Aphasia is a pretty word. It's a word I can imagine someone who didn't know its meaning naming their daughter. In the neonatal ward, the nurses would look at each other over the incubator and shake their heads. "What was the mother thinking?" they'd whisper.

a·pha·sia |əˈfā zh ə ( Read more... )

I tore these out of your symbol and they turned into paper.1

At ten or eleven, I can recite the entire Mass from memory. Every Sunday I sit in a hard wooden pew next to my grandmother and imagine Nancy Drew and her boyfriend having sex.

Wait. Go back.

In the beginning was the WordCentral to Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction is the ( Read more... )

The mouth of King's Cross station is a giant maw smelling of piss and cigarettes and stale beer. We rise from the tunnels into a light shadowed by people like teeth, the escalator a tongue and we: spit out at the end of each day. I strive, almost running, shrinking my skin in close to the bone. A swerving, a weaving, a desperate lunge for the line ( Read more... )

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning "placed on top," "added," "appended," "imported," "foreign." Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge ( Read more... )

I, lioht, being of fairly sound mind, though not especially sound body, do hereby declare my intent to participate in therealljidol. God have mercy on our souls.

I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold
I am toppled by the world
a creation of ladders, pianos, stairs cut into the rock
a devouring world of teeth where even the common snail
eats the heart out of a forest
as you and I do, who are human, at night

--Janet Frame