War Porn Read Free Page A

“news,” but what’s news if not events yet the news isn’t the event and you don’t really experience the event but only the “ news ” of it, “yeah like 9/11,” and how sometimes it feels strange when there isn’t some disaster happening, like there’s a gap in the matrix, and as Wendy parsed this phrase they talked about The Matrix and then other films commenting on Contemporary Life Post-9/11, and also music they’d been listening to like the new Wilco, then Rachel told a story about one of her second-grade girls who’d memorized all the lyrics to “Toxic” and had made up a dance to go along.
    They compared tattoos: Wendy had a jaguar on her ankle—this was her Aztec horoscope, she said—and a fleur-de-lis on her lower back; Mel, a flaming skull with born to lose on her left shoulder, a barbed tribal band around each bicep, and a complex floral design going down from her hip into the joint between her thigh and pelvis that she only showed the very top of, tugging at her jean shorts; and Aaron a crude circled A on his right shoulder, which he laughed off as his first tatt from back in ye olde punk days, an inverted cross on the inside of his left forearm, and then, pulling up his enemy combatant t-shirt, sweeping across his muscled back a pair of intricate spiked wings, crested in Gothic script reading long is the way and hard . Neither Matt nor Rachel had tattoos. Dahlia had a dahlia, on her hip, which she didn’t show anyone.
    How it had gotten dark. How they made a circle with lawn chairs, smoked another bowl, and drank some whiskey out of plastic cups, the coals dying behind them, the moon rising into the stars. Their bodies hummed, satiated, lips slick with grease. Dahlia got a little cold and went in for a hoodie. Rachel got cold too, and Mel wrapped her in her leather jacket. Aaron lit an American Spirit. Xena chewed a bone. Balinese gamelan banged and gonged from the boom box.
    â€œSo, I have a story,” said Wendy.
    â€œLet’s hear it,” said Mel.
    â€œAlright. Aaron already heard this one, but it’s really weird, so I’ll tell it again. Thursday night I was driving to Grand Junction. I was going to a poetry reading there. It was one of those days where nothing seems to quite catch, you know, like Mercury’s in retrograde, like the universe is off-kilter.” Wendy paused, casting her gaze into the distance. “It’s like I wrote once, ‘The fissure between the thought and deed, against the universal, the palsy in the hand of God.’”
    â€œNice,” said Matt.
    â€œThe reading was this guy David T. Greene, who won the Yale Younger Poets prize last year with his book Emblazoned Arcadia . He’s at once very classically concerned with craft and meter, but also super experimental, right, and he’s working with hypertext and interactive poetics, doing things with New Media artists, and has a blog. So that’s where I heard about the reading, the blog: he’d gotten a grant to drive across the country and write a sort of cyberpunk-Whitman long-poem meditation on America, blog it, and along the way he organized a series of readings. So he was reading at the Black Cat in Grand Junction, and . . .”
    â€œWhy didn’t he read here?” Rachel asked.
    â€œWell that’s interesting. I asked him the same question myself. I told him about Eklectika and Back of Beyond and that there’s actually quite a dynamic poetry scene here, but he said he had to leave early to make it to Salt Lake City in time for his reading there on Friday and then it was up to Washington and yadda yadda yadda. He seemed really edgy—his aura was totally broken up. He’d planned to have the readings be auxiliary to the experience of writing the trip, but instead he’d just been driving like crazy, barreling through to get from one reading to the next, and he hadn’t even