Jack Boettcher

Area Mountains

Bridgewidow Mountain – (elev. 623 ft.) – A slow wind once knocked this mountain off its latched haunch; the greased flush of emergency lights griddled the surrounding hills. Speculation on its origin included: air decay from the largest stormbelt in state history, and also a variety of scriptural citations from the Hall of Senile Televangelists. We tied off that gash with a tourniquet made of the imagined flags of new, imagined states. We proudly stood and surveyed the landscape. Still, something was unaligned. Bridgewidow seemed to crouch against the grade of its peak, like a bottom-heavy parasite’s blood-saggy belly, popped out like a soap bubble on a soft wet log. The military helicopter that loped over the hills that summer seemed like a scythe enforcing what “the locals could not enforce.” Dos, Don’ts: Don’t remove your nightmare boots – if it rains, our history sprouts all slippery, graves loosed and tumbling through the mudslide, the mineshafts. The thick webbing of Bridgewidow will grow over you in certain moments of thoughtless stillness, you’ll be wearing a jacket stitched with wonder and dew. Do pack a light lunch, as nothing is edible on this mountain, though everything looks delicious and slightly caramelized with time and oxidation, especially those swinging bridges cut and swaying away into their cinema belows, something like sweetmilk boiling wildly up from the old sunken cauldron of the hermitage.

 

Demographers

My favorite history:

Demographers’ party in the Census Barn: it was underground, it was downtown. There were exiled Soviet mathematicians hired to perform a kind of magic with statistics – we watched through the grate diffusing neon. Our parents didn’t know we’d hitchhiked to the city. It was nighttime.

Demographers in our state, in our small capital city: we didn’t know what kind of love they practiced. We saw them contorted in isolate space, the lonely calculation of human possibilities. It wasn’t what was fashionable, those populations of anonymous wives, those fierce erratic galas running over to the public parking garages, the low pelt of vomit in the narrow alley. What was? Demographers extended no research. And we kept a reasonable distance between us, a reasonable intervallic emptiness, calculable and exact. Demographers weren’t meant to live like their subjects. They came from some other city and some other state, possibly feudal, where the data eroded in abandonment and brickloom blight (those tenement shadows); stuck, looped and hung in the big band’s broken time.

You can’t tell Demographers “what’s couth.” The structure of their atlas was an ark, its restlessness. Minimalist Demographers spread into the small towns; they crossed our soybean fields like grocery bags in a storm, a ghost presence of which nothing remained but the hotel bibles and dried birdshit they dropped for bearings. Demographers trespassed into our engine rooms and industrial decay zones throughout that summer, camping out in the tuned hammering of our infrastructures. We know because we followed, sometimes in packs, always disguised as streetmonks, the unnumbered parade, unconditionally invisible to Demographers.

(a sloughed mound of static, a shrug)

This missive was meant to transfer energy. It expired. Or the signal flickered (explanations flickered, tube lights flickered in the ceiling draft of trespassed brutish architecture). A brief look at the map the kids made (before we began to pair off): borders knifed to dashes, so no arbitrary circuitry. No southern passage sketched in lead. How our bones slacked in agony to milkfat: marrow chaos under that lightness, that load of snapped wires and unaired commands. How our sprint revolted into torpid stumble.

We looked again to skymap and landmap; we looked for imaginary lines (threads, slender, upon which a child transfers energy). But we were growing older, up and out of childhood. Borders across and surrounding our state had been disproved in the deepest basements of the sectarian neo-Cartographers (where they walked on stilts to approach the height of that once gigantic breed). But they couldn’t report this with more than sound’s topographic stammer: a sloughed mound of static, a shrug and a muffled cough. Hiked into a future direction. So when the President’s transmission finally hit our state, we were thinking other thoughts. When the President’s transmission hit our state it sounded like a banjo’s strummed reverb flailing around a gashed-in silo, that steady-state.


 

Futurists

My favorite history:

Futurists: conflicted by their own contradictory history and intersecting nevertheless at the constant and volatile speeds required for their southern campaign, the Boccioni Drift (flightpaths confused by this uncertain separation of tense): artful destruction, the sound of checking their e-mail a moment too late: melody of hinges corrupting deep in the rotten hotel: that summer’s feel-good social catalyst, or cataclysm.


 

Our Debut Album

I met N on Thursday and by the weekend we were “lost,” drinking whiskey from jars we couldn’t wrap our hands around, lost in the twenty acres of woods behind Grandma’s house. “Twenty acres shouldn’t feel so nonnegotiable.”

Lost. We reclined on a fallen oak trunk, so big we couldn’t wrap our limbs around, and looked up to see shapes in the clouds. I was sad because I couldn’t see anything but buttocks, and she, sensing that this was not the first time, pretended to see those huge hazy flanks as well.

Then nightfall, with polyrhythm: A wild kitten swatting a leaf suspended from spiderthread and the spider hanging still like a blot of orange mold; a small fox skittering away from us, from our weight on the brush, the soft rot. Collapse. And we paused at the oxbow.

Found some deerbones, started a band. She was the drummer. I was the drummer. We used a lot of found sound believing that, in a private forest, the rhythms were ours: like when the creek slapped gently over the bridge of scrap metal as we crossed, wetting our shoes and ankles.

When we found the deer’s skull, we released our debut album to mixed reviews. We peered through the bowed notch of the antlers, looking for the asshole of the sky, a way out.

Jack Boettcher is the author of The Surveyic Hero, forthcoming from horse less press. New poetry is forthcoming in The Hat, The Denver Quarterly, Absent, Noo, Past Simple, and the Outside Voices Anthology. He lives in Jackson, Ms.