from Glam*our

Jamie Townsend

So, safe

Or save

Loo came in

A neat little package

So cute they

Said so cute

Shrugged and

Dug a toe

Into the blanket

Slowly digging

Their own grave

We lie in bed

Bereft of nothing

Read Safe or save

At the inadequate

Daydream at the pink

Bruce assumed

Was flat

Symbolic, so cute

And gay, so happy

Read Safe

Where the moon ‘s

Cold and decrepit

Face licks the inside

Of Loo’s thumb

And a wet finger

Print darkens the page

Wonder at this

Transmission

Feel saved

Beneath a

Decorative parasol

Janky skeleton

Ragged pink tissue

Their romantic dream

Of safety

Held sleep away

Predicting ruin

Whispering

Sweet nothings

Up against the sheet

‘Save me’

Soft consonants

And sibilance

Trickle out

To lay across

The hair on their arms

End to end

So close

They’re almost fucking

Lost and safe, saved

Wake up feeling

Opened the residual

Dilation

What as who

Recants Loo can’t be

Bothered by this

Thin mucus

Clinging slip

Eyes downcast

Playing with themselves

The story lost

In detail

Little red

Riding hood

By air as blood

Rushes

To the surface

Tease

Recoil

High on glaze

First blush saved

And wet, touchable

Yielding a very

Dangerous moment

Excited blood

Rubbing against

Excited skin

Knife wife

Fruity void

A portal ‘s

Bubble floating in

A tear without

The allure you know

Austere

Safe and silent

The letter

S at the end

of the dreamer ‘s

Eden

The discarded skin

Of it ‘s

Dreams like

Arcadia and waking

In the mezzanine

Of the Top

Shop

Safe or saved against

The smoothness

Of mannequin flesh

The most dangerous

Thing Loo could do

Is abstract it all

An atmosphere disrupted

An unrepentant

Shower

Of meteorites

A legion of fallen angels

Or failed men who dream

Wrestle with god

Mouth to

Mouth to be safe

Young

And troubled

Beneath a silent sky

Loo trained to resuscitate

A doll

A new doll each year

Learned

Their heart can’t take

Too much

Pressure

Loo learned to reject

The world ending

At the tips

Of their fingers

*

This problematic

Pattern repeating

Not just fantasy.

Loo reads Joon ‘s swooning objectivism, the sensation written out as milk stains on a white tee. They dissociate. Take a walk and slip into their own pregnant reverie, in front of racks of faded band merch at Mercy Vintage. It gets them out of the house, fleshes out the imperfect goodwill they imagine. Garish and obscene. Glamorously threadbare. Almost miraculous.

At minimum, Loo felt like a dizzy Adam naming their way into some extreme measure of self-fixation, obsessed and obsessive rumination toward minding their own business vs. minding their own pleasure, a private heaven or public hell expanding in exponential dimensions. At max, overwhelming obsession, squeezing everything into a horizon line. The thought Loo writ large as a folding in not stretching toward. Sex that makes an ass of them. An emaciated face or ghost of personality draining toward the shaky drain ‘s point of no return. A limp corpse wrist arching up through grating. Pose becoming cramp becoming camp becoming something chronic, rhetorical. They weren’t praying for this.

Loo conjures Aaron’s rod that budded. Aaron’s poem in The Paradise of Forms. The dress likes the way he looks, hairy. They wanted to have a manifesto to blow it up, as so little made sense in a time when competing spiritual forces struggled to pull any apart feeble agreement. The ring rolls out of reach no matter how much they stretch to grab at it. Sell the outerwear when the work dries up. Their stubborn multiplicity, an innate fuck you to a pervasive loneliness imposed as though every day they must get out into the world, face a grave, dead broke, east west, damning orientation. Yes. There were too many complications. Loo worried about the repetition of their movements, the choreography of their not yet communal body on the page creating a rough line for measurement. Loo worried too about their height and weight as well, someone called it ‘stature’ which left them cold as marble. As though the pressing thought of physical necessity left a lasting impression. No. An ever-increasing push towards order but this ran against their rangy opulence. Loo imagined the end of power as a chain of supplication cracked or dragged from around their neck. Link by link together the weakest collapsing.

