the hymnal included instructions for dissembling a bicycle
bibliomancy for the week of july 14
the four of swords and from Garielle Lutz’s Partial List of People To Bleach
One night he wanted to know what it had been like to go through with the nuptials, the hymeneals. Not much had held up in memory. I let out that the minister had spoken of a “middle ground” between women and men or husband and wife, I forget—someplace irrigated and many-acred, maybe a plain. I had felt unchampioned that day. The minister got me alone at the reception, snapped his fingers, said, “This better not've been just some skit.”
the aleatory
The hymnal included instructions for disassembling a bicycle. It was a block of silk.
Some of its songs seemed to insist on the tireless merciful bosom of the interstate highway system as a place to take one’s sins (so that they might be in the company of others).
Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground.
I don’t remember which apostle John Denver was, only the open mountainward cant of his eyes.
Memory is a discontinuous arrangement and a house roofed with earth.
As girls we stood in the church kitchen between plays stealing mouthfuls of whipped cream. I was somehow already typecast as an old man.
Whenever a black snake appeared, we genuflected by remaining completely still. Nobody was afraid until later, when we told.
the forecast
Make a truce with your attachment type. Observe it watchfully. Find an opportunity to play the villain.
writing prompt
Become as bored as you ever were on a summer day as a child. Read, if necessary, laying flat on a porch swing with your toes clutching the chain.
a chune
“Bookends” by U.S. Girls
Some of us never got over the fake walnut veneer tables at the rollerway and it shows. When I listen to this record, I feel like … did this musician also grow up on the floor of a laundromat in Cameron W.V. surrounded by orange fiberglass bucket seats?! Did she also have a Sam & Dave tape that she listened to over and over, as if that was a normal thing for a 12-year-old to do?
credits: small spells tarot deck by rachel howe
Partial List of People To Bleach by Garielle Lutz
Scratch It by U.S. Girls
dear diary, I used to think that it was pointless for a novel to have an organizing central theory or conceit because it seemed pathetic to me that a reader would want to be taught a lesson which they already knew. But now I realize that a conceit isn’t really a lesson at all—it’s a question. Some questions are stupid. Some are incoherent, obtuse, miles away from the action. But there is always a figure who points in a specific direction. It is necessary for travel. And a novel travels through time, unless it’s a pile of pages on the ground. XS