A description of a person (a) is this exercise.

To be done in 200 words.

A recalcitrant edge I am. My edge is merely a line drawn in the dust of window sills.

I am running late for this blooming exercise, two days behind in fact. It is April 3, 2016

It is 7:11pm and the time is ticking. Ticking, and ticking away.

Who am I? Here then is the dusty edge – a lined description of myself.

I turned 1 years old yesterday.

Today was my birthday party.

It was in Balmain held by my anxious but lovely family born and bred in Balmain – well my mother at least. My dad was born somewhere loud and suburban. My grandparents English or something – I’ll find out later in my life.

My mother invited her friends that have all become my aunts and uncles no less, one of whom I adore immensely. He’s a person of colour and gay – or at least, homosexual. In any case, a bit about myself.

I eat well.

I have dimples.

I have blonde hair.

I have blue eyes.

I have beautiful white skin.

My mother and aunts and uncles can only dress me in fine fabrics.


Like the clothes might make me, as though the egalitarian rants of those in control were proportionate to actual bodies of the other kinds, marked out by their variousness. Nominative determinism, writ into this same peurility, a funny story about a dentist you once heard of called "Doctor Blood." Sure as my name predicted me, I had become attached to it, but then came to really predict me, with this inevitable slide into identity politics that would mean I could start no other conversation, preceded by my alienation. And so I changed it. And then still, those asking for my involvement in their projects still couldn't get my fucking name right. And I wondered what else there was to say to amount to their rules of engagement, to steal a few minutes back from the overwhelming tide of the naming and the named. It was all so pointless and somehow so much more important now that those whom I had renamed my self in opposition to were starting to lose ground... Like I had to hold onto this identity-in-opposition, as much as to avoid becoming them, but much more so as to avoid becoming.


the house next to mine wept with a sense of rupture, of something evacuated, as i watched its inhabitant

carry her brittle tree by the pot into the yard where, dead, it was leapt upon by songbirds.

the dead tree full of songbirds pleased her, as she lives alone and single-bodied, her other bodies gone.

framing the tree, the wide belt of her treadmill was hung over the fence to dry in the coarse sunlight like laundry.


she is many, though nested singular. her other bodies were lost in the flight-test of one of her prototypes.

since the accident she's begun to pursue the design of fan-blades - a more concentrated exercise for an aeronautical engineer.

she is considered a handsome woman of diverse interests. her papers on multiplism – the existence of one mind

shared between multiple bodies – have done much to shape public understanding of the topic.

she, once multi-bodied, is considered a rarity since death of a multiple can often result in severe trauma

or even death in the remaining body or bodies shared by the affected consciousness. the engineer is referred to as an after-self

of her former multiples who, alive within her, are referred to as passengers.


Her passengers, or former multiples, can be visualized as strangers in a train car. She eradicates the norm verses the other paradigm. The things that are known to divide people along their material experiences, well, she had that super power of having lived various lives, in various genders, ages, and races, that gave her a deep knowing. A don’t fuck with me gaze if you assumed she wasn’t filled with a high volume of knowledge. There is a difference between insisting on imaging a self and the physical limitations of the self. The name is looking at the light out the window or the light as she walks down the aisle. You don’t have to be a photographer or a writer to appreciate looking at light. I guess the fantasy is that she, this engineer (was she already named) (as someone with exceptional technical skills)? Who is following what prompt with a margin of error in tow? Some people on the train bring animals in bags that do not fit easily underneath their seats. Her name is altered like a person who wants to sound less Jewish: instead of Chaya-Mushka Goldensmaltzenberg she became Hannah Golden, or something like that.


Hannah Golden addresses sidewalks with side-glances.  Her gait is a sea shanty, and he’s annoyed walking beside her because she makes him be seen.

The round sun makes the city look warm, pictures them positive like two burnished apples.

Two blocks these apples have rolled, scrolling round corners avoiding shoulders, he thinking of their dumb father.

-        Chaya?
-        What?
-        Where’s your sweat–
-        I left it in the car I didn’t think–
-        No, no you didn’t


-        Okay yes, I’m cold
-        Well, can you stop?

She turns back, handing him her phone he swaps for his sweater.

-        Don’t accidentally like anything
-        Whatever

The thick knit of his sweater exfoliates her face while dappling her vision of the city like a light machine and she smells his muscle, his secret sweat – taken from the body of another guy she caught licking his left arm pit. She had never seen him happy until this locked moment.  Her head finally births through the cloth opening dousing her hair with nearness, a if emerged from a dry pool. He glitches a look to be re-embarrassed then re-engages with her device

-        Hannah Golden?

-        It’s just my handle


Speaking to the relative importance and unimportance of naming, we met at a bar that called itself after Paradise, either through limited imagination or through the devout expectation of some religiouso-corporate (liberal) dogma that might see us all literally working stiffs, talking about real estate and buying moderate, if depressive liquid respite on credit cards (long after anyone could say to whom was this life owed). From mildly promising beginnings as one of gentrification's first outposts in a relatively stable area belonging to the resigned poor, it had steadily devolved (or reached it's true potential) as a holding pen for tinder dates, the men and women forming separate groups at opposite ends of the beer garden like a never ending game show consultation between contestants of opposing teams that would never finally come to a triumphant strategic answer... Stifling heteronormativity, like the children of single sex schools that didn't have the nouse to try it out with their school mates, breeding more of fear than of inclination (the entitlement of insecurities), and perhaps that was the breakdown of the present population, after all. 


What else? This was common for those with passengers; still,

in the open field of the aforementioned

situation, situations like it,

there’s ideological diversity.

despite such differences, these events are

limited in age-diversity. some,

who didn’t like the theories, identified, were supportive.

a few who did, expectedly or not, didn’t or weren’t.

