20191011

Steve Gilmartin

Great White Horse


This is the filament of the universe at ground level. Our house entered the war. There was smoke everywhere, and skin flowers bloomed on the hillside operating rooms. The release scattered a high-ranking police officer. In other words even those seated on a great white horse were not exempt. Stone sprayed into a dazzling hallucination of character. The staircase collapsed again just as it began to think it was getting somewhere. Fifteen square miles tumbled down into film. The afternoon screening had turned into smoke and sky. A high-explosive drop replanted the rubble flowers, which glowed like present memory. Can happiness grow from the silence that hangs weeks after night has lost its mystery? The story continued to metastasize.

Two rough dead eyes were saying something against the dusty, chalky rubble, yellow flames reflecting from part of a floor. In the crackling, the idea that the applicable statement never even existed was floated. Total up the south. A cat entered the war and immediately disappeared forever. Clear out the other 806,000. There are six sets of being conscious. Perhaps standing-for-no-one-and-nothing is one. Unrecognized, the inferno bloomed where friendship is delicate and consists of trees.

Two years after the happy ending, I am led away, my terminals of connection only the first wave, prospective employers shrinking back in the pop pop pop.



Moving Backwards


Her hierarchy became slower. The river was in the past, alas, and so were sentences.

All that was left of the racing field was one square house, glowing and pushing out hell soot. The shanty-wide aerial was where unconsciousness became soggy. Intuition and nature obliterated their pathways, snakes exiting.

So we started life but with people blotted in the middle this time. Silvery fungus reassembled in the sea. To the right, diverted mildew tables, emptiness rocking, floating, they were never bodies. We believe ghostly flamed something-breath will become necessary.

She quietly took to the body and became another far more herself. Translating the only legible paragraph into insane.

There was a long meeting on inseminators amid the ruineds’ lamentations. An aggravated hallucination was dragged into the shadows. Immediate weather deception allowed explosive air to carry itself across the land, occupying all form.

She was high, and then she turned to straw.

Look at it this way: capitalism ceaselessly spills charlatan head plates into a national dream of columns, nullity turned into a tight novel.

Three ladies handed her back her life stars. If we only live in a universe of “Well, well, well”s, let’s at least buy stock in human falls. First we’ll have no-time-ahead darkness. You feel yourself blossoming into two, four, and on out into the great spume of diameter. Digestion no longer exists. Just absolute entertainment. Assuming God, curtains are moving together to cover waning attention under the dreary combustion of ordinary buildings.

But no, FIRST, the dazzlingly great animal. Stock hair is organized to meet with all-important body. He’s just one more character jumping through a maze of triple-washed dances.

The overhwelming responsibility of having toys and hands is next. Work-mouse nouns realize the malevolence ahead and falter, are hit by fruit and heavily flung policy warnings. Some curve pregnant in torment.

Just as live fire is a mirage, so we know everything’s really straight. They want to go find the ridges of the world: a tourist prison with wonderful views. Gaudy, arrested history, memories of free snow, all to remind us of the universe as dissipative structure.

He died first and then he sneezed, moving backwards through medical darkness. Flesh tied itself to a tough skeleton. Words sat reddening, ashamed under the reality of the poor vault. It’s doorless, and everyone has a place there.

Then the factory switched off and now only the globe is lit. It’s saying, "I am the enemy laughing. You’re some kind of everyunknowable cool. Absolutely out in the shovel realm.” Stars were coupling and helping the body to move into a compulsion landscape moment. Mighty Joe’s neck continued streaming reveries.

Jet-propelled special sunlight is what they call it. Those it hits in their obstinate vanity become about sixteen streets longer. So take photographs. The dins are waking additional animals; their voices are new, fresh, and transferable as soldiers-in-training. Sympathetic cruelty forms the ever-bed of order. Sweat delivered men day and night so that they could gently reunite with the western narratives.

And they were opening him up, rage and the sky stimulants. Completed. Success was then watching him pour onto the ground. Aren’t we all instinctively against time? Reverse the film and we become people sitting in snow. Meanwhile, "findings" hiss, sweltering in hold anything that’s empty warehouses. There we are close to innocence, or no, its opposite, sorry.

