but once you’re in you’re sucked in and you will leave scarred – in a good way. It’s like this cumulative dosing of deceptive emotional wreckage that sucks you, all unique-like, into a frantic level of whoa, a story told around a story around a place you’ve never been but where you think you might like to sit down and chill for a while but you can’t because it’s that hot. No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear is no different and no joke, although there are a few of those. The book is “about” maybe some conjoined twins or maybe they were stapled together in some time before time, or something.  And they split. So basically a love story. One of the most wrenching. I know this because:

The words I am using are a scream. The words I am using are a mask. I don’t want to be the mask to your mask. I want us to wear the same mask. I want us to mask the same thing, to be the same mask, to think that when we move our fingers we are moving our fingers.

This us and we that we are or are not anymore.

But it’s also a messed up death-slumber neo-ghostly riot that might make you sad because severed ghost twins is relatively heavy subject matter these days, I hear:

Cradle me in your bones. Cuddle me in the wind of your lungs. Grapple my eyes into your head and bring this back to how it used to be. Bring this back to when we two were one and there was no link between except and everything was a link and there was no wreckage, we were absolute. Go back to there. Be in the past. This one of us two now.

Am I of us the only me that wants this back?

The book has sky-blue pages and flowers and other amazing images drawn by John Dermot Woods – boy in blue hat cunnilingus-lover to a TV goddess sporting disengaged man-mask, Jesus procuring pulsing heart-candy to bystanders, re-entering a mother’s womb to lovingly bomb it in the hopes of relegating past abominations to a more savory unreality – so you know these are no companion drawings but text enhancements, visions within a distinct vision. I stare at these still. People think I’m weird. I think not staring at this book is weird.