Heather Phillipson

i came close to his WET dog’s eye & a FAT tear shared animal PAIN sloshed & seeped in between us — “darling I’m sorry you were born a dog & people notice it” , 2 COME ON IN, WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU like a clue we found PEOPLE in the KITCHEN in the SUICIDE VEST with the KALASHNIKOV such beautiful, desperate weapons their faces had to be covered so we didn’t fall in love piteously with the self-same wretchedness we see in mirrors a worryingly familiar scene we’ve lived in will live in the carnage going on behind closed doors being told, regurgitatingly, “you only get one shot!” but is it true you only get one shot when you get a loaded magazine & plenty more where that came from in the MUNITIONS DEPOT which I picture in Arizona, right beside a render farm and to the left THE CLOUD that backs up and up and up up to where are there edges, Bobby? INTELLIGENCE tells us to test the power of names by naming things, for one thing to name is to guarantee the end like a starting pistol BANG you name it         it’s ! smithereens 4 I am so indifferent to the limits of feelings I can’t tell the difference every time someone lifts my flap the unwashed salad the unheated leftovers the sanitary products are standard but bear no relation to what I expected to feel overlaid with various forms of filth don’t you sometimes feel like getting wrapped in a dog towel and buried in the hardening ground under the Canadian maple? Do dogs need to approach death and back away from it like I did when the vet injected deep pentobarbital & his bowels ejected across the floor tiles I was there to inhale his fur and weep for my benefit I am not independent of my feelings this way of talking about feelings has fooled each one of us I’d rather be given CBT by a border collie when there are fewer words around my arms around his only adored and stinking neck dead up my nostrils throw me in there with him everything is in the cold awful and I’m not OK and without good reason still here and feelings 6 JUST A GENTLE REMINDER A LOT OF WORK goes into making sex alluring sex is just this and that but it seemed, for a moment, that a new climax had been won when even the sky fingered me with a slobbery insistence when we were retching with so much desire we created a whole new atmosphere grabbing at sex things / using the sick bag to be actually sick in now the shower curtain is transparent it’s a way of saying, “I want you too to have this experience so that we are more alike like a sign that life struck once in a slippy-bits marathon that began when our eyes were magnets yanked to each other’s fully-charged crotches at a picnic when it was essential to make every enhancement to our ‘connection’ by getting seriously indecent beside the Bluetooth wireless speaker system until even the trees had to dash inside to pour ice in their underpants” while I choked up playing the scene, as we lived it, united by our pursuit of arrhythmia or satisfying itches to that catchy bridge section in Chopin (I couldn’t wait to come with Chopin through his melancholic meadow (not that I approve of background music (I prefer to foreground the piano by massaging it loud and all over until the top layer comes off in my hand and the pedal squeaks for humanity (I like to FEEL a piano as an instrument of interruption and consciousness (though I also like to take light swims, to get away from what I FEEL (today I felt jelly beans resemble kidneys)))))) which throbs like everyone grieving 7 HERE, HAVE A NEW PUPPY said the Russians to the French to soften the dog-loss but mostly the dog’s image the image is the greater likeness except we never seem to run out of images sometimes something in an image runs through me and that is very common as is reading about something that’s happening to someone outside of me until I know someone outside of me without any knowledge it is a test for my knowledge to hang around until morning practically all mornings are news to me practically all knowledge is news to me practically all news is images going very fast around the world so we have to guzzle them like wrapped food — hot and on the run — in one end and squitted out the other [pics or it didn’t happen] until I’m fat with implications and containing not a sausage 9 I love a good weepy dog-meme as much as the next crybaby and nauseate irregularly when the gifs load automatically his hairy body into my hairy body unfairly the dog becomes the shape of 2:13 p.m. in me on a Tuesday if we accept the world as totally fucked there’s a lot worse coming than dog hairs in macaroni cheese dog hairs on pillows dog hairs in rented flats in bathtubs in my hair in my dog’s hair in your short & curlies between my teeth in coagulant soap bars some people are revolted by dogs and dogs are not up for revolting I am revolted when dogs are lacking what if he did lick my cheeks by which I mean “buttocks” which were coated in whipped shea butter and heavily comestible it’s obvious he’s related to a father he never knew because we found all his needs and perverted them into a kind of inter-species loyalty or the usual master-slave hierarchy before laying down the crisp breakfast bowl of the rest of his days which gave us carte blanche to rush in anytime and smother him with kisses without getting socked in the eye (unlike when I tried the same on Johnny (who spat my tongue out (& no one blamed him))) when maybe all he wants is just to go on being less and less subtle and alive the way life becomes very well known after its termination 12 If rigor mortis sets in it means there’s somebody who needs it. It means that somebody is drained and not awake and deems any speckles of life unusable and he is dead and dead all dead in the humus of trashed bodies shoved down there dressed in made-up relationships. What’s your favorite part? Mine’s every part with a maggot in it. Maggots mean that life’s still leaking. It’s like magic when his dead voice is nauseating and I can’t see him so he might as well be invisible. It’s like magic when he isn’t and doesn’t have anything to say and I can’t bear to listen anyway so I just recognize my fingers / all the injuries they’ve inflicted while my skin drops off. What’s worse than a maggot in the EAT ME GLOVE-BOX DATES? Does the 5-second rule apply to something that drops dead? Is it true he might come back and crack open a piñata blue alcopops, bombay mix, karaoke, and a pint of nostalgia which is like thinking in another language, I mean, how it feels, not what it means. Half a maggot, the memory of mange marching across his fur describes a lot of other feelings the feeling that someone else is taking up the whole room the feeling that no one could help me now or ever whether I was on several edges my hot core and noggin facing this hammering world of brainlessness and sweetbreads was always a favorite word. I don’t know what it tastes like but I know it’s terrible. a:ldskjfa:lkdgjsa meaning I’m so overcharged that all I can do is literally slam my hands / head / breasts against the keyboard. Wherever there are corpses there are maggots. If we dig him up will he be wearing a jacket? LOOK OUT for the milkier, gentler solaces which for all we know                   for all we know could be the wind or Chopin’s noise (still hammering the background) — who’s seen it? Only its aftermath is visible what’s not visible is the aftermath of my screaming 20 you can catch me on the FLOOR / DOG / SYRINGE periphery of the dying and dead scene FACE (FEMALE) maybe my whole life carting sensations to the center mopping shit up with towels SKULL / COFFIN (there are feelings for these things) while public petting CAR / PLANE / ROCKET bodies leak it’s no surprise what I give away ONE DROPLET you can have when the vet twirls off to deal with some bloody business in a kitchen KNIFE / GUN the hug-a-corpse scene gets deep in the hold of what I am PARTY POPPER / WASTEBIN is what I’ve not yet been 30 Who concocts the smell of dogs which smells like an extreme close-up of the world oozing in at the edges. Full as an ice cube is full of liquid. I mistook it for solidity. The world is too full of smells. Though it’s impossible to see the top of it they crawl between my legs in the shimmering fuzz on top of the plant stickers of evenings tongues held out pocket-friendly air fresheners strikes on our nostrils. They come at me streaming. Why the dog? Why not the dog? Was it only a dream of soil heating held and stimulated for his unique aroma. It’s not a way in but it places you somewhere that smells strong and looks strong leaving behind us. Hi.