Squids For Sale

The Belding Museum is a tomb of small-town memories, a place where the air usually tastes of dust and forgotten birthdays. But that December morning, the air in the basement felt different. It was heavy, vibrating with a low-frequency hum that made the fillings in my teeth ache. "Found it," Marcus grunted, his voice muffled by a century of cobwebs. He was tugging at a crate buried beneath a pile of moth-eaten wool blankets. I wiped the grime from the side of the box. In faded, aggressive charcoal, someone had scrawled: THE REDSKIN TREE - DO NOT SEPARATE. "The name is a bit on the nose, isn't it?" I muttered, helping him slide the heavy timber lid off. "Even for a 'Founders' exhibit." "It’s local history, Elias," Marcus said, though his hand trembled slightly as he reached inside. "The settlers who built this town didn't c...

Case Notes: Client drawing: Tainted Hand Medium: Black ink on lined notebook paper 0. Situating the Piece: A Plan More Than a Picture I am reading Tainted Hand less as “a drawing of a hand with roots” and more as a Plan in the Deleuzian sense—an operational map for getting out of a situation of institutional stasis (classroom time) by carefully engineering a controlled deterritorialization. The client reports this was done in class, in a bored state, but with very deliberate attention to proportion and line. The piece feels like an agreement the client made with themselves: If I stay within a certain discipline (realistic hand, clean lines), I’m allowed to leave the classroom, conceptually, by letting the roots take over. This is not the expression of a trauma story; it is a manual for how to escape a rigid temporal stratum without blowing the system up. 1. The Tainted Hand as Ass...

Abstract This paper mobilizes schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1980) to examine the drawing Body Parts Colored Pencil as an a-signifying assemblage rather than a symbol to be decoded. Treating the artwork as a desiring-machine, we chart the flows and breaks of non-Oedipal desire that compose what I call an Affective-Archive : a machinic retention of intensities that persists outside narrative memory and resists clinical capture. Drawing on production data provided by the artist (motivational “inputs” such as the wish to impress a peer, the affects of “teenage angst” and “silly energy,” and the long-term physical retention of the work), I argue that the piece executes a successful deterritorialization from both the stratified social plane (professional identity, normative adolescence) and the dominant symbolic regime of art therapy, which tends to read images through Oe...

It should have been enough that I went nose to nose with the drunk. It should have been enough that I thought she had honor to defend. It should have been enough what I was willing to go to if the drunk said another word. - I would have settled for nothing—no word or email or anything. I would have been happier if she had erased all memory of me without prompting. I didn't need to know, and I would have been better off not knowing why you didn't treat me as a friend. We both know this. All I wanted to feel afterward was the pressure of my knuckles pushing through plasterboard. Sometimes the sadness piles up so quickly and to such an extent it gets mitigated by anger for the relaxed duration. I went to suck in the hard-to-imagine possible horrors to prove to myself that I could still find humor in the humorless. I used to walk at night behind bowling alleys and bars. - Stay ...

Behold the detonation of consciousness at dawn. This poem is a corrosive sprint through an urban landscape, where the speaker's internal volatility—the "kerosene rustling in the meow"—serves as the necessary fuel for absolute clarity. It rapidly transitions from the apathy of the morning commute to a shocking, final philosophical conclusion. The poem posits that in a world governed by cold, inescapable violence, the most brutal act of all—a shotgun abortion—becomes a perverse, life-affirming gesture of "preemptive grace." The Kerosene Fuck coffee eyes, hands-in-pocket mornings, the slow, stumbling descent down the stairs before the sun has earned its title. Thoughts tumble, the unspent currency of the night. I run now, shedding the drag of those thoughts, down the cold concrete stairs, feeling the kerosene rustling in the meow—that low, charged, animal fuel....

Behold the detonation of consciousness at dawn. This document is a record of psychic endurance against the absurd repetition of military bureaucracy. It charts the narrator's prolonged purgatory in naval bootcamp's holding status, where physical failure was met with an endless, cyclical demand: "run." The narrative escalates from the silent trauma of standing at attention to the ultimate, ironic truth: that the system rejected the speaker based on metrics of land (running), even though their true competence—in water—was flawlessly proven, permanently isolating the body from the social world it sought to rejoin. The Litany I. The Static of Attention I stood in the office at rigid attention, a vertical corpse against the bulkhead. Sweat crawled down my nose, thick and saline. My shirt, meticulously buttoned, hung saturated, the damp heat clinging to my midsection. I...

