Volatile, starving, it senses a parallel self, the girl’s body emitting its solar heat, absorbed in the course of a lifetime but now discharging, pushing off. A snake has escaped from time: a suburban aquarium. An April snowfall, the bracken still coppery, gold.

Imagine the scene: a forest outside of London, 10 p.m. She’s wearing shoes, maroon patent leather shoes with a low heel and three slim buckles, but no socks. The snake slips over her leg, her brown ankle.

This is the news: a girl’s body is dressed and set, inert yet trembling, upon a rise in the forest. In the forest, time and weather are so mixed up, a trope of bedtime stories, bottom-up processing, need. In frozen time, ancient beings emerge with the force of reptiles. A snake, aspen-colored, bright yellow with green stripes, slips through the bracken, its pink eyes open and black diamond-shaped iris blinking on then off. In the forest surrounding London, a light ice falls through the trees. The country outside London, with its old parks and labyrinths of rhododendron or azalea, futile and tropical pinks in a near-constant downpour of green, black and silver rain. A puff of diesel fumes on an orbital road. How pre-speech sounds are gamete-like: a kind of reproductive material that is simultaneously non-genetic and yet propagates: a future way of speaking.īan en Banlieues: suburban. The sounds below the level of sounds that Ban makes: there. The three wire cages are filled with notebooks and on the chopping board are the books I think will help me resolve the problems I am working on. I spend half my time staring at a mobile butcher’s block.

This is why the dark green, glossy leaves of the ivy are so green: multiple kinds of green: as night falls on the “skirt.” The outskirts of London: les banlieues. This is why a raindrop indents the concrete with atomic intensity. Sometimes there is a day and sometimes there is a day reduced to its symbolic elements: a cup of broken glass the Queen’s portrait on a thin bronze coin dosage rain. In the loose genetics of what makes this street real, the freezing cold, vibrating weather sweeping through South-east England at 4 p.m. In a novel that no one writes or thinks of writing, the rain falls in lines and dots upon her. Why? The fact of the riot decays around her prone form and at points it rains. A girl stops walking and lies down on a street in the opening scene of a riot. The London street a tiny jungle: dark blue, slick and shimmering a bit, from the gold/brown tights she was wearing beneath her skirt. Posture made a circuit from the ivy to her face. When she turned her face to the ivy, I saw a bunch or cube of foil propped between the vines. I myself swivel around and crouch at the slightest unexpected sound. Notes for Ban, 2012: a year of sacrifice and rupture, murderous roses blossoming in the gardens of immigrant families with money problems, citizens with a stash: and so on. She is collapsing to her knees then to her side in a sovereign position. In a literature, what would happen to the girl? I write, instead, the tiniest increment of her failure to orient, to take another step. What loops the ivy-asphalt/glass-girl combinations? Abraded as it goes? (Friction.) (Concordance.) I think, too, of the curved, passing sound that has no fixed source. A girl walks home in the first minutes of a race riot, before it might even be called that - the sound of breaking glass as equidistant, as happening/coming from the street and from her home. I want a literature that is not made from literature.

Making cobra knotes