Bleeding Out by Battis Jes

Author:Battis, Jes [Battis, Jes]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101568835
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2012-05-28T22:00:00+00:00

I don’t know where I’m going, which is nothing new. I let anger and momentum carry me down Burrard Street. I run into a protest, which has reached critical mass on the steps of the art gallery. People wearing Al-Awda T-shirts are yelling in a variety of languages about the Palestinian right of return. A girl raps in Arabic. Every tongue is charged with anger. I am an imbecile who knows nothing of this conflict, save for what I’ve read in Drinking the Sea at Gaza. I give myself up to the crowd. If I close my eyes, it’s like a west coast version of Beautiful Losers, with everyone lifting their feathers to reveal their politics. Oh, F. Where were you when I was growing up magical next to the ocean? Where were you when I was dumb and horny and cruising Derrida at house parties, trying to fit in with the UBC brats? F, you delectable layabout, why did I never learn to be careless with my mustard or methodology?

Derrick’s interrogation has shaken loose memories, which cascade like cherry blossoms and sinister maple leaves. I give my body to the axis of evil, primeval, and penultimate evil. I give my body to Vulcan’s hammer; I bare my soft skin and my terrible curls to the witch hammer. Folla, folla, fóllame Vulcan, you bastard smith, you beautiful hunchback, you ancestor to Alexander Pope’s metrical bitchiness. Your body Quasimodo, a double-dog-dare knot, impeccably tied and removed from view like the cold vetiver breasts of the enana Mari Bárbola. She wanted nothing but a pile of snow to cavort in. I should really learn to stratify my desires in this way. I should donate my organs to magic so that I can finally look my driver’s license in the eye.

Derrick, what have you done? What have you uncovered? The curtains spread as the crowd pushes me toward the water. The only thing that bleeds worse than lost time is memory. I’m bleeding out. I’m a speck on a monstrous, flea-bitten narrative, an innocent shred of heme, a pink-eye rhyme. I exsanguinate, I dream, I make my way to the ocean with the rest of the bleeders. I understand for the first time that to recall is to be called violently when you’re in the middle of something, like masturbating or taking a bath. To recall is to leap out of the water, to drop your hands, to open the door naked, dripping, and say: What the hell are you doing here, memory?

And memory breaks the chain on the door. Memory strides in, reeking of insult and ambergris. Memory sets fire to your afternoon. Bleeding out, burning, all you can do is ride the hyphen between now and then, a hyphen with no seat belts, no holy-shit handle, no brakes, a malicious wooden horse that drags you screaming through the ionosphere like Quijote on a bender.

My yellow bedroom. In photographs, the wallpaper has an unremarkable stencil but the carpet is steady-state and pleasant to the toes.

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