Dana Ward

Lapo Elkman gazes out from the frame with a come-hither look. His wrists have soft bracelets around them & his shirt, black, is open. Looped on his neck pale strands of beads hang which causes a ribbon of shadow at his nipple. His facial hair, bleached by the sun, is brown-white. Tatiana Santa Domingo wears a floral printed dress. It is summer where she’s photographed or warm enough for clothes that light. Earrings perhaps of three golden hoops or two hang obscured in the shade of her hair. Her right cheek is touching the locks of Bianca Brandolini d’Adda whose own dress is dim purple satin. It has a black strap of lace an inch thick which, at her waist, intersects with another lace band even thicker & full of arabesques & Fleur De Lis. This lace is just above her belly which is pressed to the belly of Margherita Maccapani Missoni. White, with faint, almost invisible as flowers (maybe dots?) her sundress, exposes her shoulder. The left one is touching the patterned black stars on the silk frock partly covered by spilling brown hair, at its longest end, curled & falling from the head of Alexi Neideliski. Andrea Stefanowicz Sabrier lays on his belly wearing Ray-Bands & is laughing. Beside him on his back, with arm muscles slightly swollen, hands clasped behind his head & eyes closed Julio Mario Santo Domingo III laughs as well. Both are in blue jeans & t-shirts. Her blue & black checkered flannel clad shoulder hovers over the face of her sister whose cheek is buried in wildflowers. Each wears a ring, one is a cylinder of patterned white gold the other, more baroque, appears Victorian but isn’t wholly visible. Olympia & Fiona Scarry are un- comfortably positioned in these clothes & rings. Olympia’s eyes are wide, bright, but Fiona’s are so full of shadow it seems they aren’t there which gives her the look of the un-dead. White wife beater, ample hair in his pits, crotch the center of gravity here in this picture Harry Morton is laying on a bed. One arm behind his head it’s tattooed almost classically, twice, with illegible symbols. His slacks have grey stripes, they pour into a boot pressed on the soft white sheet at the right at the left sink into a blood-colored comforter, velvet. The chocolate toned pea-coat he’s wearing half-way reveals a hand, it grips the hem near the satin-coco lining. She has the the face of a mermaid, & the eyes Princess in her title, Elizabeth von Thurn und Taxis looks poised before apporaching the coffin. Count Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo is giddy & drenched having waded in the sea in his button up clinging his smile is one that gods give their children after hooking up with mortals for the fix. On a half-pipe ornate with graffiti the honorable Sophia Fermor-Hesketh rests a skate-board on her knee in black tights. She wears Docs. Her hair is blonde, mostly covered by a hat her dress is lycra black this is Madonna as eternal return. Yellow seal with ingratiating smile, caterpillar-seal hybrid antennae blue, markings pink, body yellow, silver dolphin, dolphin with desert-camo designs & dolphin dressed for jungle warfare these inflatables are harbored at the edge of a pool in which Bianca Brandolini D’Adda is floating on a sting-ray shaped raft on her belly hands under her chin three bracelets no bathing suit she’s swimming in her dress which is soaked & her legs are raised, ankles crossed this makes a diamond- shape between with liquid topaz. He has the cork in his teeth. In his left hand a half- glass of red. He is looking away at invisible friends & the ocean is beyond a grey mist with white bands Carlo Mondavi has hair that arcs at middle point a frozen cascade beneath which at right we see his ear half a sea-shell. The filigree is white, the buttons white impacted silk, the dots silk on sheer, on her blouse with short sleeves, she is blonde, her brother blonde his shirt white his scarf red she leans back on his chest his hand over his heart he takes an oath, Alexandre & Josephine de la Baume their lips closed eyes cold, unexpressive & imposing. JFK twice on a monitor his face & his back he is speaking Jared Kushner looks relaxed there’s a copy of the New York Observer on his knees which are bent he sits up against a wall smiles easily cropped black hair dark tie & slacks & white shirts by a window in the city. It’s a beach-house kitchen. Arnie Hammer’s by the sink. The head of his acoustic guitar nears its lip, & his ass sits near a rack where dishes dry there is one tiny elegant hole in