from Startles

Startles

The photo is pornography’s abstraction, black square with a little girl’s tutu peeking out. Stuffed animal held by a woman’s hand beside her. Another photo can’t be seen, but the files contain it thick description. Words, sentences, images as we know them in poetry, a document as we locate it in the archives. Why redact photos, but not the words?

Look, don’t look, witness and/or be traumatized. Testimonies on social media, first person behind a handle. If you click on the gray lines, words exfoliate. “That’s not the word I would have chosen,” my daughter says. They blossom, horribly.

Like a mouth full of blood, every orifice a wound. Hide pain behind black squares. When words emerge like translucent dots on a camera lens, they correspond with you, your wish to void yourself of poisons. Our old cat coughs up fur in small puddles you hope not to step in before the lights come on. The prophecies are coming true, a man in scrubs says.

Down to the detail, he adds, meaning that “peace and security” in various contexts makes a prophecy, or is it a conspiracy, true. Once you turn the conspiracy theory upside down, and shake it out a bit, it makes more sense. The monk tells us to wash our mirrors after we brush our teeth. Odd in a philosophy that downplays identity, but we can at least see our form, if not the smudge of soapy stars. The monk wept at his teacher’s feet, his face vividly damp when he stood.

Wisdom is internal, but only if you fail to react to what wants to enter, lie down on your couch, watch your television, plaster you with obscene videos. To redact is not to take away, but to cover over. To unredact reduces us to our basest impulses in the sentence-mirror. Typos are rife. They pulled teeth, so the children couldn’t bite.

I don’t see images in my mind, even the worst of them. But words hang in my mind’s cave, sharp, savage, promising the onset of migraine. I cannot push words away, as I sometimes do the images they describe. The cave fills first with music (drop after drop) and then the redacted sound of forced silences. Your phone is your lover, the monk says, turn away.

 

"All the way down to the details"

rdesStonop9606i02l3u

Lilith was interested in the mortician's blue scrubs (even though they'd just been washed, he said), and in his off-white athletic slippers, the heavy socks that slipped into them. The mortician asked how I am; we haven't talked in a long time, except sometimes through the window of his red Mercedes. OK, I say, so long as I don't turn on the news. "Oh, the news is good!" he says, his voice brighter than usual. "The prophecies are coming true.They say that when people start talking about 'peace and security,' things are falling apart. And that's exactly what they're saying, in just those words, peace and security. The United Nations is saying they want peace and security." I suggest that whatever the Trump administration says, the opposite is true. "Oh no, it's not Trump, even though he thinks he's the only one. It's the entire world." Beside us, The Detailer, as the mortician says he's called, was washing a white van until it shown, revelatory, in the morning sun.

 

from Startles

 

Startles

He loved the large and colorful moth, before he knew he had to drown it. Moths would destroy his palm trees. Pigs destroy lawns as persons bulldoze the rain forest to make them. So persons kill pigs. “I enjoyed the torture video,” Epstein writes to the Sultan.

Files are made from dead trees and tortured girls. Girls in basement stalls—today we’re pointed to a five year old—girls in massage rooms, girls on beaches, girls in airplanes. “Where are we going?” one asks. The mic-ed up tree might ask the same question, where someone left a chainsaw on the sidewalk unattended.

Moth and pig are “invasives.” ICE is leaving Minnesota to go wherever they’ll go, the governor says, his arm flailing outward. The governor does not look well. Photograph of a woman in a bathrobe on a cold city street, her phone up to record ICE. She lives in St. Paul, in the photograph, in our minds. The monks walked through DC barefoot, bearing flowers.

Being put in a stall makes the child a beast. Bestiality among billionaires comes to seem normal, or at least expected. Epstein marked girls as “virgins.” Was he moth or man, hunting his prey? A southern sheriff leans over, his hands in prayer, as the monks approach.

Bull Connor was a beast. They are hosing down protesters in Argentina today. Photograph out of the context of meaning is surreal history, cruelty’s lineage. Is that nature or nurture? Or lack thereof?

You have offered us their suffering, even ramped it up by doxxing them. You take back the men’s names, for they are victims. Bad Bunny’s grasses came out as themselves on social media, with their numbers attached. Joyful concentration of souls. Benito behind a bulletproof football, clutched to his chest. 

“No one is illegal on stolen ground.” What approximates ground is Vegas, pretending. After mass murder proved their point, the gamblers went back. Chance pilgrims, hoping for heaven from the slots. My daughter’s teammate’s grandmother played the penny slots for hours, in rapt concentration.

So many posts begin: “do not look,” but they lead to small rooms with black squares in them. I am not I but the black square that covers me. Blanket over my pain, this double excision of self. The shame lies with the man beside the square, the man who lies. You are now behind the square, in this perverse community of protected blanks.

