Jeremy Hoevenaar

Red Weakens an Hour

The axe comes down again, two-sided this time: labrys, battle-axe, artifact engraved with

grooves and patterns filigreed with old blood that traps and dims the sun. It chunks in below his

left ribcage and he can feel it connect with his spine, a thickening buzz running down to tailbone

and up into skull, eyes. His vision quakes, jellifies, the sun suddenly a yolk spitting wet ropes of

shadow. He is prone in wet grass, concrete a moment ago, he thinks. Is it significant? These

scenic shifts? The axe arcs back up sluicing a red sheet, a pink mist, the sun a pulsing symptom,

producing tangents: you can think of the sun as hemmed-in, caged by expectation while it

spreads shapes out, making arrangements with its heat. Trust it in reflections, warped or

concentrated, sometimes diffused, making color, synergistic with wind and bending things, not

least itself. Everything bends everything else: the gravity of facts, facts being events, duration

painless and spreading. The difference is spreading. The blade slants and flickers. Things lean

into each other, themselves. Sunlight runs from the wound, pooling, like the body is filled with

another day. What day would you choose? The blade flickers again and flattens, falls as a war

hammer and smashes into his left hip, shattering. He imagines the screen of his iPhone cracking

in concert, splitting icons, then slivers of glass sticking into his scrolling thumb. Digital, digit,

dissipate. The hammer pendulums and the day is damp and full, a soft hill with its distances

rolling away, singing itself into the split at the end of vision. The phone says 7:07. If he gets up

now he can be a little leisurely, sip coffee, let the dread build or seep away as it will, watch the

backyard weeds twitch greenly in the wind, peaceful as long as he gets the cats fed fast. He rolls

onto his back. Behind the hammer looms a grin with no face to hold it, toothily ensconced in

folded clouds, but right over him, seeming close. It flexes in the light like a thought. No hands

are holding the weapon; it just is, and moves. He feels himself dragged, the world scrolling, body

a bag of loose parts leaking its essentials. His jaw clenches tight, teeth squeaking, damp grass

cool and sliding beneath him. At the crest of the hill some of his teeth give way with a murky

crack. He turns his head to spit them out and the axe reappears, different though, like one for

chopping wood. It comes down into the meat and bone between his neck and left shoulder,

severing connections, wedging him apart. His mouth is full of wet red teeth. The wedge pulls

away. His dad, looking passive, wields the axe aloft. The landscape heaves with his breathing.

Difference spreads from the wounds, changing the scene. He sits up in the dark next to his

sleeping wife, feeling the pressing resistance of that congested medium, his life.

Das Ding

things moving that’s an accounting a system or symbol

pick one follow its sounding bent around the corner

of a possible future things moving i appear

to know that situations are likely the ability to respond

is unconfirmed and not given the one place any stretch

is possible so why limit it the most fickle restrictions

the freedom lights up and out description never stops

running me over with gentle constancy keeping the address

simple hitting the wall infinitely enough to pass through

convenience and into the appropriate angle beautiful truth

sifting through a backlog of indications embedded predictions

things moving freedom is description uninscribed

prosthetic flicker and every chosen word a deletion

fundamentally partnered resonant holy boredom

of reflection an altar in the beer an altar in the thrift store

radio an altar in the sound of dishes being washed

in an adjacent room holy mystery of adjacency

ascendent shift rise like a wave to scatter and repair

does system mean we know what we’re doing

or a description fettered to notation the triangle inherent

to speech and back having altered nothing

no trace of the swipe or display does symbol mean

icon i can unfold when touched and rupture

into a list or i’ve failed to be simultaneous

enough to expand collapse back into the storage you are

node enough to know it everything points forever

things moving swarm of filters holy filtration

stammering the symbol for stammering it works this way

The Future Begins

Treat the symptoms and the underlying problems come back worse. Return

with a vengeance, filmic, like advertising, like slant-parental I told you so said

not with worsened mouth but twitched forth with a twitch of face. Is fiction

a symptom of nonfiction? Is my symptom that I look the same as yesterday

even though filled with new language? That the rupturing, riot, and revolution

stunt and murmur in the tiniest field, toy-like, forgotten while still seen?

Microhorrors

wrappers shake sun

in the flayed yard

this gesture is called work

///

beautiful, terrifying

blast out of the water

///

crossing grey causeways

manifest distance

picks up speed and direction

wind believes the body into walking

///

displaced etceteras

quotate

///

if you jerk

the handle

bandages bloom

in the courtyard

don’t sleep; dream awake

///

a dream of limitless entry

wound first

into the future

Jeremy Hoevenaar is the author of Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement (American Books) and Our Insolvency (Golias Books). Other writings can be found online at the Brooklyn Rail and The Believer.