his t-shirt, in his collar which is loose, low, reveals his long neck & hairy chest. The Corona in his right hand sweats. There is white foam all over my face which began in a canister, moved as blue-gel expelled by air-pressure then diluted with water was smeared on my cheeks, between my nose, lip & down onto my chin. I am shaving naked I have three rolls of fat each bigger than the last. Looking in the mirror I cough, draw the phlegm from my lungs with a suck roll it onto my tongue stick my tongue out examine phlegm’s color for blood but there’s none it’s like mud- infused egg yolk. I spit it down into the sink with the little hairs spiking the cream. The cigarette pulls like a kite from her body on a long arm suspended by wind. Her tea-cup she holds it waist high & with one finger pins the fabric lightly to the bottom of the saucer. The cigarette ash is precarious her dress has five little shoelaces white at sternum’s end. Margherita Maccapani Missoni is happy. Sophia Barclay has a grey cardigan under which she wears a Disney dress. Hayley Bloomingdale is blonde she has a kerchief on her head a thin slice of melon in her fingers a white strand of pearls her bangs are one soft shard that hook her chin. She turns like she noticed us following her, & ready with her smile meets our eyes Ivanka Trump is moving, carefree, through the city. A young Thomas Jefferson, Adrea Casiraghi stares proudly at the future of the world & finds it splendid, brown hair cascading over his wool grey coat his white shirt reveals his marshmallow chest which contrasts with his granite chin & jaw. Dasha Duhkohva reclines on a marble table outlined by hydrangeas in jeans & striped shirt a grey trench coat thrown over her body. In a little row-boat, in a tank-top across which in marker has been written River Keeper Amanda Hearst crowned by a loose, densely beaded tiara. Black rubber fishing boots swallowed her legs. She’s drawing an enormous black tarp around her torso & smiling while her head tilts to the left.

The heat out there this evening is contained heat like things keep applicable boxes at the ready then subsume their diverging constituent parts long ambivalent talks into midnight, all those glowy Sophia Coppola movies, Prosecco the sexiest records I know. I don’t feel how I know anymore to be more than something seeking my appalling lack of cinematic knowledge, fictive innocence & something like the break-down of those little boxes little tombs put their hands up in front of my mouth there’s a tacitly humiliating eulogy to drown out couldn’t feel much more stupid about feeling stupid over feeling stupid, living. Let me go & watch something moving several images some of them symbolize humility broken postures bloodshot eyes, intimately talking through this publicly I am not developing at all but just the same. So hot outside in the evening heat locking hazy jonquils & sunflowers dead for two weeks, ridiculously mournful as I’ll try & dimly think of the last real shock. I remember disgust perhaps & something like alarm (the phone going off in the middle of the night) pervasive disappointment &, for sure, horror, but shock?, as if the heat were seceding from the frames of its containment thought & feeling & establishing some wonderama ratios & beanpole features quick to surge beyond the human model. I know I do the heat out there this evening will & maybe I should be the one I know who has to stop. If I have to heal myself completely every time before I start I shouldn’t be. I think about the god of demurrment in the world or I think about it later having fallen to its love spell — the heat keeps me shut up at the table in the evening at the laptop arranging each letter with the same affectless love it’s nothing moving Avery born & Vivian to come December Kermit the Frog sings the Ave Maria while the white flag is endlessly lowered & raised through the whole master/slave dialectic forever. Don’t let me be wistful. Let me be the actual heat, forgiven its severity & leaving for the year. Mercy is just like the children’s zoo it’s real weird to think about anything now, think how fucking hard a fucking beach read used to be sewn into its spine delicious words from start to finish I could just lay there & die it’s so goddamn nice in this sigh vitrine real 9/11 kind of midnight Friday midnight, lamely shifting in my chair, the fan that stops the love that moves the world that stops goes out on gold weeks other weeks it just sits in the back. It collects statically. I hate that.