Broken is prohibited, for example, in the purity of a beloved mystery. Famished grumbly children were chipped with eyes programmed to speed. Silence is always a breaking sea, but out of respect for Security and the Book of Living Fluids, we make money flame out in crazy, vast patterns.

Language itself is browning and getting larger and rarer. I have friends on the Bacteria Committee who remain undivided, and the appearance of textured agreement provides relief, but many of the production ghosts are substandard. A time-stamped drama storm cannot do it all. Walk the message into the tune, the voice fine and the lips massaging nothingness to instill a sort of soapy comfort.

I have written an op-ed on the importance of controlling motorized events. Crushed steam shunted to the right ensures that the corpses are conveyed to a contract position and then are bounced into vats of warm, frightened writing.



Act of Population


The entire act of population justifies phosphorus. That morning the sun came up showing signs of dementia, digging holes in confusion. One field after another disappeared into copper ashes.

The B-52s saved the day by shortening it to fit the screen. It was said that the military scald bombing was 98.4 percent citizen. They teach us how to move villages. We think of the benefits, planting them in gardens. A well-governed shell came through the ceiling and got a signature.

To climb out from under the end times--but what we can see has been cut off, and the rubble has grown translucent as wax. I’m always scared now. Bodies of schoolchildren became history embracing the clouds. She looked up in anguish while everything proceeded as if engaged in a strip tease.

Concrete melted because of the knowledgeable people and napalm. In the spreading detachment, the rubble seemed to be playing with its own burnt outlines. But a spasmodic design was able to cradle us and this saved our lives. We tried to make a kind light with our eyes. We crawled into it and were allowed to hear nothing.

She lost a bunch of living targets while detonations resounded uninterrupted. That cracked her. The solitary man was as firm as a canton in the shadow spreading across newsreel maps. We found our animal souls and kept firing. Something turned us into earth air.



The Sun, Again


So the sun kept tumbling and pushing on every living being. People’s ability to build drama around a visitation from our “them” remains astonishing. Water surging forth from the American ending drowned the clarity of what’s mad.

There are unusual flowers of light hidden in me now like total civilian casualties. I’m trying to follow the instructions placed over our fenced-in eyes. The decimated city will drown only once, still nostalgic for literature and example, while centuries continue their unearthing. A timid knock. The door opens onto dry buzzing ghosts.

One drop obliterates an extraordinary quantity of knowledge by propagating across the bare skin of each lie.

"Bread," she called, and obstinately refused to step up onto the great boring. Investigations copulated in heaps, and I placed a lid over them.

Further decreasing already depleted souls allows one to more easily sustain the loss of friends.

What happened to them: grins, moving light, and the problem contorted and submerged, milky in the handcrafted dwellings of dead content. That lasted forever and seemed to him to involve whole worlds.

There were two suitcases: one containing the ruins of a stomach, the other, jeweled wings, rising against an enormous mesmerizing sky that made everything drive for a roomy fuck in a manor far outside the bounds of shadow and light. Done it too late, someone said. I looked up to see a formerly invisible frieze of panopticonists.

It was like the fulfillment of a sublime wish, and then everything moved down at the same time. The front door had been fitted with letters and ghosts, some recently arrived from having drowned in the flat of the plain. I have dead-wall reveries containing every plot of literature. Wouldn’t it be nice to place these on Chinese screens?

My rat people are parsimonious, their eyes, pinpricks pointed toward advantage. It is normal to use sleep as a palliative, head flung over rubble strewn like writing about to flow. Are we calculating total civilian seconds or minutes? You were asking whether something was on fire just as my brain staircase collapsed.



Steve Gilmartin is the author of a chapbook of mistranslations of Emily Dickinson from the German, Comes Up to Face the Skies (LRL Textile Series, 2013). His fiction and poetry have appeared in many print and online journals, including and/or, Big Bridge, Café Irreal, Concis, Eleven Eleven, The Fabulist, Mad Hatters’ Review, Rivet, and Unlikely Stories. He lives in Berkeley, California.
 
 
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