from my email / Always Crashing

 

"Who Determined This Body for Purpose" featuring half wolves, half wombs, half elegy, half against, half DeKalb, half Had, half reading, half asleep, half sure it's the eighth year, half positive it's the ninth, and B movies. This is NPR. Always Crashing Magazine Sep 30   READ IN APP   / Now at AC: 2 Poems by Orion Allen Matrix Worry A city is half wolves, half wombs. Who determined this body for purpose. What stretches and leeches and loads. The roads are a cube, are matter, are for sale and partitioned. The box has value that is appreciated. A gravid female’s a prize for possession. That which it makes is that which it is. Prayers mostly gravel-oriented. Drainage. Never been a sustainable ecosystem. From the throat or neck, a re gurgitation. The bodies with spines are the bodies of ants. Product of pleasure, if pleasure is a burden. Can a pattern rear. Is there culture in a system. Mother’s calling: fontanel fontanel fontanel. Matrix mater womb. Mammal mamma breast. When I first encountered this piece, my brain inserted “this” in front of “purpose” in the second line: “Who determined this body for this purpose.” But that’s not what it says: Who determined this body for purpose. During lockdown I developed the habit of telling myself, no one really needs anything from anyone before noon. This was a way of giving myself a period in which I was useless and therefore free: for a while it was the only way I managed to get anything actually worthwhile done during the day, by awarding myself a certain uselessness so that I could shut out the world. And now I have somehow stumbled into a full time job—what someone recently, and probably not with the disdain I projected into it, called an “honest job”—and every moment during the day when I am not working there’s some part of my brain recording me, as if that moment might be later played back on a big screen in front of me when (my brain tells me) I am inevitably fired. Is there culture in a system. Who determined this body for purpose. Who determined this body for anything at all. Who determined this subscription for this purpose? We did. We did that. Pledge your support / From the Archive: Whitney Koo, “Elegy Against” A sprawling poem, haunted by whitespace and voices from beyond—read Koo’s “Elegy Against” in our archive now. / Elsewhere “Richard Brautigan visits DeKalb, Illinois, a year before his suicide. It’s 1983, fifteen or sixteen years before I move there, so I miss the chance to see him; besides, I’m born in 1987.” AC contrib Addison Zeller at Had. New chapbook, According to the Plat Thereof, by AC contrib Alex Tretbar available now for preorder from Ethel Press: AC managing editor Tadd Adcox, for the—what, like eighth? ninth?—year in a row will be watching a horror movie every night during October and yammering about it in an endless thread on social media (now on Bluesky, since Twitter is ever more broken these days). This year’s theme is B movies. Feel free to yell out suggestions.¹ / Today’s Soundtrack We are a Sparks household. 1 Yes of course he’s watching Blood Dolls (1999). Always Crashing Magazine is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Always Crashing Magazine that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.