2 excerpts
from In Defense of Abigail Williams
Excerpt 1
In Defense of Abigail Williams,
here is her sense of Heat.
Minneapolis 2018
His musculature seemed to have a certain charm, aerial tan bark—his lightness immense from his disquiet. The hard beautiful the reeking white dazzle.
I was I know the sense of death, me and we leaving the table, a glamorous picture. I could also feel a ramble taste, a celebrity whereby I didn’t recognize.
I asked, “how were you planning to kill me?”
“No, not you. But the lady at the next table. I was going to slit her throat. I guess I could’ve slit your throat or smashed your head in the wall.
Pretty fucked up. I’ve talked to other guys think the same.”
I lay very white wild but apart from that I will never be loved. Marlboro superior like white by this and she got up on pictures on the wall. What and see he talks like a town that has lost. They bring you and bawl or I come—I put my eyes to it was alarmed white and green. Was this man not my friend? Indifferently respectful, a breath of cool. Lamentations. Why don’t you take me down, first time, hanging on the dirty white wall? Damn marble black letters. Too big too stone. Tied the end to the bottom of the water too weak to own the earth. My heart was cold when I was wearing glass. Dress cut laughing. I am angry too. So clear and stranger here and not either of us found that out. One of my eyes hostile you are afraid of it. We are like silent reels all white first to go and best to leave. The other side always a moth. Not long ago in the daylight, yes, I am calm. I said, “put the sad things away.”
He was so anxious and came across like a messenger. I hate you you know and against the walk all your friends dead will never see you again. Just you touch me once like you love money. The green that everything around it doesn’t touch. I did not shut from underneath. I felt giddy. The scent of a fixed smile the hot weather the sting of a red ant. Of a break in the blank face.
He was the worst. I could live happy with the worst. If he can keep his mouth shut.
I was in a little war. A little town. You came down and bombed the scrambling noise. All glory would not be struck in the wrong place. Like a paper-cutter slices cellar from cellar—and in it you will know more wind. To the poor bastard among his rat bites, which is confessional, end golden over the satisfied nation. That story where you can speak and be answered by God.
We dig trenches before we’re shot down in them. No one man is a furnace. The bird waits in the egg and speaks upon his marble harmonizing all evil youth. This vision is unfit for building. Mad, sad, what is happening here? I can’t say, more weight upon WHAT CRIME IT IS to be me. Ministers kissed me as I scolded them. Buzz off jabberwocky. It changes to a Saturday evening. Hell itself. And blessedness.
We smile simple felt simple and dismounted quickly. Steam rose off. I had fucked white supremacy. I could tongue across the yard. He couldn’t hurt a fly not a fly throat cut I dared smiling and I forgot this began with the same argument now. A fine machine straight features and so many friends who had died. He was helpless simultaneously rode up saying he loves me and so barely alive he believed that.
I did not love him which I could not tell him for as much as I loved him I could not induce him any further to destroy himself.
Why would I ever want a man to be the father of my children?
The future failing on this floor like nearby water like I never fully emerged before that fertile summer moment. One involvement somehow peripheral. My summer was energy. I had less cause in all as the panic morning makes you sweat. Unrelenting sense of daily routine. Eat with potatoes. Get out of bed. I felt bad I never brought better and eventually lost more. I coasted in a shitty job. I spoke big soft lies. Returning all which is now in the lying translation. I slept in smaller middle eclipses. I stayed the yellow summer. One space, much of the house, just as social every green and violet room. A local house. Land had been cleared, a white moving. Immigration clerical unbalanced well as land to history thing to public use site of many others.
“You said, you couldn’t get pregnant.”
“Why didn’t you take Plan B?”
“If this is to get me to stick around you will never hear from me again.”
But how his cells or while our lying adolescent-like curiosity sucked the things onward in me. I am wearing it. Where has he been? Kuwait Afghanistan Iraq Syria where has he touched with his bare hands himself bombs and loved it, America? What flag- draped coffin?
Excerpt 2
Justine
I recall drains in your town and an immediacy of vampire covens. I pass and I can suddenly see the streets lit up from a dollhouse, a teenager in a moneyed motor home. Then I park a moment under the electric light, a laminated hymnal of folding chairs next to a set of hands.
I pass windows but no one hands me the ability. What’s more, Meth-women interested in carrying out the witness, switched on the blood. But it was summer. That’s all it was. And from the road took place the pulpit. God, there were people. Poor—by throngs. Poor and had burned drinking and sniffing. And forget do about fuck-all. Private- nesses or standing invited inside forming naming blessings performing on the internet. The mashing pedals muted their laughter born their ducking shadows.
They had filled one woman they’d established a dump. My God, I memorized his face better than ever and called this rally a freezing silence.
Say I burned up a piston, a cylinder, the crank stops cranking. Begin tearing it down to a spine. Take the pins from their aluminum holes. Check damage. Compression. Seizing. Answer Daddy on how much money I have in the bank. We’ll lose the house, but I will not waste a single cold cupful of methanol. Make it juice, make it spool up from the mouth of the carburetion, breath and combustion. Sleep on the bone fragment you steer with a currency of beer and wonder where we will live next year.
The feeling of being harnessed is catching. Keeps pace with me. Never polite and starting to get to me. I feel most comfortable when the cockpit closes. Cock and bull. A tie-down, tie-me-up, bed. A perpetual hiss of go go go. The men and the boys make sure to spray me in the face as they throttle it in the turn. Wet, never stays long, reminds me how fast I’m going behind that breathing glass.
I have bruises where my arm bones should be. I have welts and eyes of yellow, purple, blue, dimpled blacks on my thighs, knees, my legs have bruises like amoebas, a petri dish.
I drive a bloodstream coming from a tank, plastic red, plastic black, plastic yellow. Burrow into the wake. Why do I have a feeling this marriage is childless? I lay my eggs in batter on the beach. Sucked back into my body like a spitwad. This is the underground. Bloodblooms. Kicks it through the air.
I raced against the pitch, the boys, the sticky stiff oiled crew with grappling hooks and bungee cords on shore. I loved the power I loved the supremacy.
I’m going to lick you now like your mother. I’ve absolutely crushed the lilies to the ground. There’s the deepest black and the deepest green surveying me in curving motions, roving flashbulbs in lighthouses, synchronized swimmers, and stretchers full of handling devices dropping down like men to the concrete. But water when you hit it is unyielding.
I have seen onrushing bellies, a section of the human species on a carousel, screwy metals and mirrors, kaleidoscopes striking circles popcorn carotid caryatid. There are curved brims dumping blood, but he is a drainpipe. He spits on me. It’s a grave not a vermillion bath, somehow a bride of a spill on the floor. It was like to follow the path of tongues. On a experimental altar-
low and look over those slow dictum.
don’t gaslight
I’d be under the house like a worm. The crammed captive audience. And I pushed him in shut. This was when we were inseparable. He was so otherwise open as the doors slid. As I’d known him what he was to which I was frequently. I’m so really fucked up for as long as I’ve dealt in emotional exorcism. Live dark archival reaches
redemptive good—
Brianna Johnson received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her first book The Axe Lectures was published by Spout Press in 2017 and her second book Drone Fidelity was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2018. She lives in a small town in Minnesota with a pit bull and some books.