from Midwestern Hypermnesia Surfaces
Purple hinges the sky together. When electrical towers volt, we park our cars beside the end the end of time.
I.
In the midwest, bodies are guided by a preternatural internal magnet. At the center of the vanishing point of the horizon we converge: the Super Walmart. In the dream, you disclothed beneath the fluorescent lights, on the talkshow yr culpabilities were revealing.
“Do you have an individual reading light like, uh, a clip? For a book.”
I frame the employee’s face between thumb and index finger, at the crux of an alright angle. See, a square. Where’s its edges
Lately I’ve noticed myself making theatrical gestures that borrowed motifs from the movies. I like to wiggle my fingers into the itch after triggers, raising my hand towards You. You can lift mostlyanything.
Behind the supercenter, its immortal gloaming a refinery pumps slowmagma against the purple-contour ripped sky. Outloud, colors I cry My God, My God.
No one has the one product I need. So flatten space, you try again and mists strangle the possibility of depth the light contained. I hesitate before the solid blooming blocks of Indiana industrialnight. My Ford Taurus is parked across from another ford taurus they both smell like a fire hazard. When you have to magnify everything to get to the truth, shifting scales, I turn my head back, lower my body into its center, rocked away and carried forward, running at that improbable night
II. Indiana Abandoned
My weeds my weeds my weeds my weeds, my weeds rapture the air and hunk the concrete.
Pacing nurseshoewhite, and terminal. The abandoned hospital ahead of us finds the wedge in yr heart and finality dislodges it. What did you need this for
A red brick facade.
We enter through an improbable door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessica Baer received their MFA from Brown University in 2017. They have published a chapbook, Holodeck One (Magic Helicopter Press, 2017), and their work has been featured in journals such as Pinwheel, Prelude Mag, Horse Less Press, and Bone Bouquet. They live anywhere and they love horses.
ABOUT THE MANUSCRIPT
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is about the diabolical pact with analogies within language as an endlessly proliferating series of artificially derived re-semblances, halving & splitting and re-joining themselves. The affective currency of disastered bodies where the brain’s automatic hyper-completions run crunching errant timelines together into singularities that transgress homogenized social time in the neurodivergent cptsd text embodied. It’s about the (im)possibility of intimacy after violence and its fulfillment within my relationship to my 2005 maroon Ford Taurus. In a Super Walmart parking lot where I met myself in an identical car; the sinuous-duplicitous doubling that powers drives through the immaterial of language textures. A paean to Ivan Ooze, it’s about my decision to reunify my abusers out of the world of my life and into the cosmic everything-nothing faraway. It’s about the specters that stay behind anyway. It’s about the paranoia-machine of alienated desire; the perpetual inauguration of the uncanny-familiar in time as indexicality. It’s about the line in The Who’s “teenage waste/land” where he sings “I don’t need / to be forgiven.”