Fiction
The Forest is in the Euphrates River (a work in progress) For the sculptor Petah Coyne, and for poet Judith Goldman
not a mirror the forest is in the Euphrates River
The outsidefloorcompletely harmoniouspeoples on the rose desertcruising Toyotas
break the delicate surface
so the rose huge floor goes
everywhere the rose floor of streets
with people
just the outside (word) is harmonious,
though it is
Oarsmen/Eye/Forest –(Reading as Horizontal Sights)
Their looking from their eyes (theirs being plural) ‘is’ in the middle. One’s eye is in the middle. One’s/they’re in the forest (thus silent words). One is walking. The floor of the forest, black rose-sewage, floats then. Then black roses and fur grow floating, oarsmen row the forest. No sky is there. Hospice did not allow treatment that would lead to remission, either chemotherapy or radiation. Knowing this, and hearing the mother state she wanted to live wanted to consider treatment, her youngest daughter arranged for hospice, without discussion with family and without the mother’s knowledge or consent, to begin before the first meeting with the oncologist. The daughter announced this as a fait accompli to her next older sister who stuttered But we are seeking treatment…There will be no treatment, the younger sister declared.
The floor of the forest is the door (of the black train of roses). This isn’t a dream but the rule is (it has a rule though it’s not a dream, though it is free floating, undetermined): if black roses and fur grow, the oarsmen are rowing them there. Just seen. So they’d say this is nothing.
There aren’t edges or periphery either. One’s eye being in the middle sometimes sees the oarsmen but if they are close to blank eye they are invisible. Present they’re oaring forest but there they’re invisible. A word is still always.
The forest isn’t black. Its train crusted black roses and fur. A face rose weeping. The face is seen only at random. It may be in blank eye still. Who is in the middle of the forest. Besides one. There aren’t going to be any questions because the president has blinded them there.
But still and without there being a word one in the middle of the forest, therefore blank having only future, has that then. At the time.
One hasn’t dreamed since her family, led by the third daughter suddenly assuming being its head, bullied her and their mother who had a brain tumor. Were also bullying the exhausted and frightened father, though sustaining him alone. It floats as a plate on the surface. When the mother is scanned and seen to have a brain tumor, the third daughter–unknown to the second daughter–has herself named as next in line to replace the father in determining the mother’s care if he goes away. This should only take effect if the mother is unconscious, yet the third daughter acts as if the mother is unconscious now. The father keeps going away. The family concurs to oppose treatment of the elderly mother, who’d taken the treatments faithfully. Again. Earlier, unformed who’d turned into a minotaur intercedes insisting to the grieving father the mother is not in her right mind when she indicates intent to treat the illness, the unformed secretly securing a document giving herself authority over her mother’s life, as if the mother were unconscious when she is not, should the father not be there. He keeps going away.
The father, without telling the second daughter and her lover about the existence of that document (is a forest of petals–no), asks them to arrange and draw up a document placing himself solely in charge, which would unseat the third daughter from this role without saying he is doing that to her. Because who could come up against her. Yet he relies on her to care for him daily in everything.
One goes against the unformed minotaur for the first time.
The hatchling minotaur can force because she is encouraged by Iago. The forest is the black-rose floor only. The hatchling, spewing, revved into another gear lies to the others–yet in front of one they appear not to even care if this is true—maintaining mother was being forced by one to be treated.
The others care about her mother. Are the elderly not listened to. Our–regarded as not there already. They conceive of her as elderly—It is in spring, it is spring.
