Hossannah Asuncion on “26 Monroe Street, Buzzer 6”

While I am in the woods severe with language and my mortality, she will be in my bedroom, in my bed fucking her boyfriend.

These are natural exchanges in New York places, the currency we use to be ways unregular in our lives: vacating our Is while another temporarily stations a coating of injection.

Perhaps we are artists, perhaps. Perhaps we are bored—of life, of self. Perhaps her name is Constance and she is very, very flexible in body and mind because she is a teacher of yoga.

Maybe it is not just my bed they will use to support their fucking, because she asked about the stability of my bookshelves, to which I replied, Bolted and steady, an ex-carpenter, a dream ideal, love-of-my-life sort...the kind that leaves a punishing memory for dreaming him away, built and gifted to me such a steadiness for the pages and pages of words both hard of bound and soft of spine.

Bolted, she asked.

To the ceiling. To the wall. He used a tool that sees inside where the wall is most reliable. Imagine such a tool—to locate past plaster skin, into brownstone anatomy—a place that makes the most sense for such a structure that could hold all my beloved books present and future, and I imagined her boyfriend, whom I did not meet, with the face, despite my most virile truth-pretends, of my ex-carpenter dream. And it is this face, while I am alone, in the woody coldness of dark inspiration, that is holding the remainder of her density. As they negotiate a beat, maybe simple, or what stirs my envy even more--a very complicated rhythm, most likely un-American in tempo and gesture, one my body could never discern so conditioned to 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

In two months I will return from the woods, my eyes squinting at the neon ambition of my city life, and another's bedroom built around my bed.

Tell me what you have seen, I will ask these poor books. Give me a portrait of their sex? Was it bendy? Was it French circus? Tell me what about their boundaries, tell me the detailed erasures of them. What was the mode of disappearing? Policed barricades of long dark blocks more shadow than camouflage? Or a competitive color of contrast to render everything but their magic invisible.

The books answered as I relied. The sex was other material, they say. Destructive of forests and roasting of flesh. Your bed, we are sad to say, will struggle to aspire. But the books were calibrated and taut with taunt. Liars, I write in their margins and I crease their pages unnecessarily.

We are ageless, despite our pulpy disintegration. We are imagination like your imagined heartache--a vapor and ombre, not grayscale gradation, but the way grass can go from alive to straw. The way we feed straw to horses or cows named Beulah. The way there's a way to be alive in the woods when the woody soil is aching for your fertilizer, the way there's a desire for your destruction, the way we like to watch beautiful little girls tumble with their firm breasts but with such violence our necks break from leering. Or ageless boys dying alone in the deepest loneliness of a reluctant yes.

The books are wise. And then there is a screen, a glass of wine, a note to self.





From Object Permanence (Magic Helicopter Press, 2017) All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.