none of them are artificial — all of them are ‘real’ — all of them are resistant to the body as biopolitic, but they’re not super romantic about how Foucault defines biopolitics (the purpose of political agency is to have control over ‘life’ — how clean or dirty one’s body is, where and how one can access the grounds of a hospital, the intricacies of birth locations, if you’ve ever taken showers with frequency at planet fitness out of necessity, paying money for tampons and pads, paying money to epilate the female body, feeling inexperienced without constant universal access to the world) and are more into the goth rock theatre opera that is Sayak Valencia’s work in Gore Capitalism, her knowing that the State inhabits (or performs) biopolitics through ‘everyday forms of violence used to obtain recognition and economic legitimacy’ — you tell these kind of girls, “We kill and then we sell,” and they’d throw you off your skateboard — as though you could ever, on wheels, move as fast as the dream she’s constructed out of vapid things she’s purchased, or the different kinds of murders she’s running from, even if she’s not the President’s Daughter, or redeemable, or achieved through distinction, or thrown away due to her redundancy. It would kill these kind of women more to have never existed on a page.

Terminal Mystique, 35

Terminal lives in prison and she sends her poetry out to get published every week, or as often as the mail system will put out her postage. She can write about the edge of a feather beautifully; she has to force herself to not repurpose the phrase ‘golden light’ in every line she writes. She’s silly; she’s overly feminine and finicky, a romantic, a punk even when it isn’t physically or aesthetically apparent in how she carries her body or the clothes she wears. Especially now, in prison. Her hair is rough and her eyes are very bright; something luminous lives near her mouth and the turn of her face has the glittering effect of millions of tiny dermal piercings flecking her cheeks. She likes to write about sex — she over-does it, has to send her lovers her excess erotica when publishers who romanticized the perceived ‘edge’ of her prison-residence begin to reject how horny and repetitive her work becomes. When she was on the outside, she was a copious lover and used her beautiful body as an instrument for pleasure. Now, on the inside, new to being captured, she is shy. She has a boyfriend and a girlfriend on the outside who are both geniuses and scammers. Nate is 23. He dropped out of his university after his on-campus organizing became so extreme that a self-imposed ultimatum of morality forced him into couch-surfing and skill-sharing. Nate rolls doobies for a living for a dispensary he has miserably failed at unionizing (he sends Term a voicemail via a cracked Signal manipulation to her illegal cracked prison-Droid that the main reason his co-workers won’t join together is primarily because they’re really, very, essentially…stupid) and he re-sells popular children’s toys during peak holiday seasons. Sort of like Dwight Schrute, with Princess Unicorn. Terminal is obsessed with writing letters so Nate becomes a little obsessed with making money that he can send her for her purchasing of copious amounts of stamps. Purchase, she does. The frequency of her ability to communicate (as though money were no issue) does not escape her lady lover — receiver of dirty letter upon dirty letter. Heavenly epistles. Terminal’s girlfriend, Nadine, has always thought of Nate as her opponent — even before Terminal went to prison. How much money he starts sending Terminal, right at the beginning of her sentence, sets up a fucked power-imbalance that Nadine feels like she can’t compete with. It doesn’t help that he’s ‘perfect’ — Nadine lays on her back in her shitty apartment thinking about Term lying next to her, her droopy eyes closed as she would drone on and on about Nate’s muscles. How good a girlfriend Nadine was — how pathetic. “I’ve never even tried to pronounce the word ‘sinewey’ before I met him, lady…” She would say softly, ultra and extra hornily. Nadine would almost purr, hate herself after. Nate (as in ‘The Gawd’, the bawdy namesake of his egregious Substack, tiny profile picture his gorgeous torso, headless) remains tan even in the most fraught and gray winters, and he is so long and handsome that he can bag uppity girls when he’s as dirty as ever and as drunk and dark as the night. Spending time with Nate, as a vagrant member of the collective house that Nadine helped organize, has always left her feeling like a little freak next to a hot cartoon character. When he cooks too-much-chutney curry for the house, he puts on xaviersobased and emotes xavier’s swag; dances with everyone who passes him … Nadine’s face burns. She loves this music, she is curious of Nate, but doesn’t know how to be sexy and compete with this beautiful boy. Competition isn’t the word — what battlefield is Nate winning in his psyche, and what obstacle is Nadine hiding behind in her own? She pinches her round thighs, in her dingy little bed, alone. Nadine wanted Terminal to herself when she was free; now that Term’s wings have been clipped, Nadine becomes so protective that she doesn’t sleep for nights on end. She paws her floor twin mattress as though a phantom of her incarcerated girlfriend will bodily illuminate her studio at this — she swipes again — this … exact … moment. Air responds to her hand like a knife. 

