CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive
Andrew Durbin
It is true my face beheld
The crestfallen captcha
That reads the end of the world
Is bound to the end
Of the weekend
I buried my face in fox fur
The fur of a living fox
I held a fox once
War is not a fox
I went swimming in a lake
I felt the war touch my ankle
The lake held the names
Of my friends
Who were not at the lake
The cold spring
Which feeds the lake
Leads to a farmer’s market
In the town Cold Spring
Your mother is a fox
War is not a fox
Your mother is aging
There is a place
In North Carolina
Called Hell’s Kitchen
As there is in Manhattan
A Hell’s Kitchen
I know an Irish slum
Is a mouse brigade
War is not a mouse
The war touched my ankle
The lake didn’t move
It has no grammar
The lake’s waves were tidal
As the river that feeds it
Is a tidal river
There is no river that feeds it
I don’t know why it is said
Why I sometimes say
War is not what I sometimes say
They say a girl dove to the bottom
And drowned
This dead girl touched my ankle
The girl was never found
I held a fox in the woods
You were not there
The fox spoke to me
Of a secret it swallowed
I would have to cut out its liver
To where it stores
With its humors an info
We would all desire
To make a movie of
To stop the war
I held this fox once
At a lake covered in snow
He says you must make
An incision in my belly
Put your hand into me
The war touched my ankle
At the lake where the war
Was swimming at the lake’s floor
Put your hand into my mouth
He touched my face
There is a dead girl
Who does not want to be dead
She will slip up through the film
Of algae to be undead
She is a fox who has info
To stream online
A video the war isn’t ending
It is touching you
With a metal rod
The fox is holding
In its dark belly
Maine is not a destination
Maine is a sheet
That is easily torn
To cover a fig in sugar, to draw the ants
To the fig wrapped in sugar
To bring the fig back from your belly, untouched by the acids that dissolved it
You climb the cross of branches to sit on the cross of branches, above
The mud below
There is no mud in Maine
There is less water. There is less air
I am reduced
To watch the wind talk
The horizon into stepping over itself
To a desert. The desert is not routine nor is it symbolic. I want to direct you to the air in
Maine
For the air
Is king of a climate the desert is not
And the fig is not
There is no avenue that splits the city
To unite it with its friends who are locked in the backroom with a bowl of sugar and an
army of ants
For the plants
To descend safely
We would have to plan for an ocean
For the mountains, the forest
The desert, the plains
My head is full of landscapes which pull apart their signifiers and do not say
anything about where we might point our hats. They slip between the well-
greased hands that hold them together
I know no assistance
The air
Still makes
The water talk
The Gazelle
The gazelle wagers
Its place in the chain
Of events
Because it loves a gamble
That risks itself and those who rely on it
The gazelle is swallowed in the grass
Which wavers
Cautiously in the wind at first, then more quickly, until the grass
Is what everyone else has come
To see
Anyway, what forms the next world, and as we see it the point where you board the
plane to flee the country, vanishes in the hallway as the last world triggers the
conditions that enable the next
To our surprise
And I fuck you as hard as I can after dinner
Or in reverse
It comes
To fruition to retool
The address and the mark it left on your forehead
Out of a very serious love
That has finally arrived at its denouement
I am a gazelle who must be eaten
Because in being within another
I am transformed by the multiple forms that will eventually destroy the structure
that upholds them
When I walk the Serengeti
I am there
As is the sun
That is going to kill the Serengeti
I am the gazelle, the sun, and the Serengeti
And together we wash our faces
With the blood of friends
I feel disparate
But I meant to write desperate when the mockingbird signaled its illustrator to free
himself from this corrupt world, unveiling as he said so
The chocolate birdcage
Filled with chocolate eggs
In my dream about the time I was trapped in Desert Island
Which is a comic book store in Williamsburg
I take the runners in my stockings
To an elf who repairs them
The little green hat I impose on my head
Was made by the same man who made the Washington Monument
Which was once the tallest building in the world. Now my head is the tallest
building in the world, and no one no matter what
Can change that. To read the signs
In the zone of clouds
That have changed their colors
The rainbow in the runners
Of my stockings
The elf says he cannot repair
Do elves have gender?
Am I its one?
I feel as much as I can regarding Virginia Slims. They are slender and when they speak
in the night from their lit tip
Which is their little glowing mouth
They speak elevated
From a vocabulary of the heights
I can’t see
Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder, a publisher of artist books, ephemera, pamphlets, and glossies. An editorial assistant with Conjunctions, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. The rest of Reveler is forthcoming in the Brooklyn Rail and [sic].
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