One can’t dream, yet later one dreams the woman who gored is sitting in a car as if planting herself in front of the house in which they’d grown up. The gorer is boasting to someone else–the same man who, with her, outside the dream, commented on the uniform process of all death, ascribing this to the mother, who lay listening and ceased to speak after this episode, either because the words had discouraged her or because she would have ceased to speak then anyway. The gorer’s smug tone in the dream speaking to him in front of the house is usurping by condescension, the same tone she was using outside the dream of possessing and of being everything in a family in which devotion is central and one non-existent outside of expending that. So, it is the assumption of the dream also, which an outsider who ‘saw’ this dream occurring could not comprehend in it, that the family house is all. As childhood. (Though the people in the dream are adults.) The gorer having taken over the house of their childhood (from which the parents outside the dream had moved long before) occupies everything. At all. Not that she (one) wanted ever to be in childhood only, as does the gorer—but one’s existing as it arises in childhood has to be entirely relinquished to someone else. Yet the second woman (one) is now not in either the family or in the outside. Why does she see that she is no longer in the outside.
There have been two contradictory directives outside the dream, which it is indicating: Only being in the family. (And thus non-existent otherwise.) And the simultaneous directive: Only being outside. (Not only is the outside the objective but the family hardly exists, in the second directive. One’s reversed into the outside.)
The gorer has only one of these directives. She does not have the directive of one being only the outside. She ‘lacked’ it, a question as to the word ‘lacked,’ though there are no questions. For the gorer, in goring and in being blinded–by the president as we are–the outside does not exist.
A fine rose silt fills the air in day and night here. The Sahara is being broken down now by Toyota Cruisers used by everyone the nomads cruise the desert and break its delicate crust which disturbed enters huge sand storms that obscure the ball in space’s atmosphere because the rose desert below as its floor is huge. The Toyotas cruising tearing the rose train, it is now everywhere. The rose train of those cruising causes illness in people’s now rose lungs and in rivers of their eyes, black at night.
There’s no way to directly articulate. A blind fascist having only personal life–that’s what a fascist is here. The coercive hatchling minotaur shouted. The internal events occur while the second daughter is without words. How has the other one had only personal life here. A bully or fascist ‘is’ as if they were interchangeable because there aren’t words here. They sneered as a pack as if they were expressing feeling and as if the other, in favoring treatment, were criminal in which the bully was sustained, speaking so that blank couldn’t speak, speaking when one spoke.
One’s family now hates her. The minotaur boasts to one that they all hate her, spoken as the minotaur traipses in front of her. Except the father, wanting treatment silently in front of the family in the midst of their actions to one. Yet not silent in that he agreed to treatment with the doctors and says this to one. It doesn’t matter what they think!–about this–what they think about one–he takes her aside and says.
The ignorant bully knowing nothing of this illness, she thinks eating bananas fed by one is killing her mother, who’d have the mother die at once (yet mother had treatment which shrank the tumor to be a very small size–against the hatchling minotaur’s will), and who aloud in front of the mother after which the mother becomes entirely silent says: Her skin is breaking down everywhere–pointing out process of all death where the mother had just said to one Then we’ll try!–hates one in this, arising then, at the point of the start of the mother’s illness. Now.
A man, clear, says people dying have to deal with things that happen when they’re dying. Bad or good, it’s what’s occurred (now past), for that person. There isn’t present seemingly: ‘Too’ is wordless. And is also. Now is folded over in space. There she flips her wild sides silently beside the family.
The shock hurts her. It appears that they don’t have any sense of anybody being free.
For Iago, family is only tyranny which she (Iago) uses. Iago says to her (one), as if she were not, It is time to be mature, in the cold black desert.
Our insane maturity is–one is the outside as being, and one is ‘the outside is entirely rejected.’ Iago conflates these to one is only forced by the outside, one rejecting it therefore (which is oneself) but being it as its convention only.
this is not bud. budis
(lineage)
unbornis there at once
a horizontal night.
If the mother can’t be cured there is either only ‘personal’ or only ‘being outside.’ And family is not ‘personal.’ Outside the forest. Also. The sun goes down as one is walking, at dusk.
once. recurring. first
are killing the insurgentswho’re
everyonethere
the only thing to be is the insurgents
people cruising the rose desert surface is broken
Contributor
Leslie ScalapinoLeslie Scalapino is the author of over thirty books of poetry and fiction. Day Ocean State of Stars' Night is forthcoming this year from Green Integer.
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