Firing squads shoot mostly blanks so that none will know who killed. A redacted conscience, there but not there, bruised and yet not bruised. Are we the shooters or the fired upon? Clear the mirror after you brush your teeth, the monk tells us. Then you can see yourself.

We see us both. That is our own particular torture, this knowing what we cannot see, or seeing it, unable to take it in. Mirrors take in nothing. Sponges are full, the ground is flooded, a washer floats down the street like a rubber ducky. Aloka the peace dog plays.

Review of Io ed Eucalipto (Italian for I and Eucalyptus)

 https://www.vocidallisola.it/2025/06/20/io-e-eucalipto-di-susan-m-schultz/

by Daniela Maurizi

 In English, including "the bitch, Lilith"!

https://www.vocidallisola.it/2025/06/20/io-e-eucalipto-di-susan-m-schultz/ 

 

Grazie to the translators and to the reviewer here! 

 

My week in China . . .

was over-full with amazing museums, meals (including one that sent me to the ER with my peanut allergy), temples, Buddhas, faces, voices, monumental buildings . . . I was there for two reasons.

1) The Abstract Only show that had been at the Wailoa Center in Hilo, which featured artists from Hawai`i and Shanghai included one of my photographs. Several of us went to Shanghai for the opening there. It was overwhelming!

https://www.wailoacenter.com/abstract-exchange 

 

 

2) I did a poetry reading in a Filipino nightclub with several other English language poets.

 

 

 

 

from Startles

Startles

Kona storm: clouds scurry from the Koolau toward the ocean to the east; trees pronounce the wind before it arrives. I pronounce you and you pronounce me. The diary of a young girl appears in code, though “Jeffrey Epstein” looks clear enough, as if clarity had anything to do with it. She was made pregnant, the birth monitored by a woman dressed in blood; the baby was taken away. “From then on, her tone shifts permanently.”

From then on, she writes as if to gather artificial flower petals that fall on a cemetery road. If you can’t put the actual flower back together, then try the fake one. There’s less wilting, more willingness to be glued in place. We won’t ask the meaning of place, as flowers are less that than portions of one. I must remember to save my document, I tell the wind.

The horror is in their use of ordinary things: masks, pizza, ice cream, a pacifier. None of these are what they mean. Metaphor takes us to the hell of cackling rich men. You can find two bodies on the New Mexico ranch, one email says, its writer saving that information against legal cases. We don’t report crimes, we pass them on for bitcoin.

She went in a lamb and came out a lion, she wrote. Was her name redacted for safety, or pulled across the internet sky like an ad? “She’s available,” the future president was told. She was told what to eat, what to wear, how her teeth should look. The chair for dental work doubled as something we have no word for.

Or none that we shall say. “Did you get the torture video and did you like it?" The photographs I can’t forget are the still ones. Girls in white blouses and black skirts, dressed as if for Catholic school; from a stool, one reaches to take something from a cupboard. Her panties fall around her ankles, her face is black square.

A woman in a red dress screams about the smell of human flesh, after it was cooked and eaten. She disappeared. Girls’ frail voices ask where they’re being taken: Epstein and Pinker stare back at them. Girls play the part of the camera, taking it all in, never emerging from its chrysalis/lens. If you want to witness, click yes to “are you over 18?” on the government website.

I love Reznikoff, his testimonies, the gaps he left for us to fill. The gaps offered an ethics, the answer to why a Black man had been killed in a barn in the south. The gap is where we fell, and out of which we came clutching our bills of rights. Holocaust I couldn’t read past babies thrown in the air for target practice. No pacifiers there.

Now, as then, gaps can only tear fabric; no spools of thread can be had, only blindfolds. To have one’s eyes covered takes away our power to witness. I might see bodies fall from the sky if they’d not been redacted, twice hidden in limitless streams of words and photos. Documents without end, amen. Completion would be a form of justice.

 

I bought beer and meat, oranges and apples

"Are you homeless?" she yelled at me. "You're MAD." I'd approached her--seated outside Times Supermarket on a blanket with an umbrella and few other possessions--to offer her two green bars. "I don't want nuts!," she yelled, and I thought she meant nuts in the bars I was holding, but she meant crazies. "Why are you talking to me?" she demanded. "I'm not homeless, I'm from Kahuku." She held up a blurry newspaper article that had been covered in plastic a long time ago. I saw nothing except an unreadable black and white photograph. "You want my fucking real estate?!!" I noticed her eyes, I heard her voice, I saw that her hair was held back with a cheap golden headband, that her teeth were yellow, but the details don't add up to image. The fragments are land and theft, madness and home, and those are as real as her illness.