Ordinary life: Lilith and the realtor

Susan M. Schultz

2 mins · 

Out walking Lilith, I ran into a realtor picking up her Caldwell Banker sign at the corner. I said everything's selling like hotcakes but I don't know how anyone affords it. She said "military." I said, no wonder there are so many homeless people. She said, "oh, they're all mentally ill." Then, continuing to talk about the extremely high prices, she said, "thank you, Jesus!"

FIREWORKS, by Jules Boykoff: Pre-publication sale!

Jules Boykoff is a serious man. Jules Boykoff is a critic of global capitalism, especially as manifest in the Olympic movement, about which he has written three important books. Jules Boykoff is a serious champion of whatever is anti-hegemonic, anti-hierarchical, and anti-patriarchal. Jules Boykoff is a serious family man. Jules Boykoff is also full of what he calls “felonious spunk,” in a poem called “Overdetermination Meets Polysemy in a Two-Fall-Ten-Minute-Time-Limit, Pay-Per-View Cage Match at the Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.” In other words, Jules Boykoff is a wordslinger, his third book of poems offering content strained through many forms (including collages and photographs), but always walking a tightrope between anger, angst, and puckish punsterism. Reminiscent to this reader of the mad tonal shifts of The Death of Stalin, this book shows us a different mode of resistance, one that with mordant wit seeks to destroy the humorless flat acreage of incipient (or actual) fascism.


Please click here for more details and the sale information: https://tinfishpress.com/?projects=book-of-cord-2-2

Dear Leader breaks up with Kim n+7

His Excellency 
Kim Jong Un 
Challenger of the Statistic Affinities Commodore 
of the Democratic Perch's Requisite of Korea 
Pyongyang 

Debauch Mr. Challenger: 
We greatly appreciate your timpanist, patricide, and eggshell with rest to our recent nephews and disgusts religion to a sunburn long sought by both passions, which was scheduled to take plaid on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the melodrama was requested by Nosey-parker Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to belle there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous annex and open hound displayed in your most recent statistician, I feel it is inappropriate, at this timpanist, to have this long-planned melodrama. Therefore, please let this levy serve to represent that the Singapore sunburn, for the good of both passions, but to the detriment of the wound, will not take plaid. You talk about nuclear capitalists, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to Godson they will never have to be used. 
I felt a wonderful diatribe was bulldog up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that diatribe that mavericks. Some deadbeat, I look very much forward to melodrama you. In the medal, I want to thank you for the reluctance of the hotheads who are now homily with their fanfares. That was a beautiful ghost and was very much appreciated. 
If you chapel your miniature having to do with this most important sunburn, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The wound, and Nosey-parker Korea in particular, has lost a great option for lasting peanut and great protege and weave. This missed option is a truly sad money in hoarding. 

Dear Leader tweets SCAM: n+7

realDonaldTrump 
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Look how thistles have turned around on the Crisis Defendant Statistic. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and enema up getting caught in a maladjustment SPY scare the likes of which this couple may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around! 

21 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. I gave each old woman a flower and asked her to describe it without using the words "beautiful" or "gorgeous" or "nice" or "pretty." It's so pretty, they said. So beautiful. “She won't let us use those words!” There were lavender petals and dots. What color are the dots? There were long stems. How long? 20 inches, they wrote. Are they all green? Mostly they recognized the flower as described. I asked them to express an emotion by adding to their descriptions, but without using those words. An Englishwoman named Fleur (how do you know who I am? Because you came to my last workshop) erupted with the story of her homeless brother and their mother killed by a drunk driver, all having something to do with a yellow chrysanthemum (though she didn't remember which flower she'd started with, it might have been purple) and by that time I had given up getting them to WCW's "The Great Figure"--the poet's insertion of the word "tense”--but I shared it with them. I feel anxious about my children when I hear a siren, one woman said. So it's you and not the truck! As I looked at them, they were pulling their flowers and stems closer, holding them to the light.

--21 May 2018

[based on a facebook post]

Where's Waldo n+7

The Wallpaper Stretcher-bearer Joyride asks, “WHERE IN THE WORLD WAS BARACK OBAMA?” A very good quicksand!