Krystle Krystle Cole you're all I thought about sometimes I watched you while our daughter slept your Sissy Spacek ways your laconic demeanor in relaying either ecstasy or trauma & the un-embittered empathy your voice conveyed on YouTube which is our loving cup the solution of butter & DMT you took anally that really made you freak the fuck out & your friends just stood there watching you as you hurtled alone through mirrored tunnels. It's that frictionless feeling the smooth & vacant course that lacks abruption, one wave the clinical mania un- differentiated whiteness contains when cylindrical cloud hard & plastic comes to represent the mind to the mind & thus describe a model of terrible momentum with unity of purpose toward nothing so much as cold, radiant nature stripped of Eros, of becoming, just the mainframe & its withering severity without any predicate of others, save perhaps their gazes, no walls, no nothing, completely white light & your name when your consciousness was splitting time was stopping you were going always into that. I was going always to the mall in those months, the young century's rainiest April & May, to walk the baby & to understand my art. I didn't understand. I would move the stroller through the halogen, over grooved tile & across those smooth marble expanses meant to simulate floating & gliding before that pure frictionless feeling was entire. Sometimes we'd go inside the stores. Sears was still enormous & because of its design implied a bound series of discrete, related worlds linked by passages threatened & precarious to me. The connections felt besieged or like a mask for separation, they felt like connection between us in life but I didn't take my allegory further Krystle Cole, into your lysergic delirium later redeemed by a beautiful discipline of spirit & cosmography developed for praxis. I liked your video on candy flipping hard & developing ESP with friends. It suggested oneness was a leavened mix of random indiscretion, bruising wariness, & bliss obtained by synchronizing chemical encounter. Krystle, there's a made up drug I wonder if you'd do it? Bradley Cooper, in Limitless takes this little pill, which, in its candy dot translucence looks a lot like a tear plucked from the cheek in Man Ray's "Larmes." With it, he can utilize all of his brain, & so he un-riddles the patterning hidden in the ceaseless flow of capital, structuring its chaos in excess of any mortal with a terrible momentum & unity of purpose toward nothing so much as pure profit & complete subordination of the world. At the mall certain spots sold old stuff: sports memorabilia & video games, vintage organs & deluxe baby grands. In one store there were highly priced comics with toys & ephemera related to the stories. They had action figures based on some series I guess called The Crisis ofInfinite Earths. I wrote the phrase down in my notebook & realized only later that I'd made a rather telling trans- position, putting the word 'world' where 'earth' was & thinking The Crisis of Infinite Worlds I guess because anyone will occasion the world as a world its commonality precarious but real, & the person beside them does the same the person far in every way from them will as well where the wound of even being in material conditions where consciousness is made these confrontations & arrangements each taking their referent then as earth or taking something else entirely as world—the word is profligate & dense & transparent & cheap & impossibly one the clearest pill. In our minds it floods with light & we see through that, life's benevolent corruption in a radiance we can't make any sense of. Krystle, have you ever, just standing around, noticed someone smoking in an older silver Volvo & watched the comeback feelings of a Tupac Easter Sunday steep in their ambivalent features until they are more radiant than cinematic virgins having lost it in the wake of Saint Maria Goretti whose patronage is lost to the brutalized sweetness of her charges when depicted in the mind & reconstructed as a low-res simulation by scientists the weekend Wall Street's occupied & particles are found to go faster than light then weirdly feel like this is paradise not for people but paradise regardless. That same May I had gone to Detroit. I saw the most wonderful graffiti, more a prayer, written on a wall in magic marker, it read— Two Things: 1) That we would grow closer & closer as time progresses. 2) That our ships would not crash. Magic marker on a surface doesn't have much depth of skin. You move it smoothly on the wall & it stays smooth barely records the softest friction of two separate textures meeting. The wetness of its onyx dries quick or even quicker if you blow on it with circled lips, like clouds in old maps that blew ships across a flat earth to an edge I don't exactly not idealize. That somewhere there's a precipice in this world & tracing my finger along those ardent lines I'd found the fault of it a little, in its boldness far too faint & not enough.

for Brandon Goacher I. Let me speak with expressive hesitation & a feeling for interment why even lineate what isn’t broken by music let me speak with inextricable reluctance. I want to tear the heart from refused convalescence & feed it those long fronds of river bed grass. I want to tear the heart out of style & put it between utter thrall & the infancy of all things impure. Torn out, a flame thickens between us as if not right now we’ll be ripped from this life or each other a white lie not a little more tender than quick. Inextricable reluctance to die or even leave youth culture ever. What a stupid feeling. Do you think it isn’t true? The very existence of flame throwers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves ‘You know I want to set those people over there on fire but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.’ Someone puts their arms around you in the cold. There’s an al- most disquieting closeness as gossamer clots & becomes an impasto derivative of some newly visible interdependence. Flame throwers then are just a description of prevailing ideology, relics, the life of the party, a soul flirts by burning that name for itself up in jonesing that comes at the end of desire? Well I wouldn’t know about that. A little goat. Why would it nuzzle dreamily up the way I nuzzle dreamily up to my knees. In the ‘fatal position’ as my nephew used to call it estranged from play waiting on the fox hunt. Oh baby it beats up my lips the somatic effects of contriving a psychic blockade against death with the contours of your face & healing in constant eclipse where all things inextricably broken by music make the basic rhythmic unit go something like this — I don’t want to loose you. I don’t want to be empty, clever hold & keep you.I was lost to you to start with still I keep on coming back. Do you think you’ll keep on coming back to me forever?That’s the meaning of our life together baby.