BRENDA IIJIMA
From
UNTIMELY DEATH IS DRIVEN OUT BEYOND THE HORIZON
Episodic forest. What is an episode?
Roots down/sky obscured
Why sky obscured?
Our bodies become blue
No Nature, not, and not of nature, denaturalized
or logic chunk brink cup tool
Good luck with that nugget [!]
What are the leaves in the process of, of doing?
Leaves of various trees, touching
One tree leans and fells another
Natural, like coal
Will the language wither also, immediately or
is there a nostalgic aftermath to come?
A coda.
Even when survival takes every cerebral cell?
Stay inside
your body! (was an outdated central command)
Mountain as symbol for less-time-passing
The Arctic ice is melting much quicker than the
Antarctic ice.
Most of Mexico’s water goes to grow crops
on multinational fields (in Mexico) that are headed
to US consumers/ one third lost to leaks in pipes
“In 2008, 30 countries had food riots.”
‘The Food Crisis’, February 24th, 2011, NY Times
That’s called reign
That’s called rain
Fuel is scarce. People are focused on
foraging and protecting themselves. Some much
spent toxic waste has already leaked into the soil.
Most are experiencing some stage of sickness.
Some burn the fuel for heat and numerous
explosions have resulted from these acts,
worsening the effects of the radiation…
There is a certain resilient worm
that has migrated to these hot spots
but they (the worms) only seem to
exist in cooler climates where there’s
still some ground moisture.
The worms burrow through the
porous concrete canisters releasing
radiation as they eat it. When
they die, the nuclear radiation
returns to the ecological system.
Actually, it never leaves…
Consequently, all the viruses, insects,
bacteria and germs leapt onto what
they could of the body exodus.
Nothing chewing away, no
symbiosis, no mutation,
no feeding off the other.
Dead material. Drying and scattering
the enzymes. Cesium, strontium
& plutonium isotopes
Insert image: Radioactive boars roaming around
in German forests, 30 years after Chernobyl. Their
diet consists of radioactive berries and acorns.
They don’t live a long enough life span to develop
tumors.
Leslie: Buried in the constant present.
Burn after burn, my body as proxy, released
Burn after reading and the device here called character
Grid on a burn line down a meridian that meets core
I’m open to the fallacy to the orange coded space
More frequency signaled for a criticism in the narration
and the same time, no indication of a rare verb
Using the plural masculine, we do, when speaking in the
first person, in the clothing you now wear
In the sense of coming upon, invading = accedo, aggredior
ingru, in the sense of the inferno that is a metaphor for
spent energies raising questions about the gods, cosmos
origins of civilization and morality. Again, ambiguous and
compact. Where in thought are you going? Emendation
of the object. Virtually cognate. Even if you
refuse. Nationhood, there’s a thickness and end
to location. Razor wire obscenities, fucked as a kind of blur
Ate the spirit of recognition. As Melanie Griffin presents
spirit. We fledgling, confused as bio-normative elements
contending for capitol in the capitalist rink
Summons, sinking. This stunning stocked hour trade
Modulate to target, epidermal sensor hot meat, hot
slung low responder, here to go in the field, target
ample and live, the target is ample, precision our cuts
eye goggled approach with jeep in the midst, barrel
We can learn to kill while the spirit is moving
like our targets they are alive as is knowledge of the site
physical theater of response and fight command
young beautiful soldiers menacing young beautiful soldiers
Spirit safety which we pay for with body labor and cellular
realignment, human genomes for a social world which
is dictated by a flow of abstract numerals which can’t be
killed, in unison, we are the numbers, the spirit has us
do its bidding, do you know why you were murdered
while sleepwalking? I want to hear you talk about
how you think the spirit preempts protests
guides volition and reflexive humor tonally like TV
A bio-political model groomed in the blue satin of a
casket, to punctuate the sullen episodic structure with
shrieks. Bust doors down overturning tables
children with bloody congealed outlines by their skulls
Originally looking for the roots, meat claim swollen
it always felt urgent and at times an interruption but
actually and particularly the confrontation, continual
launching of wars, blasted environment, conveyed meat
which means the mechanisms are the adjusters
continuously reoccurring, to control women’s bodies,
not only women’s bodies, fractal, structural and cellular
necessities (Silvia Federici) and the history of meat
From there we learn to wield authority effectively
never mind future in the basement of the ceremony
The battle is less likely to be symbolized by lace
but lace might be a staunch symbol of stability
achieved through war as a means to extract
time and light and sustenance, unsurely
violate hot meat, violence and lace
Eliminate them theme
Insert image: faded, solarized, nearly
bone white hazy surface of a somewhere
nondescript though there is a sense of a
forested mountain receding and an
elevation that speaks of the Appalachian
Mountain Range. The ecology is blurry
and indistinct. There is a footprint in the
mud that stiffened, the footprint is human.
Tree ring circa 2030
The mountain looks—….[pause]
no, it can’t be adequately disclosed nor described.
It wasn’t long (before) and the trees were almost completely felled, even
the trees that grew on the more precariously sloped and craggy precipices.
They fell that falling sometime. The logging barreled over the underbrush and the animals that previously lived here (there) ran off, died: it’s really a vacuum.
With the exposure to the sun the dirt became brittle and flash floods carried the sediment (pollute) to the tributary that ran into the _____river. Little could grow in this seared ecology with the disastrous erosion that resulted from these processes.
A huge swath of land became a dead zone and the people who
foraged around this mountain also had to disperse. Some bones became visible, There were no scavengers to make off with them. Even bacteria can’t access the bones—it’s too parched.
The soil has effectively died.
There are no bugs and no worms or spiders.
They are thinking of transferring nuclear waste
(here) but the will is low, it’s hard to organize activities. __________________________________________________________________________
Brenda Iijima's chapbook Glossematics, Thus is just out from Least Weasel Press. Additional poems from UNTIMELY DEATH IS DRIVEN OUT BEYOND THE HORIZON have been published in pamphlet form by Mondo Bummer. She lives in Brooklyn and runs Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs.
