Summer undulates. And this small town is a vaporous mirage; the dust unsettled, like everything else. Lawns sweat under the mower's aggression. Gasoline mingles with honeysuckle: something to choke on. The red and brown bodies of the kids in the pool are a writhing stain of maggots in an open sore. Remember the knee you tore when your bike found the gravel; it starts where the steaming asphalt crumbles into the suffocating fields of wheat. Further, cows line the fence, their eyes obsidian mirrors. Flies disperse and congregate to the rhythm of their shit-slicked tails. Out there, invisible--colored by rock and weed, made of mystery and threat--the rattlesnakes relax the tension in their coil. You find the heat "oppressive" and remind us what the bunk house smells like, in July, after a bender, empty Jack Daniels bottles, shag carpet soaked with beer. Even the fan in the window sputters and spits. We are inches away from an accidental fire. It could consume everything, if only the night air might dissect the bare belly, the bare heaving chest. Place me on ice. This autopsy must include everything, at least everything that is left...this summer.
"This journal is not a mere literary diversion. The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition--of the chapters, of the sentences, of the book itself--the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power." --Jean Genet
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