With a handful of brass rings, their or this hand a rams head, a claw, a ram in profile, a Cleopatra snake charm winding up to strike any softness or warmth of flesh. A tiny glass eye. The pendulum of a snowflake pendant. Scattered indications of movement outwards. Each object of reference, a reliquary, a talisman, a psychic tool, A fire sign, a fire floating above the perpetual watery sensation, the feeling, a lack inside the water and so Loo became an anthem in perpetual wonder of the distinction. Glamorous, the we that together made a choice, was given split-second choices to make. Loo wanted a them or they, an us in some mindless repetition. To be awed again. Language for what they didn’t yet understand. Anyways, Loo didn’t want to be confused. They wanted to sing.

Punch a ghost…

A dress only becomes a dress by being worn

Or the specters of Anger ‘s puce moment, obscene luxury just danced off the rack. Loo counts: A sheet a shift a skirt a ghost, styles of unfolding in the machinery of their vision.

Belief is what Loo falls into from the periphery. The shadow of a god insisting the writing is the wall the body is an outline on the floor. The slight heft of paper chains or this history of royalty. Neither nor. Loo believed naively that passionate fire would materialize to burn it all away and beneath would be a glowing residue of wholeness. An unbroken circle beneath the church. Inside curves and smooth wet. They felt this as something approaching completion, tearing each layer away. This less specific and quiet insistence of a sensual momentum forward made it even moreso. Loo watched it all through a specific lens, watching Legion, a show of superpowers where the hero is labeled mentally unwell – is sick with a multiplicity – in a world unwell in its insistence on those without these specific queer powers, filled with synthetic cloth and mid-centeery modern furnishings. The hero ‘s obsession moves throughout the scene, touching each stupefied spirit, kissing her or him as they switch bodies. They, remaking what it means to inhabit such a world, to slosh against the viscera. Dumb and newly born. On the floor of Wolfman Books during the reading Loo listens to their friend transforming into pure description at the same time not listening they pull off the gel polish from their middle finger complete in one piece and stick it behind the shelf of poetry, saving it to chance upon later.

*

Eyes soaked in milk, shapes buoyed through taste. A holographic makeup stick marks the limits of Loo’s field of vision. Cheeks blushed. Streaked with a shade called supernova for an understanding of what they thought they saw before the lights went out. Believing the flash was enough to make a distinction. No. Not totally. Not in fact at all. But a vagueness. Awesome, overwhelming ambiguity. Yes.

*

Our love dissolves

The sheerest tulle

Into a scatter of applique

Sequins into female trouble

Posthumous Birkin bangs

Nipples like meringue

Hannah Wilke is still

Suffering for glamor

Vanity Fair spread

In the shadow

Of a useless giant spoon

Industrial fuckwand

Set to maximum

Obliteration

Horror and beauty ‘s

Trash offered up

To the better demons

Of our nature

*

The moon is sending

Psychedelic invocations

Through the pastel pink

Orgone pyramid

In the sunroom

Loo reads the feeling as

Eve Babitz on the longest

Walk of shame

From the homes of dead

-eyed Orange County

Suburbanites worshiping in

The Hereditary loft

Of Ann Taylor

A cloud of sage

Cloth swirling

Across the windshield

As she powders her nose

From a compact

Of beige accelerant

Dancing on a dash

Blasting Dumb Blonde

Dolly ‘s New Narrative

Bittersweet fantasy

Transforming a scarf

Into a noose

Into a guillotine

An open hand

An ashtray

As Frank once admitted

Loo misses their sisters

And reads a treatise on stars

As metaphor

Reverie and warning

Don’t be mislead

By glamor from heaven

As it bursts

Against yr throat

In the wind

When Loo finally laid out

In the bright light

After the year from hell

And read what

Brenda wrote

Satan isn’t sitting

In some bunker

And

fuck that

In wet hot turquoise

In a poem to Ivy

That felt like a fortune

Wrapped in a warning

Wrapped in magenta

The color of our conversations

With the dead