Hello! Welcome back. We have some more work from the lovely fleece, whose work I will always make everyone look at forever, this week, and an old poem of mine. I’m all over the place this week, so I’m sorry for being brief, unless you don’t like these little preambles, in which case, you’re welcome.
THREE ACCOUNTS OF THE LAST GREAT BEAST
by fleece seafleece
A POEM FROM THE GROUND: i saw your shadow from my window i saw your corpse in the paper they put rope around where you stepped i saw in your eye fear and love they put poison in your skin. you killed my neighbor. i saw in your eye a different place. i wish it was here. — SALES: It Shall Become a Monument To the Past. We will charge no money to see it. But there Will be a Shuttle, that goes from the town to the forest, about two hours— A respectful fee, no more. It will go towards fuel, little sculptures, marbles, and candy you can buy in town. This is Memory. — EOCENE: The forest is in the west portion of the continent. In a region spanning from the coastal mountains to the salt-falls in the east, there is a type of beetle. When it is a larvae, it does two things mostly: eat carrion, and get eaten by common insectivores— small digging mammals, birds with long beaks, and some amphibians, if there is water. The adult beetle retains the ability to secrete intestinal fluid to make its shell slippery that it first developed in hopes of escaping an old foe, a small arboreal primate that abandoned the region for sunnier climes somewhere in the range of fifty million years ago. The beetle dies within a day or so of jettisoning its guts, which is still enough time to reproduce, with some luck. Some modern species get more use out of it than others. The larvae have remained largely identical in form and function since the age of that little primate. They are born in and feed on the decaying bodies of animals, and have done so for hundreds of millions of years, by our estimations. We know the beast is an ungulate from the age of gigafauna. We know it belonged to our continent. We know the beetle is old and unchanged. There is not a force on the earth that could have stopped their oldest processes once the carcass fell. They were always meant to devour it. The question I have on this is not especially scientific but I will include it here anyway, as my colleagues have seen fit to wax a little themselves on the collective disbelief we now experience, in the aftermath. Do you think something old in the larvae remembers the taste? The fungi, with their hyphae? The ferns, their crushed fronds? Our interloping is so very recent, here, against that long backdrop upon which all of their lives intertwined. Where do we go from here? Where do we place this event on our charts? With what force written into our bodies did we here operate? Is there anything we could have done? Was there ever anything we could have done?
fleece is a writer, artist, and chronic gm and maker of tabletop role-playing games. they are interested in blood, body horror, undeath, desperation, love both human and inhuman, the interplay of individuals and the power structures they indelibly exist under, monsters, giant robots, religion, and disability. he posts sporadically on tumblr (@seafleece) and on twitter (@mittromney_vevo).
RECURRING THEMES
from the horse’s mouth (bee hyland)
and so, when we reach Autopsy, we will find no surprises. to sing the body Parasitic, the tumoral, the congenital, to speak them aloud / to sunder them; regardless: to call Illness a muse feels plain. feels hackneyed. feels, even, unpoetic. I cannot romanticize my exhaustion. I cannot romanticize the worms that devour my insides any more than I can romanticize whatever else devours my insides. but, then again, I can. they are Metaphor and they are hungry, and I am hungry, too. Dickinson said: I am afraid to own a Body - and I cannot say it so succinctly. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. when I write of the Body, instead, I can say this: picture the spine as its own creature. picture it hungry. picture a worm. what would you do if you were hungry and wrongshaped? if you were hungry and lacking entirety? picture the spine crawling. picture the spine crawling.
a song for your week:
Little Simz is making some of the best music out there, and has been for years, and even with all the fans and critical acclaim, she will never get enough hype. Go crazy.