Gone Lawn
a journal of literature
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Gone Lawn 6
Winter, 2011

Featured painting, ©2004 by Chris Mars : Parasites of Necessity.

Editorial
by Alana I Capria, guest editor for Gone Lawn 6

Featured Excerpt

New Works


Gary J. Shipley

Bomb Caviar
excerpt from Spook Nutrition, a novel-in-progress


I saw it turn retards into angels wading through petrol spinning new proportions, every whore's former profligacies of night recast in long calculations without interval, its variant prongs in arms its agonies shared by whole streets and cities at once, heads nurtured into a single locus of oddly muted pain, and none of its physical promptings touching me inviting me in or adjusting the volume of my identity, a horror of particles cast into the indivisible mould of man's dull solace, as there like snakes coiled round spines the empty chills of Asphodel, and as it sank into a ground of modified rats they said they'd cut it visible heard its voice sink into passing dogs, made strangers of families took slaves from farms and emptied its angles into the remains of butchered cows, and I ate from a can of organ puzzles my veins bulging encumbered with sentences made from drain fluid ears full of its congress of howling its evidence impregnated with ferule entities and convulsing flowers and ephemeron of steel-plates on LA freeways pouring vultured meat in off the plane from London its fungus shrieking under microscopes, eyes boiling seas, softening the materialism of the scientists in vaults their outer surfaces electric their insides feeble solutions of hands, and the sweat of undigested sunlight under Bacon-orange skies in boxes with bones curved in contrived exertions, carne-like substances in junctures too new for language, its gloves made from infant hippopotami with us up and trawling supermarkets and graves in fields with translucent crops where the locusts grow teeth at night, getting down inside the larynx obstructing the voices coming out, and all them western homes' untenanted eyes rotting in a slump vortex of bodies coming together like furniture to be burnt, so we'd have webbed feet to swim in it this exaggerated place decomposing in the old habit of that inorganic itch, but we had the white of Canada to move us on, the radios like starving stomachs spewing sound-dented axioms into an epilepsy of words, its molten limbs in the supererogatory sockets the bodies stacked like banana boxes like allusions to emergency transplants performed with teeth from beached sharks their grey skins bubbling and cracking in the sun, its immortal disease airborne in flocks of Etruscan ravens the sun a rarefied pendulum the wind an ill murmur the floor a confluence of roaches, and so it spread, tree roots dank strings churning demons grieved to be alive from mosaics of strangely watered soil, in Rome a million knees to the tarmac a million eyes to the crucified dog, the maniac's companion in effigy, head baskets thick with feet, our brothers' needle-stained arms blown up like Popeye postures while loud wires shrunk autumn into a flood of my nothing of quick animal deaths lasted out in prisons ancient in structure, its future attached to unformed children and the non-existence of man outside his capacity for solitary violence, the entire universe reformed as changes in you unsuppressed in paralytic impulses formed in crumbling lungs, young brains lost to a winter dementia to a restored blindness to the constant rain of the world its chirping graves anticipating themselves into diamonds, and we ran stalked by outlines and babbling like bees, our American echoes dropping off the screens our metaphysics contrived into vicinities of sentient cavities sucked through teeth and made into delicacies of that decrepit madness our lost keys to the localized reason of suffering, the stupor of new living bodies absorbed by their pre-praenomen diagnosis, midnight seen to contain all wings out of here the chant of every auto-da-fé dreamed up into diseases of bark and fire, our Koran our holy colony our canal of fables flowering in sluiced interiors in the mortar of condemned solid unmoving eyes that have died and found madness in the adhesion of cracked thoughts of groping men, so we'll wait till it sleeps in the draw of night of triumph our bones inside a horse's face their white concentration a hypochondria hesitating and silent, but even that concrete gaped, yawning simulacrum convulsions in the shape of Goya wretches sealed inside grimy asylums and subjugated to celibacy inside the leg spasms of poisoned donkeys


Gary J. Shipley is the author of Theoretical Animals (BlazeVOX) and co-author of Necrology (Paraphilia). He is on the editorial board of the arts journal SCRIPT.