The amount of money Nate starts to send to Terminal starts to weave indeterminate patterns ‘in the sand of shared lives’ — a phrase Nadine loves like a winding river, one she used to whisper down Terminal’s back. Nate starts to become more popular within their tiny punk scene. His toy reselling becomes a new technique for making money without a job. He gloats a little when she sees him in-passing, at a bonfire in the woods far enough behind the K-mart to attract little attention. His squinting smile is shifting, his big hands patting his knees to different drum-beats, his body handsomely and aimlessly swaying to music in a way he once shared with Terminal. Term would’ve dipped her waist as the music climbed erotic notches, beating her head and laughing like it was essential to breathing. Nate would’ve cupped the front of her throat with one hand, holding the top of her womb with the other. Nadine hates him. Stupid boy. For even getting the opportunity to hold Terminal with such pride, to act as though she would be forever. Now everything is unsure. It was unsure before, too, even when it was supposed to be perfect. Terminal kept breaking into random buildings in their exburb’s community college, claiming that her actions were an expression of released suburban repression. Nadine had said nothing when her smoking hot girlfriend started locking her desk drawers — drawers often communal, shared, researched and diaristic. So the documents and files stolen had added up to build evidence in her case. So what — for those crazy months before it all…really — Nadine didn’t care as long as long as her crazy ass kept fucking her like they had found an answer. Their bodies knew an answer. Making a really simple magic, Nadine thought. And if it had only been the theft and the great sex, fine. But for a girl like Terminal, dating a really sexy guy publicly was quite easy and dating a hot lady like Nadine, no matter how many times Term did it, felt illicit and private. Nadine wanted out-loud before her girlfriend went to prison and she still craves it now. Nadine is beautiful, evil, soft, violent, a harbinger of what women could potentially be in the world she and her friends are attempting to innocently birth. She makes her friends rise in the wee hours of sun-breaking mornings, drive at 20 miles an hour close to the soft clover fields, maneuver with the back of their hands as she throws herself out of their open sedan doors. She has weird scarification on the sides of her legs from when she was a teenager, but it isn’t shameful — it’s pretty, and scary. Deep wounds curl down her calves to the imprints of her feet. Terminal used to laugh at her, “I’m surprised you didn’t bleed to death!” she would snort, but Nadine can tell Terminal loved her scars. How they’re so thick they seem impenetrable (even to poking), and terrifying to normal people. So punk, the destruction of her own body. Nadine’s grandfather taught her how to carve knives so that, to most men, the idea of Nadine and the knives become inseparable. Beautiful and well-crafted, sharp and almost impossible to grasp without skill. Nadine is afraid of men — she’s 32 and still doesn’t understand what their desire implies. She wants to take their bodies into her own without responsibility but she watches how Terminal navigates men licking her collarbone, or grabbing her hips, or how men used to stare at Term when she would practice sprinting, her boobs bouncing like caged-animals in her old sports bras. “You can’t deconstruct desire,” Nadine writes with no real sense of urgency in response to another horny litany from the prison desk of her lover. 10 years is Terminal’s sentence, long and even and un-ending. Terminal is in for what she calls ‘environmental activism’ and what the State calls ‘property destruction’ — she spent six months camping luddite-style in wooden, swamp-y areas surrounding a military base leaking oil into the head of the Chesapeake Bay. After local surveillance became a little too aware of Term’s local surveillance, she knew she had very little time to continue learning the ecology of the area around the base. Striking before she knew she would be caught with a lame vagrancy arrest, Terminal’s yoga-agile body trespassed the base through weakened concrete folding along forested overgrowth. Attempting to ostentatiously plug the oil-leaking pipes, she shoved homemade biodegradable material (stretched and dried kelp harvested from an endless summer in the swamp) threaded through with metal wire into gaping openings under the cover of night.

these girls have a working definition of neoliberalism and know how to use it — these girls work in square buildings and create products — thinking about kylie jenner and her sister impressing the shape of their bodies upon the vase to create the product that they’re selling — they’re selling the impression of their bodies — women who wear Body by Raven — women who do not have the same shape of the Instagram model who has influenced them to purchase — I think we are all trying to look like strippers — My fetish of the future is me in my little virtual world with denim shorts on stuffed with money — Anycia does a version of this back when she was dating 4batz and one of those internet pedophile designer guys was like Man she comes trim — talking to my old man Virginia boyfriend I have to say she ‘looked stylish’ — because he doesn’t know what trim means

