Southern Hospitality

Down at home there's a nigger dying in a ditch. His nappy hair is matted with coagulated blood, his skull is cracked from a violent pistol-whipping, and his uneven breaths blow up little gusts of dust into the dry September air.

(Who pistol-whipped this old boy? It's invisible. It's an empire. It's the scourge of the South. Kyklos is a joke. The Klan is a sordid farce. The violence is symptomatic. It reaches deeper than any fraternity. It's innate violence. It's de facto violence. It's the violence of a people inable to forget for 140 years a war that devastated them. In the South White violence against Niggers is easily attributed to the angry violence perpetrated against them by the North. Is this an excuse? No, it's reality. Am I racist? Yes. Do I wish I wasn't? Yes. Violence materializes in many forms: pistol whippings are one blatantly obvious one. But can't a "lynching" happen with something so subtle as a sideways glance? Yes. The violence is so widespread. I hate queers, niggers, jews, and Roman Catholics. I HATE them. And so do you. You can't help it. You might not think you hate, but you do. Those of you who don't believe that you are as guilty of hatred as I am are the fullest of hate. You mask your hate. You cover up your true identity. Embrace it instead.)

Down at home there's a nigger dying in a ditch. The whites of his eyes seem to hang there in the dark, his teeth too, so white and devilish in the dry night air. He's in a coma in the darkness in a ditch on the side of a dirt road, left to die, left to be picked apart by buzzards in the morning before the sun cuts through the thin layer of mist, still alive in the black pitch of a coma he'll be devoured by scavengers and creeping things.

(I didn't pistol-whip him. I'd never hurt another living thing. I don't even hunt. But someone did. And I can't help but to say that I understand whoever did. I don't advocate it. I don't appreciate it. I understand it. This isn't our fault. Noone ever came in here with a team of psychologists to clean up the huge mess they left. No. They came in here with carpetbags and set up house to make big money off our humble heritage. Who is the slave now? We can't be responsible for reacting. We've been reacting for 140 years, and rightly so, godammit.)

Down at home there's a nigger dying in a ditch. Flecks of spittle glisten on his big pink lips and a cold sweat pours off of his unconscious brow. He shines, no, glimmers in the dry hot moonlight.

(I can promise you this, folks: This town needs change. This town needs understanding. A pistol-whipped nigger spells out our need for understanding. We need to get close to our nascent racism. Our feable attempts at understanding our modern condition have only helped us to mask the truest symptoms of who we are. We are white men. Let me help you build a white city. Let's make this city shine as the whitest in the South. Let's crown Clewiston as the glistening gem of Florida. Vote Maynard Toombs for Clewiston Mayor on November second.)

'Clewiston sparkles on the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee. A few summers ago a negro supposedly "suicided" in nearby Belle Glade, FL. When he was found hanging in his grandmother's back yard his hands were tied behind his back. In an interesting coincidence, the annual NAACP convention met in Miami Beach that Summer.' - Eds

-Paul S. BLOOD

In the Forest, A Desert

My father, took me far away, into the woods, I never saw nothing like I saw that day. Into the woods. Don't look back. Can't look back. Won't look back. Blind and headfirst, into the woods, laurels scratching, sawing at the soft spots behind my knees. Twigs and acorns clog my nostrils and spiders crawl up my toes. Far way and into the woods.

And now, and then, in the darkest rooms with the brownest tile I'll look up and find you looking back, and with a happy heart these words you'll say ("our father bless this home today"), and smile, grin, and the brown tile will spill out and over onto the grass, and the outside comes in for a while, just to sit and think and rest. On a dirty couch on a dirtier porch you'll turn to me, with happy heart, and spill out too, filling the brown tile, the brownest tile, flooding it ankle-deep no knee-deep no hip-deep and I have to wear waders just to get through you. Grey grout turns red as you fill it up, your happy heart running out all over the floor.