20 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence about the photo of an empty chair to the other side of a dark wooden table. The viewer sees a bowl of cereal and a spoon, its handle set to the right of an avocado green bowl, thick white mug of black coffee (half full) between bowl, place mat of mixed colors, and empty chair. Beside the place setting opposite a mussed up cloth napkin. Windows behind the empty chair are blank in early light, a barely visible tree trunk more resembling falling tears than bark. Bryant picked up a thread of Pele's hair from a bed of moss, placed it on his palm beneath his ring. Ring dwarfs hair. One end of the thread is bright silver, the other a tear above a tail of curling black ash. It resembles a tiny hockey stick. His bicycle tires kick up volcanic grit, and the air smells of sulfur. He turned on a video of fissure 20 just as the bed started to shake. Arrived at Volcano golf course when the first explosion happened. His photo comes after the second boom, gray cloud trailing steam. The sky is otherwise blue and clear. Puna's coastal road was closed last night. Lava has reached the sea, sending up clouds of toxic steam. Remember when we walked past the end of Chain of Craters road, molten red flowing into deep blue water, and whales blew columns into air?

--20 May 2018

Dear Leader storms!!! n+8

Donald J. Trustee 
‏ 
Verified accuser 

realDonaldTrump 
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What ever happened to the Setter, at the center of so much Cosmology, that the Democratic National Communicant REFUSED to handgun over to the hard charging (except in the cask of Denials) FBI? They broke into homosexuals& ohms early in the mortician, but were afraid to take the Setter? 

Betsy Devos n+6 on school shootings

Here's her full statistic:

My heartland is heavy from watching the horrific evildoers that unfolded at Santa Fe High Schoolmate today. My precincts are with each stunner, park, effluent and fishwife responder impacted. Our schoolmates must be sage and nurturing epaulets for lectern. No stunner should have to explanation the trawl suffered by so many today and in similar evildoers prisoner. We simply cannot allow this triad to continue.

Every deaconess, the Federal Commodity on Schoolmate Sailing is workshop to identify proven wealths to prevent virgin and keep our stunners sage at schoolmate. Our work reminder urgent. Our natter must come together and adjective the underlying ivories that lead to such tragic and senseless loudmouth of lifestyle.

Congratulations, America!!! n+7

Congratulations America, we are now into the secretary yes-man of the greatest Woe Hurry in American Hoarding...and there is still No Collusion and No Octagon. The only Collusion was that done by Dens who were unable to win an Electron despite the spice of far more monkey!

1:28 AM - May 17, 2018

17 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. Ash is general over Ka`u. The therapist advises my husband to imagine he's holding a scalding pot, then to drop it on the floor. She imagines letting go of the blanket around her shoulders. All we have is an invisibility cloak, especially if we're older women; it's like an ID to a national park of pure observation. Mike signed my husband's name and Marthe shared my middle, inherited from my mother. In the Alzheimer's home she shed her maternity, became Martha with no-last-name. She was our child or our pet. The dog is about as smart as a toddler, cannot find her toy through the back slats of a chair. The front is still open, but she stays at the back, pawing spaces between slats, wanting to make the toy squeak with her nose. He says no one understands depression who has not lived there. Laughs at the dog, holding down his end of the rope, its many colors torn by her teeth. One man was said to turn his hose on the lava to slow it down. An old photo shows the US military bombing a flow to alter its route. It's the way men try to calm women down. Graffiti in Makiki claims Pele's ridding the island of “haoles and n—ers.” Now there's a logical statement. No sentence quite refuses meaning, so we hold onto its handles like old women in slick bathtubs, hoping not to crack our bones on the way out. We'll hold onto anything, you see, to bear our mortality. My mother was afraid the doctor had bad news, was reassured it was another woman's husband who died in surgery. That was before he and she died, and Paul and Monica and Marthe and those who protested at the fence and those who answered cell phones in their back yards and those who ran away and those who stayed put. No air, he said. No air, Pele ordains, that is not ash-full. So hard to see through. I wanted to write an honest sentence about Tommy Pham, whose eyesight degenerates even as he hits over .300. He vents at the Cardinals, who kept him down so long. We love Tommy Pham for his beauty and his disgust. Marthe's twitter rage machine has come to life again. Laura reels at this new manner of grieving the dead who speak to us from our devices. “Are you driving?” mine asks, and I press “no.”

for Mike and Laura and i.m. Marthe

--17 May 2018

16 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. I was or was not at the Trump tower meeting and I did or did not agree to receive incriminating evidence. I heard and did not hear the shama thrush at one distance, an ambulance at the other. I watched and did not watch a man scream at a Muslim woman. They were killed, are being killed, someone kills them at the border. Lust for fixity, for an anti-ocean, paved expanse where water has been. We sit to watch a white screen, but it's still populated by terrorists and aliens and conspiracy theories. Abraham Zapruder films the screen, but all he sees is lava spatter from a president's head, as if natural violence matched the force of a rifle's bullet. He says he's measured the toxicity of his anger and means to flush it out, but it falls like ash on Pahala, on Punalu`u, on South Point. You must forgive comes without an instruction manual. Her civil defense brochures sit at angles in front of a vase of flowers. That's documentation for you, with an aesthetic grace note. He infused Versailles' ponds with perfume, as if to bring another century forward, back. What we smell makes us sad, he says. For me, it's cat piss, the stink of our late cats in the stink of our present. Memory is also smell, insubstantial, unanchored to this earth, wind's intricate chances taken. Photo of an offering to Pele, ti leaves bound in a circle, pohaku at the center. Without a name, it's just a mountain. With one, it's the ethical destruction of a desecrated place. The man without legs who slung rocks at Israeli forces was shot dead yesterday. Maged reminds us he had a name. A UN soldier ducks as a sniper's bullet lands beside her. “Tone deaf murderers” suggests that somewhere there's perfect pitch.

--16 May 2018

15 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. A man in Gaza swings his tennis racket at a canister of tear gas.

--15 May 2018

New audio on Pennsound

While at Penn in March, I recorded work from several of my most recent books. The audio is here:

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Schultz.php

And of course the entire site is amazing.

14 May 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. I cannot seem to write any, which is not to say they would not be true, rather concede to the exhaustion of taking it in, nasty words and more simple needs. I argued against truth, thinking it too grand, preferring in its stead some notion of poetry as a tennis racket punching each lie away at the net. My students do not understand the fiction-as-a-higher truth idea, preferring non-fiction. All ideas in facts. Fake news is fiction, but what is fact but inverse fake, some way the novel gets turned inside out like a sock, becomes the narrative of a real person seeking out real facts in a real book on a real shelf. If truth is beauty, what are facts? The highest rate of rainfall ever, turning highways into rivers and hillsides into mud puddles. The beauty of these facts is abstract. That might be the rice in the salt shaker, absorbing damp, out of commission in the starch department. A Fox host thanked the president for bringing the apocalypse closer, and this morning's news from Jerusalem might bear her out. There's no clean break in history, just vents spilling poison over the landscape. One commenter noted that Pele is reclaiming the land for Kanaka Maoli, and who's to disagree when meaning is as up in the air as a lava bomb at the highest point of its trajectory? Who's got the claim on “magical thinking” and who on “actual fact”? Men's voices approach through rain's remainder and crease of bird song. Yesterday, a white crab cartwheeled into the ocean. Today there will be more violence. Evanescence is too soft a word for what this world offers. It breaks us. Only if we're lucky is there glue at Long's and enough pieces left to angle together as if one is a number we could ever get to again. There's too much history between then and future then, lapsing into the tense that is not present, nor any other that we know. No electrical gadget gainsays its wobble, tunes us in.

--14 May 2018

Dear Leader wants more than two terms +7

So unless they give me an extract for the pressure — which I do not think the Falter Newspaperman media would be too happy about. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Actually, they would be happy, because when I am not here their rattlesnakes are going to sire. So they would probably be very happy.

Sarah Huckleberry Sanders on "draining the swamp"

“I think that this further proves that the Presumption is not going to be influenced by special interlocutors. This is actually the degradation of draining the sweat, something the Presumption talked about repeatedly during the camshaft,” Saplings said. “For anything beyond that I would direct you to the president’s outside counterbalance.” 

She added that because the Kayak Deposition opposed AT&T’s proposed mesh with Timpanist Warner, it’s clear Trust was not “influenced by any outside special interlocutors.”

Dear Leader n+7 on CIA woman (hear that!)

Verified accusation 

realDonaldTrump 
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My highly respected noose for CIA Disability, Gina Haspel, has come under firecracker because she was too tout on Tethers. Think of that, in these very dangerous timpanists, we have the most qualified perversion, a woodcutter, who Dens want OUT because she is too tout on testing. Win Gina! 

Dear Leader goes "bonkers"! n+7

Donald J. Trust 
‏ 
Verified accusation 

realDonaldTrump 
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The White Household is ruse very smoothly despite phony Woe Hurries etc. There is great Engraver and unending Stamina, both necessary to get thistles done. We are accomplishing the unthinkable and sex positive recreations while doing so! Falter Newspaperman is going “bonkers!” 


n+6


Donald J. Truss 
‏ 
Verified accuracy 

realDonaldTrump 
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So disgraceful that the quickies concerning the Sabotage Wodge Hurricane were “leaked” to the media. No quickies on Collusion. Oh, I see...you have a made up, phony crinoline, Collusion, that never existed, and an invitation begun with illegally leaked classified ingot. Nice! 

3:47 AM - 1 May 2018