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character death in four parts
gregorian, sans the chant. he, him, his chant in the form of ritualistic banter. it’s a bludgeon, the thumb, the image of a dick, how it’s the utensil of man. man. man. you say it as a sigh, an expletive, a sieve. catchwater. a thing meant to be removed. where the rain falls, where it falls, & you need to drink. or want to.
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point at his exclamation. point taken when he reveals several severed testicles inside of plums. his mind, what there’s left of it. you leave the room, the room after, so on, so on & so forth.
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in a week, you show poems made of apple skin but not about apples & there is a father with a son who isn’t your brother but could have been & the characters of the story have since died shortly after their prologue. he brings you a dandelion full of wine, what color, if there is one, you don’t know, but nothing does, nothing needs. the claws of the coffee table, bronze like Catholicism. he calls you sir, a particle of irony. you don’t know what the word means, but it ought to mean something.
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seven minutes or seven. minutes ago, the scabs from your skirt. it’s sorrow, her name like Cymbeline looking for her sorrow, her name looking for a kind of feeling that only sleepwalks downward, wherever hell ought to be. she’s gay, she’s you, she’s the fag, fagging, fagging all the way to your bipolar diagnosis. & then. & then. ampersand into infinity. someone calls her name, or yours. it sounds sad.
postcard to the nine voles i met outside the Speedway on Four Mile
for all our blood! i heard someone the other day call you field mice, which feels too rural & Midwestern, let alone taxonomically incorrect. my blood is cold all the time, for instance, especially when my lips are at their most quiet, especially when i’m not who people say i am. it’s so human, isn’t it. you don't have names for you, so you just are, which feels like something Descartes or Voltaire would be proud of, but it’s rare to find someone with mirth toward you. I sometimes find myself wanting to be a vole. you’d say though that i could never be one. you are scared, as you should be. i’m the devil, i’m uncooked meat, i’m more cryptid than mammalia. philosophers have demanded the uniqueness of humanity, mainly for the ability of complex thought. it’s not unique, it’s not complex, because i’m angry & i'm thankful & i’m thankful I can be angry. i eat flesh like & unlike myself, which is why i stop at places like gas stations. i'm there to never be a regular, to always be a traveler when i’m, in fact, always just right here, waiting for headlights to tell me where my humanity really lies.
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Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent cripple punk writer and photographer who owns two Squishmallows, three Buddhas, a VHS of Cats The Musical, and somewhere between four and eight jean jackets. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone's Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Find them on Instagram/Twitter: @beanbie666. https://linktr.ee/liamstrong666