Deb said didn’t but drank friendly like she did.

sometimes she’d get that way she’d say.

Frank did and wished he didn’t for his sister.

Leona was Frank’s sister. some know how that goes.

easily-frightened Leona was a real stunner.

she was cool about it in ways that that’s possible.

Tina Wishen was called coveted by Deb to Frank

and was there too. attraction tends to come up

(as: from the bottom). Tina asked Bill,

“what’s your favorite synonym for rebuke.

choose from the blue highlit ones.”

Bill reminded her it was Frank not Bill.

there’s blushing often when trash goes out.

bathroom door-swung and clamor.

Leona tied the plastic

before it hit the street. Leona,

Frank, Tina, Deb, the others lifted

their thoughts' skirts to the breeze

to remember each other,

just beginning to become acquainted in some senses

as a weed-whacker leaned in the corner.


As a weed whacker leaned in the corner; the noun category architecturally engineers their arm between itself, wall surface and air. The weight held in the ball of their foot – a paradigmatic shift shifts their shift – (a pointless florid trope starts this train) ‘What is that top?’ a woman across the room is asked. The name tonight is once again another process of light – (and other things) – (in another order of the room, archetypesis explained by an annoying tree from L.A) (the thick bark of binary divisions) – (a material for a sleight of hand) – (another crowded carriage). The woman realises the ficus plant stashed in her bag, trembling in the patriotic fragrance of the room that seeps through the fabric of its container. “Nice bag” the plant heard being asked of the woman. “Are you a member?” “Yeah, I finally got accepted. I’ve been waiting for ages.”

The potential terrorist on her side; its evil roots to stop the flow of agricultural production (all labour – no good) She herself had never felt endemic to this scene; neither the train ride there, the white walls and corners; the lumberjack peering. How to change this soil?


Water it.  Say you love it.

“I love you soil”

Say it like you mean it.

“I mean it”

What do you mean?

“I mean love”.

Describe this love.

“The description of love as I see it.  Love, is a person b.”

Describe this person b.

“Okay.  I will.  I will describe this person b with as much detail as possible.  With as much possibility as possible.  With as little Pozzible campaign money as possible, which means nothing.”

What means nothing?

“Money.  Money to describe Person B whose name is now inflated with title capitals”

What if…

“What if what?”

What if we got Person B, to describe themselves; in their voice, in their own time?

“Oh.  That’s a novel idea.”

I wouldn’t be caught dead reading a novel.  Narrative is dead.  The word is dead.

“Okay whatever.  Here’s Person B to introduced himself”

-           Hello

Hello.

“Hello”

What’s

-           Brian

(all three laugh nervously)

I didn’t think you’d be so handsome

-           I didn’t think you’d be so handsome either

“This is fucking disgusting.  You two are both men.”

I’m blushing.  I never thought about ever being gay

-           Maybe you just like Samoans


She stared indulgently into his big brown eyes a moment, wry smile fixed in place, ready to concede the charge of any appropriative impropriety whether cultural or counter. The other white people, faded somewhat into the background of this self-perpetuating, frenzied, ritual laughter looked feckless and afraid, though for what reason, no one could quite remember. They shuffled towards each other in a grim 19th century dance, regulated of movement and tempo, coupling, taking a turn around the room, parting, moving to the next, and repeating. Otherwise discussing real estate, governed, in the manner of the manor by arbitrary categorisations dividing the right sort of people from the right sort of people, great loves and great arts confined to practicalities informed by patriarchy and class. What was everyone else doing? Making it work? What was it? What really worked? The definition had extended to this very situation. Realisms and abstractions supposed to structurally impose a sense of truth that went beyond it, lives that were in no sense literature except in the sense that they were, they were made from fiction and they tasted like fiction. No one could believe what it wasn't.


any longer in living was what
there was a nice printed sound under the cover
she liked to think of it as a living ordeal there
the automatic white fighting something whole
a scarred mechanism that doesn’t brace
the apology sounded very bad like bad words
left or spread or something quit in motion
we hadn’t left it nice in a white while
still she liked it there fighting sound
it wasn’t hurt under the red mechanism
that didn’t sound like a film apology
she’s sorry her not having covered
the bracing quit process of it
quit her idea for the automatic white
it didn’t sound like that got red across

nice god did it need to cover
left god or something nice very bad
god in motion or something your idea

printed it felt scarred over or something
it was safer for it like a living apology
a living left bracing mechanism
quit saying that nice sound
why were they fighting in motion like it here
they printed some out and spread it
she hurt very bad words printed
something was under the red
it was no use the cover covered it
in film for the automatic black
cascaded

over its body profound like no man ever
like no other is allowed to be

i have often thought that in this moment on the train between the college and my home with the dog, that…
that this
then that
this what
why now
not later
always ever
ever lasting

the other day i picked up at a bookstore
my 1980’s & other essays by some guy named wayne koestenbaum

i wasn’t engrossed in it, moreover the cover – a polaroid of Debbie Harry by Warhol obviously,

she looks at me over her shoulders

i have written about photographs in my time

an historical present
an always different

a body's change
a mood's swing

i wasn’t surprised that i opened the book, i took my time doing it

by the time i eventually opened it, i found myself outside the store as a thief

i have often thought that in this moment on the train between the college and my home with the dog

shall i quote him for you?

“barkie”

who am are you?
who are am you?

who are we you?
who we are you?


__

BF is an artist based in Sydney, Australia.


Z.O'Mahoney is a dilettante of the cult of personality, nominally existing in Sydney, Australia.


Nic Flood is a poet from Louisville, Kentucky, living and working in Brooklyn, New York, USA.


AG is a poet and they are happy to be here.



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