You begin with a town because a town is where it begins.
POETRY CORNER
No seriously, read this, it's great, I even typed it up by hand for you.
Catie Rosemurgy, "The Pirates of Gold River"
Chapter 1
You want a place to keep it, a place for it to be, a repository, a source. For the gold.
The gold you feel all day burning inside out, gaining supernatural value,
threatening the leadership of your head. The gold fighting to display itself in your eyes,
pulling you towards other people, turning the heap of togetherness into something
permanent and musical.
You were mined from a hole in the earth that you belong to like larvae belong
to a honeycomb. We all have a home, but it's a law of dispersal
that not all of us will fit back in it.
To be loose at a time like this is to lose your teeth and be a pirate entering the sun.
Chapter 2
You begin with a town because a town is where it begins. A town is always
lost or buried. It's always obscured by raw mountains. You are always in the dirt
digging it out. Hunter, drifter. Species: marauder. With your thorax boat
and your old face whipping at the top of your sharpened mast. With your forked arms
and your improved relationship with the monsters of the air. Water and dirt
serve dutifully as your two emotions.
Chapter 3
Gold River collapsed on itself, but before that, so did everyone in it.
The hand in front of your face became rapid and disturbing.
So much for the preciousness being stashed in the body.
Eventually our bones became the spoons that stirred us.
Chapter 4
We are safe, the body is ruined.
Chapter 5
The real voyage begins as the joints unlock, every instant a shining hill or valley
beyond ownership - original, unseen, utterly remote and detached from the place
you were a second before. The living room walls are a new form of sea, the sensation
in your knee another box inside a box sinking with its treasure through the silted bottom.
The main island is no longer your head. The self becomes a desperate way of holding on,
of stringing things together, but that's been true for a long, long time.
Chapter 6
A metal city grinds in the distance. His fingers rest in pieces on the seams of her face,
bone on bone. The other option is to turn to jelly.
Chapter 7
When the pirates finally arrived, desiccated and coughing, Gold River was back in full swing.
Strings of lights had been hung between the houses, and the pirates found
that the twinkling festoons were exactly what they'd been missing.
Chapter 8
So you are a polyglot, fluent in water and digging. With no clearly demarcated head,
your hair's no longer sure where it should grow. Sea creature.
You gave up your body and went to live in the foam. You stung people
with spiny ridges that weren't yours, floated up under their chairs
with contagious tentacles. Abyssal plane. You float in and out of your cave
with no arms and legs, newly electric. Your old body bloats in the corner. Harbinger.
Contaminant. You and your kind. Now you want to go home? To be alive?
To have a tiny house, a sweet and personalized explanation, a hole you can swim through
in and out of this world? I don't think so.
Chapter 9
Kindness. A table pulled out under the sun for several generations.
Epilogue
Look at the insanity expressed in the mechanics of the knee.
The winged desperation of the pelvis. The wind passes though
as if through a curtain. What do you think?
Maybe lace. Maybe cut flowers nearby.
No seriously, read this, it's great, I even typed it up by hand for you.
Catie Rosemurgy, "The Pirates of Gold River"
Chapter 1
You want a place to keep it, a place for it to be, a repository, a source. For the gold.
The gold you feel all day burning inside out, gaining supernatural value,
threatening the leadership of your head. The gold fighting to display itself in your eyes,
pulling you towards other people, turning the heap of togetherness into something
permanent and musical.
You were mined from a hole in the earth that you belong to like larvae belong
to a honeycomb. We all have a home, but it's a law of dispersal
that not all of us will fit back in it.
To be loose at a time like this is to lose your teeth and be a pirate entering the sun.
Chapter 2
You begin with a town because a town is where it begins. A town is always
lost or buried. It's always obscured by raw mountains. You are always in the dirt
digging it out. Hunter, drifter. Species: marauder. With your thorax boat
and your old face whipping at the top of your sharpened mast. With your forked arms
and your improved relationship with the monsters of the air. Water and dirt
serve dutifully as your two emotions.
Chapter 3
Gold River collapsed on itself, but before that, so did everyone in it.
The hand in front of your face became rapid and disturbing.
So much for the preciousness being stashed in the body.
Eventually our bones became the spoons that stirred us.
Chapter 4
We are safe, the body is ruined.
Chapter 5
The real voyage begins as the joints unlock, every instant a shining hill or valley
beyond ownership - original, unseen, utterly remote and detached from the place
you were a second before. The living room walls are a new form of sea, the sensation
in your knee another box inside a box sinking with its treasure through the silted bottom.
The main island is no longer your head. The self becomes a desperate way of holding on,
of stringing things together, but that's been true for a long, long time.
Chapter 6
A metal city grinds in the distance. His fingers rest in pieces on the seams of her face,
bone on bone. The other option is to turn to jelly.
Chapter 7
When the pirates finally arrived, desiccated and coughing, Gold River was back in full swing.
Strings of lights had been hung between the houses, and the pirates found
that the twinkling festoons were exactly what they'd been missing.
Chapter 8
So you are a polyglot, fluent in water and digging. With no clearly demarcated head,
your hair's no longer sure where it should grow. Sea creature.
You gave up your body and went to live in the foam. You stung people
with spiny ridges that weren't yours, floated up under their chairs
with contagious tentacles. Abyssal plane. You float in and out of your cave
with no arms and legs, newly electric. Your old body bloats in the corner. Harbinger.
Contaminant. You and your kind. Now you want to go home? To be alive?
To have a tiny house, a sweet and personalized explanation, a hole you can swim through
in and out of this world? I don't think so.
Chapter 9
Kindness. A table pulled out under the sun for several generations.
Epilogue
Look at the insanity expressed in the mechanics of the knee.
The winged desperation of the pelvis. The wind passes though
as if through a curtain. What do you think?
Maybe lace. Maybe cut flowers nearby.