Noona My Hero

NMH is a conceptual project of Big Man, a conglomerated firm of international male successes who have ‘moved the needle’, so to speak, in veritably every known sphere — the athletic sphere, the engineering sphere, the captured and then titularly replaced sphere, the eviscerations sphere, the conquests sphere, the act of dilapidating, then discovering, and finally, exploring sphere. ‘Titans of industry’ is a phrase that would miniaturize the type of men peopling the ranks of Big Man; one could instead refer to them as Ontological Winners. “For us, it’s a state of being…” croons carven Nettle Hemasche, the French-Austrian nobleman descended from ranks of polo players foolish with their hammers — building erroneously both legacies and vaunted frescoes, the fecund athletes stumbled into horrendously built mansions poppled over with babies, babies, babies. Perhaps for Hemasche, being is about being all of the men that have come before you. If not, approximating what it feels like to carry a million ghost’s beginnings and ends becomes something political … or at least something to be lobbied for. Hemasche is not very different from other men who are on the Board of Big Man, with specters riding their coattails, reverent for eras dead and glistening. “What can an international firm of the most spectacular men do?” Hemasche asks hypothetically, parochially, grinning a little gutturally for the room in which he is presenting. He’s not really sweaty, and he’s not really nervous, but he runs his fat hand underneath his presentation screen in a way he only recognizes feminizes him, after. “What can’t we do, seems to be the more appropriate question.” Hemasche knows what he says is of little importance — he knows that every Important Man, gathered here, in this conference room, wouldn’t remove his eyes from the large projected screen if their wife came in screaming that one of their over-bred litter was sick, again. The image is resonant enough. Nettle knows his forehead is sweating but he refuses to move his hands like a girl again — shoving them into his suit pockets as if startled, he swings his head out to the crowd and questions, softly, “But I know you all like her boys, don’t you? For our first project, we wanted to attempt creation the way we see it. The way the moon is soft in the light when the window’s open on the first night you learn how to pray. How a soft cheese stinks but you need to learn the taste. Gentlemen, the ineffable…” The room is so quiet that Hemasche’s words seems to be swallowed up by a grander silence, feeble but vengeful. He whips his head back to the screen, Noona My Hero stretched from one end of the room to the other. He laughs lightly. “The ineffable of the feminine, we’re constructing that. So don’t tell me it’s ‘in’.” No one in the room laughs in response, but this is how he knows he has them. The joke is a purchase of stolen time, in pursuit of the creation of the greatest commodity.

Noona My Hero!

Noona My Hero!

Noona My Hero!

My Girl Who Likes to Fuck

It’s the 1920’s and Claudette is an African-American girl I like to fuck who does not live in my neighborhood. I’m Luke, I’m White, and I’m 25 years old. My father worked at the Post Office so I’m training to work at the Post Office. I had a few slip-ups the past couple of years because I like to get drunk. Being a post man is a reputable job, for an honored man in the community, like my father. The town I live in is mid-size, in Western Maryland, up North. We share a border and a mountain with West Virginia. Mail comes in from the mines, mail goes out from young girls who pine after the men who blow big rocks up. Hot stoves, warm biscuit, nine lives. Cats in the street and variegating itches in my pants. Dust collecting over Oyster Hill. Creaking wooden steps heard while walking in after a night out. I’ve always liked to fuck because I like to drink…I don’t know my body very well, but it becomes loose after I’ve had rye whiskey. I have thick, hard arms and wooden thighs. Don’t know what makes a difference to women. I didn’t meet Claudette directly…there is no way I could have, being that she lives down on Delta Ridge and my family has lived on Burnham Street since we laid claim to a little property. A friend of mine connected us, Nader. He knew Claudette would do things for men for a certain amount of money. He said her family had gone through hard times recently. I didn’t really pay attention when he said that. My brain had already started to fuzz in an imagined scenario when Nader said she would ‘do things’. That phrase tortured me, how illicit it was. The mystery implied in how nondescript it was. Claudette’s mom used to clean a house on our street, so I was hoping that maybe Claudette looked as good and firm as the women who came before her did. Her mom had a high ass, like Negro girls did, and thick heavy hair falling around her shoulders. White teeth. Very fair skin, for a Negro. Once, I threw a ball in passing at her, to excite myself. She blushed very easily, and I carried a boner home with me to grieve what I hadn’t done with it. So maybe Claudette would be the receiver. Or she would, because I was paying. I spent two weeks waiting for Nader to get back to me after I gave him fifty fresh dollars, heavy and new-smelling. She seemed to want me to think that what she was about to do to me was very special, and that I should have to wait before getting my chance with her. I found that exciting, that a Negro would think of herself in high value in that way. I was damn near getting Nader drunk every night, on my dime, trying to woo him into Herald’s bar after his day shift to see if this damn girl had decided what was what. Every time, he would come in carrying my fifty dollars in his back pocket, laugh at me, say, “That girl says she ain’t sure yet, she says it’s a lot of money, and it looks awful good, but she don’t know yet. She plays with it like this, Luke, whenever I bring it out…” and Nader would fan the money out, pretty-like, and bat his eyes dumb like women do. This would get a laugh out of me, admittedly. But I wanted a piece of that hot ass. One evening, carrying what seemed like hard hell in the front of my trousers, I shoved the money back at Nader, drunk off our asses, and cried out, “You make sure she takes this money next time, goddammit, I want to see what she’ll do with it.” I could tell by the glint in his eyes he could tell I wasn’t fiddling around — never had been — and I didn’t see Nader for two nights after that. The next time, he met me behind my parent’s house. I came out the back kitchen door and there he was, grinning with his sharp jester face. “She took that money, Luke, and she’ll meet you down by the river Thursday night. Said it was Jupiter’s night, perhaps you’ll get lucky. But I said, the idiot done already paid you. He’ll get lucky either way.”

