Days cyclic as Rangoon traffic turning so many yugas of hostaged
time, at any node of its unraveling a thousand words ransomed
to a thousand other gods of perfect memory. Jaundiced light at the
edges of uncounted towns, dogs and barbershops, old men
with tinned food in their hands, people on bicycles looping
between potholes on roads that cross India, China, places
between designation, unrepresented in official-worldese.
A woman stretching to reach a single papaya on a tree, the
birds that rise up when the boys on bikes take the billowing
curtains of daylight into greying fields and palm tree groves,
the solitary shrine with its dripping candle, the coitus of gods
kept close in the sanctum where none can overhear them,
ringing bells, ringing bells, in the dusk, through the night…Who saw any of it, from some concealed place? All the worlds
that swam into view, and receded. The half-demolished buildings,
engorged moon hung low and pregnant with an unshed blood, past
midnight at the provincial station where in a yard of broken glass a
girl showed the amnesia pubis under her skirt and motioned a stranger
to come. Who saw the theatre minus all spectators, calling from some
other barely-held frame, trains racketing through plural globes of life
untouching, unrelated but contiguous in some apparent space, boys with
soccer-balls, girls singing within earshot of a warzone, days before their
wooden stilt-houses slid down the mountainside. Office-workers on
the suburban lines didn’t read it in the thumb-smudged papers left on
seats behind the morning rush. Umbrellas against the radium glow of
premature sun, cobbler of sweat putting new paan in his mouth, become
a master of knees and torn, rain-washed newsprint. In some places no-one
could ever cross the streets, you must stand and wait a lifetime, guarantees
in hand, letters of recommendation to an eyrie in the air on the 19th floor…Who would reach there, or if reaching fail to unburden wings and fly across
to Macau or Rio de Janeiro, or somewhere that had never yet featured in a
motion-picture for stateless driftlife? Still the woman who cut coconuts
for iced-drinks had I.D. papers in a curbside drawer, and spoke to the
delivery-boy with the benefit of only five teeth which she counted on
large, saurian fingers. Not too far away her incoherent daughter who
walked epicycles around the house and only for brief moments gazed out
a window at the passing clouds. To passersby she was a piece of brittle,
frayed wire. Would she have a funeral? The delivery-boy might know,
or the half-sized man who lived at the bus-station, with no arms on his
ironing-board torso. His neck and missing shoulders were the same part
of delicate plank with a chess-piece head on top, the head of a pawn who
had only ever moved ahead, one step at a time. There was another habitué,
carrying a dozen shopping-bags who whirled around him like a satellite,
an exotic, large, plastic Chinese bird, space-eyes a-flutter. All in space,
cycling in wide concentric circles, the traffic alone a certainty in the
flux. We’d never fly to Rio but it was the notion alone that counted…Words were everywhere, to be sold on street-corners, in bunches
beside enormous flowers and fruit-towers, girls with rafflesia mouths
and kohl-rimmed assurances. The rain came down, came down, on our
mutual parade. Honeyed light at the edges of the fields, gongs sounding
at the beginning and end and in the middle, bodies moving and turning
through time that as it rang had no foundation. Whatever happened next
was something that had happened before. You swam, saw and cycled like
a water-dragon through liquid forests of event, some luck, much death
and home-coming. In the mirrors of the tea-shops, the coffin sweatshops,
in the gold-markets and trinket stores the aging eyes and teeth and death’s
heads looking through, right at you, smell of decay between your feet,
incense rising at the temples and the humid mirrors full of happenstance or
possibility, each branching-off a tributary of another, not truly replicated,
nothing so certain or perfect, never fractal in the repeating but repetition
itself that would every sun-blinded morning recur and recur and recur,
vertiginous blur of prismatic lives in the markets and roadsides and
foodhalls, allcomers to the feast, primeval dog-headed servants at the gates
letting the guests through. Megaphones announced it, bells ringing through
the night, the various marriages and their blessings amplified through rubbish
laneways and you passed, you passed through to another place, another
town, uncounted, unsought after those that had come before …
- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones