ICYMI, Part IV

"it feels i imagine like showing someone your dick for the first time ever."
-iris appelquist-

***

I couldn't help but feel left out not partaking when Renata pulled out her leather coke pouch/metal straw and started doing bumps in my leather office chair; we'd been bumping knees as a mating sign and I wasn't picking up on it. It took her being blunt and saying, I think you're very fuckable to drop my guard long enough and take off my jeans. My boxers were hanging by my ankle when it was all said/done and I am apt to believe there was reluctance on both sides when it came time for a refractory period...

It's no secret that as long as I've been here, I've cycled through several distinct profiles and subsequent one night stands on these dating apps. For instance, almost a year to the date of our fallout, I've seen my ex girlfriend on 2 different apps within a week. Shots fired, smokeshow, she's so recognizable. I fucked up for sure, as our time together is referenced in her dating profile, touting so many examples of a red flag. I mean, it's not often I run into a woman who even knows about cutting hair, smokes weed, The Venture Brothers, let alone is as fanatical about the show as myself. Sharing obscure references to Adult Swim, fantastic sex, empathetic nature, fat blunts, these are talking points that alleviate pressure to keep the conversation flowing on first dates and beyond. 

Positions of control, authority/leadership are not easy for me to hand away. But a strong woman with a flourishing intellect? Fuck. Take my car keys, do some damage. 

I love a good slap to the face. One of my exes told me a cold slap is called lussa shahenna in Aramaic. It's become part of the lexicon and I have a slew of memories that can be described with acronyms from Pornhub kink searches. 

When faced with it, I have no words in the moment. A naked woman, a wet left hand, you can keep your birthday cake, that's my kind of surprise party. Moments of vulnerability are sexy and rare and I only share when confined to intimate spaces like bedrails or in depth interviews. 

iris appelquist sent me 3/4 of a working manuscript to review and for some very ambiguous reason, I became aroused by the 1st prose poem: 

"There’s lots of horniness in there"

She warned.

"Hopefully some of the gruesome or didactic stuff takes the edge off"

Yea i dig the contrast of having a looming authoritative shadow over everything

***

I was working up the courage to give honest feedback while omitting the building sexual tension from reading through personal reflections via someone I highly, highly respect/ have known since the days of MySpace. At one point, when the weight of 20/2-somethimg was too much for me to maintain focus on building Kleft Jaw and siphoning through the numerous submissions we received for online issues/MS proposals became overbearing, I actually handed the editorial duties over to iris as I knew she had an unyielding sense of what we represented...

FM: Admittedly, you have an intimidating online profile but in person, as I experienced in Cleveland and Denver, you're engaging and warm hearted. Do you think that online mystique is a misrepresentation or do you track warehouse fires as a hobby? 

iris appelquist: "That first one, at the Kimberly-Clark warehouse—all paper products in a safety-non-compliant building—“all you had to do was pay us enough to fuckin live”—made my entire week. Direct action is more of a passion than a hobby, though I’m still cultivating my own niche…tracking the fires feels like following a light at the end of a dark tunnel. To your question, though: I contain multitudes."

As is evident from your writing and latest EP available on Bandcamp. I'd go as far as to say your separate projects are woven together like a photobiontic network, submerged and feeding off each other in a enzymatic diluent. 

My attention span is diverted by constant ringing/crunching of cartilage in the ear which is very apparent when my head touches a pillow; I struggle with a constant fear of being fired after revealing my recent diagnosis...

Your stance that the arc of a body that has no shame is the same as the arc of justice suggests that justice as a whole is found in a curved sense, bodies of water will flood, perhaps, and hey, maybe a crazy idea here, but a corrupt body of government/administration will crumble, all at behest of a shameless tidal wave, a willingness of the disenfranchised, an evinced stroke of freedom. Is it accurate that you see a principal subterfuge of society and self in the manuscript; maybe this is a way of quantifying world influence over that evolving perception? 

ia: "It's true that our bodies are at odds with the system(s) we were born into, and the system(s) require us to forego the body's needs and even forget or never learn what they are--and if one isn't successful in this level of alienation, it produces a lot of shame. and grief. and we mostly lack the language or emotional landscape to explore it. 

Shame is a big theme for me, in general, in this body of writing and in life; figuring out its weight or strength, the ways it is understood and mobilized for me, the ways it is understood and mobilized by me. I think it is so big in our contextual and cultural frame that it is almost as much the water we swim in as capital or bureaucracy...and it carries the same kind of utility toward the rendering of docile bodies. It is accurate that I am trying to illustrate some of the ways we participate in our own oppression and the oppression of others via very personal and internal mechanisms like shame."