All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > No Man's Land > Status Update

“Potato (a biography)
[…]

DEPENDENCE
Skibbereen, County Cork, 1815

God's gift. You can't blame us for loving a sun
that pounds inside the earth. […]
So out of nowhere, this
new protuberance, this hunk of luck, fattened
to our particular moisture. The foodstuff we deserve.
How could we not love it? It could usurp the grain, rape
this land of all variety, and we would say thank you.”

“some hold funerals for their dead, some undertake

to divvy up the dead one's blue things; some would call you snowflake
if you flinched at this, since some are so inured to death that death
is déjà vu;
[…]

some consume as performance: whatever bread there is to break,
they break,
[…]
for some creatures; some creatures would sooner bite the hand
than bear the handshake”

“Advice for earth in apprenticeship: keep your head down;
sleep only in the abstract, not in winter; don't light up
and don't extinguish; practice all your vices: smoke,
drink, use, gorge, hoard, covet, fuck, get fucked;
don't you breathe a single word of this to anyone; shoulder your lot like a Catholic; […]
leave their claims of greenery in tact;
forget you're nature.”

“A Butterfly Struggles Against Coastal Winds,
5 Metres Offshore

(Did one of those circling seagulls
pluck it out of clean
air when we weren't looking?
Did it stop beating its wings
briefly enough to thud like
a closed book on the ceiling of the sea?
[…]
in spite of all that fucking wind,
and in spite of an ocean
the sound of shredding pages)
we made it hold its place in the sky
just by wanting it to.”

“It suddenly became vital to me to steal a peacock feather for you, on first thought because I figured it would make me seem more butch, and on second because if the first thought failed, then at least the feather would be a memento of the day, of me inside the day, its gas-flame eye unblinking and and absolutely disallowing oblivion.
I couldn't get close enough to the peacock.”

“Things have got to the point with pigeons where their presence in the city is popularly resented but privately ignored, like daylight savings or another country's war. The reason for this is ubiquity. Pigeons in your day are punctuations in a block of text […]; and of course it's the words of the day that call your attention, not the commas that fuss between them.”

“These are the colours a river can be: blue; black; off-blue; universe blue; the colour of an orange; rain black; rain brown; home-, love-, folksong blue.

The river doesn't laugh from the mouth. It laughs from the mountain.

[…]

By the dam on the river they purify water. Think: to bring water back to itself; every day to say water, and write water. Not just to imply it.”

“What's left to be desired:
the slap of wet shorts on rock,
more unprotected skin than
we know what to do with.
Humans at the beach are animal
in the best way — all movement is
the least effort for the most reward,
and from hunger to fullness
is as the crow flies. The poster is right
to show words and not grammar.
At the beach there's no grammar, no restraint.”

“For these and other reasons

I don't get, snow
won't fall in
my part of this
country. I

see these ersatz
flowers now like hangovers,
above ground but still
ground-facing,

pangs of light,
like those pre-sleep
alarm-bells
that sometimes

ring: what might have
been, what might
have been, what
might have been.”

“When they scroll past on long bus journeys, I can translate them into any caliber of metaphor —
cardiograph of the country, cloud-scourers, bird-botherers, nature's cuneiform, village gossips, barcode of the sky —
but never into English. I forget and I'm stumped — I wish there was another word for it.”