It was easy once we started. She knew the woods better than even the hunters I knew. She had this spot she called the White Lodge, a spot in an emptiness between trees that housed a stump the size of a bedroom, that I stumbled through stinging nettles to re-find once a month or so. My months became about that, really. I forgot what I was learning at the Post Office as I was learning it. It was as though the new information would be rinsed out of mind by the image of Claudette on that big white stump. Huge, circular, creamy tan was that wood; with tea-colored rings expanding in size up until it’s edges. She would perch on the edge of the stump, bare above the waist. She liked these little raspberry-pink pants with a golden button on the side. I’m not no fag. You become fascinated enough by a woman you start to remember the tiniest, stupidest stuff she talks about; the stuff after sex. How she loves these pants, they make her feel sexy, they were the first expensive thing she ever bought, last year, so she always wears them to feel sexy. I would listen to this as though I were a religious man and she was a pastor with the message of the revenant. My wish that she would be as pretty as her mother was granted by some generous genie who thought it would fuck with me to give me my wildest dreams. She was something even wickeder, the edges of her eyes tight against her face and some life-force pounding behind every inch of her demanding to be released. Maybe by a magic wand, maybe mine? I said this as a ridiculous joke to her, but she was smart enough to know I was serious. She was the kind of girl you paid for that made you feel like she was begging for it, that you were going to have to give her quadroon kids she would need to raise in New Orleans and name them Marie Cher Louise, that the piece of her that was for sale had already been purchased, and was now owned, completely and totally, by you. By me. I was doing her like we were the first humans on Earth and I had to perfect it every time in order to continue to populate our species, our shared race. Thinking like this was dangerous. I couldn’t keep thinking like a Yankee. I would get close to punching myself in the face when I was alone, thinking about how my family would think about what I was thinking. Banging my head against the wall, I thought — I guess I would have to fuck it out of me. Chasing her down a ravine, the hairs on her legs electric where water had touched them, my sperm probably still on her belly (or rolling down) as she screamed with delight. Sprinting like a gazelle. Objects in her way meaning nothing…“Where are you fucking taking me?!” I yelled through the hollering wind, but not loud enough to be heard through her manic laughter. Roaring water. A hooting river I never knew in this land, her grin tempting as she waved her lotus-hand by the running rapids. “It doesn’t get you harder to hear the sound of running water, so loud and so close?” She said this like it was the most obvious thing in the world, completely naked and completely at home. Where the fuck did they make this creature? What entity could possibly be held responsible? To me, she was an animal, non-human. It felt like bestiality to fuck her, it felt like heaven, the sin burnt like privacy, like evil, like the bitterest hell. I had had other women, but only she made the act her own while submitting to me, wrote her cursive upon it so we were co-authors in degenerate bliss. Looking up at me as though she was earning every cent of her keep. I stopped hanging out with Nader. For he would know what every new color turning in my face meant.

— the shameful actuality of anarchist creation — ‘anarchist philosophy’ as a term that reflects on itself, the point is the imagination, re-knowing what an imagined/fantasy world is and what reality is (in response to a review of Days of War, Nights of Love) — critique is of ‘anarchism as an approach to life’ — at the center of the debate between socialism and anarchism is the difference between community and the force of the individualist, believing in the importance of internal desires / narrative —