PHILIP SORENSON

MONTHS NINE THROUGH ELEVEN: TIME-WORK AND ORAL EROTICISM

endless frustration/ impossible, impossible wish: burial, live burial, gymnasiums, tied, sheets and beds, aching, hot rooms, massive arms, massive legs: paralyzed and alone just for a while, a subject of curiosity, some stinging, some crawling, and then a complete disappearance into the sea-haunted cave, bears and guinea-fowls, grasshoppers, victims, food, cadmium, pinkness, cabbage and mussels, a pumpkin stuffed with shrimp, being eaten by his own dogs, a woodcut of a little yard full of sunflowers, round woolen bodies turn around the stalks, “subway,” a mother’s mouth, my mouth, worms, mulberry, katydid legs vanishing, Timoclea

less alone
everything

they traveled to a rock outcropping
drinking wine

certain trees

a golden pile of leaves
climbing under or buried under

imagine a honeycomb
inside a snake

the fingers stretched from high above
shaking the yellow clouds and all of the yellow and all of the red leaves

you’ll be let go and you’ll fall forever
and sow your apples in hell

we were walking on a wooden bridge, a floating maze through enormous cattails. mixed together were tall grasses and lilies and bindweed. the sky over us was as blue as you can imagine. maybe bluer. a September blue. a small turtle with moss growing on its shell crossed in front of us. and then we saw, clinging to a stem, a dragonfly systematically swallowing a smaller blue dragonfly. its jaws worked and worked and with each moment the smaller creature’s body disappeared into the longer creature. afterwards, all that was left were the wings.

we were very little, in kindergarten or younger. we lived in Colorado. it was the autumn of 1982. my father’s friend shot a coyote on a hunting trip. he skinned it, and gave the tanned hide to my family as a gift. my parents gave it to my sister. it was on the floor in her room. a rug. I remember its smell and the way it felt on my hands and on my face. I remember playing on it: little dolls’ feet, little plastic feet moving through the fur. then my mom found pinworms in my sister’s underwear. we all had the little white worms. we went to the doctor. we took the medicine. they went away, but soon they would come back. all year in a circle, coming and going, like moons, until my parents realized that the coyote rug was giving us the worms. The rug had not been properly cleaned, and it was full of little invisible eggs that we swallowed over and over again. I watched from the bedroom door, as my mom stuffed the rug into a black contractor’s bag. Hilda Hist: “little by little I stop wanting to procreate and instead eat ass, that I crawl starved of all of my senses, that you rotten, men, that you rotten, and decomposed, live body of worms, urn of ashes thereafter. . . . I wanted to swallow you . . . you falling in UMM into my larynx, into my entrails, my nodules, my unctuosities.” A golden path, winding and winding into the golden wood:

]

in a hole

speaker covered
in moss and leaves

WORK IS HARD VORE

grow up and climb inside the vehicles that have their own odors:

old takeout, leather, pine, plastic-cracking sun, disinfectant, engine oil
all of these vehicles have rows of teeth and a pushing muscle

they are giants and alligators and flytraps

my father’d leave in the morning

but we did not we searched for hidden doors
a bomb is 50 rupees you must work to get

and my father who’d climb into his Buick
with its rows of teeth and the pushing muscle

would drive long strips of road and would come back incrementally different after every visit
after moving through mazes, for example, and being seized

when I am sitting at my desk, I can feel the pushing muscle’s relationship to the soaking sensation

outside the air is cool and bright

it’s June and it’s 8:45 in the morning: Link carries his wooden sword into the first dungeon and there are bats and skeletons that stalk the corridors and the breeze is pushing the lace curtains the sun is our engine and we’ve used it to build a network of stomachs

there are loose bodies and there are tight bodies

the orange and black prairie is a loose body
the orange and black beetle is a tight body

the workplace is a tight body
a stomach with a point of entry

but it is connected by lines to an endless series of underground dens other stomachs where others are drawn down: I sit on the train

unbirthing starts with the doors that open and the doors that shut

the seats are plastic and our bodies are warm
we sit together quietly and we close our mouths and legs

*

“this dark and viscous fluid, a concentrated product of millions of years of solar energy, powers the tanker ships, trains, and planes that disseminate people, objects, and ideas around the world”

the engine of ecstasy or need, panic soft
animal fur on my buttocks and back

a tuning fork singing wantonness singing loss

the humming flux of jetliners
our relief each time we lock the door

our missing children our rotting teeth
we can grow our skeletons in the TJ Maxx

in the morning I woke and remembered my dream:
magicians were burying centaurs alive

in the desert everything was on fire
the sky was pink and orange

*

everything is turning into

the writing is a prairie
the ivy is turning emerald

come October

come November

we roll ourselves up into a ball tight and so skinny we are so skinny and when we become the potato bug the toad can fall on us

and we can stay still so it can absorb us:

our work is being dissolved and appears in others’ work

*

in the film L’exercise de l’etat black shrouded people efficiently decorate a room
it is elegant and French

red curtained and ministerial

a woman is escorted in
she is expressionless

an alligator is in a corner and the alligator opens its mouth and the woman approaches

she is crawling like a cat and she climbs inside the alligator and is swallowed

the scene takes place inside the office of the minister of transportation

*

clothes are clothes for work and I wear them to say that I am at work

I am not myself

I am overtaken by the interstellar condition that is eating me and I am preparing them for what they call “the real world”

it’s no wonder that my students don’t realize that they are already real

and the world is already real that they are dissolving inside of a social condition to make the social condition: work insists that it is all that is real and work is all that is ever real

we feed them to the powerpoint or it might arrive as a spreadsheet, toad
the loose body will not leave because we gave it the most impervious body

“a dark viscous liquid” and we will crawl into it and it will always be there excreting mixtures into transportation niches: overpasses, railways, gulfs

*

divide this body
a face a thorax

ice on the river
a pure practical reason

and with each slice
ownership

over the single working organism
the fly that lays its eggs

a princess on golden
autumn mornings

she is hungry today
eating and planting

in the fur world

she grows by winter
enormous and invisible

the degradation
begins in work: clean this

pathogenic worm imaginary
wash the bus tubs

the things we are forced to make
have become perverse in our worry

Philip Sorenson is the author of two full-length collections: Of Embodies (Rescue Press, 2012) and Solar Trauma (Rescue Press, 2018). A shorter handmade work, New Recordings, was released by Another New Calligraphy in 2018, but it's now out of print. He co-edits The Journal Petra with Olivia Cronk.