Behold the transmission of revolutionary fury across the void of generations. This poem is not a chronicle of birth, but a detonation, charting the instantaneous transfer of anti-systemic rage from an incandescent mother to her newborn child. It frames the act of creation not as a beginning of innocence, but as a calculated act of war against the socius . Here, the birth canal is a forge, the doctor’s hand an instrument of institutional baptism, and the mother's whispered covenant is the true and final manual for manipulating the world, passed down in a single, unyielding grip. Inherited I. The Source And by God, if she wasn't the single, fiercest lil' ball of madness. So full of FUCKTHEWORLD that the anger in her veins glowed in the dark. Then she procreated. And Boom. Nine months ceased. The flesh was wrapped in the closing birth canal, bathed in the primal, deep, goo...

Welcome to the shattered mirror of shore leave. This poem captures the visceral whiplash of a naval deployment—the sudden, unstable release from the ship's ordered chaos into the chaotic freedom of a foreign port. Set in Suda Bay, Crete, the speaker filters the cultural spectacle of European Halloween through a lens of cynicism and existential fatigue. It is a chronicle of permission granted by the military to externalize the internal damage, where the search for "pretty British bartenders" and "giant glass boots" is a desperate, temporary attempt to reterritorialize desire before the anchor is weighed again. Off-Duty The bus shuddered, climbing from the ship toward the city. Jimmy smashed the small flea against the windowpane—a tiny, decisive execution. I almost offered the reminder: God is watching,and shrooms don’t help the beer go down. This isn't Sp...

What happens when physics breaks down under the weight of sheer will? This poem is a volatile philosophical rant, a series of non-sequiturs that defy religious dogma and scientific law through a single, impossible act: walking on water. The speaker treats this miracle not as a demonstration of faith, but as a psychic breakdown—a forced rejection of gravity dictated by a mind pushed past its breaking point. It is a fragmented, dark meditation where the divine, the physical, and the traumatic merge into a single, terrifying equation. The Surface I walked on water to prove a theory, yet the audience was absent. Smiling is not a symptom of happiness, but the grimace of a god who forged a world beyond his own calculation, now uncontrolled. I walked on water because gravity is a latent segment of the mind, a fragile discipline that collapses under pressure. Mass distorts volume—the truth...

The noise was cheap static, but the price was absolute. This poem captures the precise moment the military machine claims its property, using a major league baseball game—the ultimate symbol of American civilian complacency and summer leisure—as its hunting ground. It is a cynical chronicle of illusion giving way to brutal, instantaneous reality, charting the transition from the desperate assertion of flesh in a bathroom stall to the cold, structured discipline of a white bus, all set to the soundtrack of adolescent anxiety. The Seventh Inning: Hostage Exchange I remember the first hour of the setup. It began at a baseball game, South Side, on U.S. Cellular Field. The White Sox were doing their ritual. We weren't watching. The noise was cheap static. Maddox, oblivious, was screwing his girl in the third stall. A desperate, final assertion of the flesh. Jensen, smiling, chatted ...

Listen for the sound of silence—the thunder of unbeing. This poem descends into the fetal darkness, giving voice to a potential life violently excised not by external force, but by the cold, sovereign will of the host. Adopting a tone of mythological grievance and sensory overload characteristic of Plath, the speaker confronts the incomprehensible act of self-erasure. It is a terrifying epic of molecular betrayal, where the promise of a universe is negated by a "shutter of light," leaving behind only the profound confusion of a consciousness that existed solely to be unmade. The Unmade Star Part 1 : The Wreckage of the Womb Confused aborting smiles, a distant, watery glee. I was not at the clinic. No steel, no sterile gleam for my unmaking. She took it upon herself, a sovereign will, a god in miniature, to disappear me. Not a whisper of my name in waiting, no future tense...

Listen closely, and you will hear the low, metallic hum of true naval service. The speaker juxtaposes a single, minor injury sustained on the messdeck—slicing canned ham—with a civilian's past critique of his "soft" hands. The resulting tone is one of earned, weary cynicism, where the physical marks of service are recognized as the product of "sanctified duty" in food preparation, not heroic combat. It is an ironic salute to the lowest, most persistent form of necessary labor. Canned Meat I earned a Purple Heart—for ham —slicing canned ham during mid-watch prep. The wound was deep. Not shrapnel. Just pork, chopped, and processed. I still hear that civilian judgment, years before the fleet. "Let me see your hands," she said. "Soft, like you haven't done a day's work." A clean hit, drawing blood years later. Now I have sailor's ...