[evening]

Consider the remarkable resilience of the Mac Dre
Industrial Complex, whose subsidiaries belong to the
rarefied business of “culture,” unlike the
manufacturing and logistical enterprises which appear
at first glance to be “graspable,” and yet take for
example Stauffer Chemical, which in the 1960s and
‘70s disposed of 11,000 tons of alum mud, also known
as red mud, or bauxite residue, at present-day Albany
Bulb, radioactive industrial waste which, it was recently
revealed, continues to spit off elevated gamma count
rates, invisible and ungraspable to the innocent
park-goers. But Annie Andy Pondscum and Candy
and I, we do not care about this revelation. We like to
go sit at the shore of the irradiated bulb and we look
over the bay and into the polluted haze over the distant
skyline and we find a gnarled tree to tie disposed
medical tubing and our shredded graffiti-soaked
bandanas to. We sit and smoke and pretend like we’re
dancing on the rafters new millennium-style and roll
around the trash heap in order to hasten our trajectory
toward blinding radiance, gamma rays soaking into our
tissues, lighter now, glimpsing gradual systemwide
mutation, expression via the iris, turbid purple, like
that one Future music video. A peculiar time in which
all the horoscopes might as well read ‘ketamine waxing,
promethazine beeth waning.” Well, We want real new
— one extra syllable in a fit of late style, the
dog-walkers averting their gazes as we inspect the
opening of an emergent sex organ and we caress it
gently, with purpose, before it atrophies to make room
for a perineal vent, look, intergenerational trauma laid
like an egg, aglow, and so cute — we want to summon
our ancestors back from the grave, not ashamed but to
fill them with lust and lean, here, on this collapsing
solstice, we’ve expropriated all of the light evacuated
from the day to which it belongs, waving byebye to the
irradiated sky, its illumination diminished so we can
more properly remember the dead, each one a mutant
flower out from the trash-filled earth, children of the
not-so-charming sarin, tabun, and soman. Nazi
compounds whose horror we have inherited, not of
our own choosing, structure/history/agency, otherwise
known as wind, the soot of nuclear winter, and holiday
cheer, which we lack, and is why we came here tonight,
to stand atop the wreckage and turn memory to ash.
For every boydyke, for every unclockable Machiavelli;
for the wailing tranarchist, running, yelling “Shelley”;
for Big Dick Ice Spice, who’s still shaking ass in the deli;
to the daddies and bitches and withered
nipple-latchers, with whom we share universal basic
bitch era guerrilla warfare. Remember the vests and
their peace policing? Remember “white men to the
front?” Now it’s just Hind’s House, the tranny
lumpen, partisans of the student intifada, a taste for
blood only capable of being acquired in riotous Spring,
and now that it is winter we have nothing to lose but our holes, mwah.

“[evening]” is forthcoming in Tripwire 22.