Can't you picture it? November 1987, my father, he took me far away, into the woods, and I never saw nothing like I saw that day. Under the laurels, through the thick heat and light, under the hot hot sun a calloused hand traces down a tan chest with beads of sticky sweat, feeling out the ribs, one by one, rib...rib...rib...rib...until no more ribs are left, and there's nothing left but a little bit of white worsted, and the heat, and the sun, and for a while everyone seems breathless, everyone watching from outside, peering in under the canopy, as semen spurts out, drips, drops, spills out onto the dead leaves and mixes with them, tannic and bitter.

H.e O.ften M.asturbates O.utside forever from now on to be known as Paul S. BLOOD

(Only one of us might be a homo. The ballot is still out.)

(2) Poems of Regret

* * *

You left me in the hands of the locals when you left me behind. Their routines are inscrutable. Obscure purpose, military regimes, and pickled beets. Monkish routines. This fall feels like Spring Garden in the wintertime.

We built a shrine to your departure when you left. Remember? You left things in the apartment. Samples of your handwriting. And you hopped on the plane, and the sky was vaster, brighter, thinner. We never had together empty hours in the day. Suddenly, the afternoon startles and falters. And the city has changed irrevocably. In the summer, the Citadel was a nipple. Really, it’s a windy piece of turf, empty and forlorn. That’s a fact. You see the fringe of the city and the harbour is disconnected from the sky. It repulses the light.

My only comfort is the deepening season. The night sky will stretch across the continent. Days become shorter and the nights are endless. Try to find comfort in that infinite darkness. I dare you to feel like yourself in the infinite blank. I dare you, miserable cunt.

(Our friend on the edge of the earth seems to have forgotten certain modern conveniences. Like electric light and entertainment, for example. Take a warm bath and relax. Hop on a plane yourself, or drive quickly in your car. – Eds.)

* * *

Q: I haven’t experienced sexual desire in years, possibly ever. I am happily married. My husband works hard. I work hard beside him in the field. He works harder and longer and I prepare the meals. (I am an emancipated feminist. However, certain divisions of labour, traditionally determined by the construction of ‘gender roles’ in society, are expedient to the cultivation of land. I live in rural Nova Scotia beside a windmill. If my husband were more ‘effeminate’ and I ‘more of a man’ (these of course are quaint patriarchal expressions that I use with reserve, marking the force of their oppressive potential) the roles would be reversed.) I am responsible for the chickens and the goats.
Food preparation in the country is no small task. My husband and I support local organic farms exclusively and try to be, as much as possible, self-sustaining. We live on a small organic farm, ‘off the grid’, in rural Nova Scotia. We do not raise free-range grain-fed cattle for example and thus swap skinned rabbits and eggs for milk, butter, and beef. A red pepper is a real delicacy in the summertime. One might be traded for several weeks’ worth of root vegetables. Which goes to show the intricacy of the local economy. There is a web of barter, a syndicate of preserves. The tasks are all-consuming.
My husband is broad-shouldered and strong. His hands are rough and parts of his feet appear to be rotting. There is an odour. I like the warmth of him beside me in the winter. But this is not an intimate arrangement. The blades of the windmill freeze tight in the cold. The lights dim and brighten erratically. Mostly, we use candles. There is an inch of ice in the washbasin in the morning. It’s a rural necessity.
Am I extending myself too far or not enough? My husband is the silent type and we rarely talk about these things.

- Canadian Under No auThority

in other words, stuart MINT

Love Letter

Dearest M-

Think of this of it as a token. A gift for you so that you can read something and feel loved. A gift for me, too. A chance to talk to myself--to stroke myself, really--with you as the invisible recipient who justifies the act and makes it all OK. We're selfish, as usual. And secret exhibitionists. (I pee with the door open, sometimes, and think of you.) But this is only half of a conversation, and that's it's excuse. That's why it's circling on its string, going nowhere. O missing piece! O phantom limb! The honus is on you to finish my sentences…

If, in the end, we should come to some kind of conclusion, I’ll print off our correspondence and tie it with a ribbon and hide it under the bed. I'll read it when I'm thirty and remember what it was like to be me at twenty-one. And I'll think of you.

Love K.

First Post

This is the first post.