The following collaboration contains explicit sexual imagery.
(Wearing her chain necklace was a familial provision.)
Augusta Elm Service, the runt of the Service family, had a quality that her brothers and sisters referred to as “thirding.”
(A provision holding kindness like a communal cup of milk.) Augusta Elm respected the chain necklace, and the shawl, and the chains of warmth, and the infinity scarf, and the square; nowhere else did she see such familial rigor blossom.
“Thirding” is, of course, in reference to the number of times it takes to do something customarily, or the number of times something will happen before it finishes correctly, or the number of times something quick, like a sneeze, can happen predictably.
“I am a beginner!” she’d say. “I am a bright new beginner!” But then, the third would come: “I am Augusta!”
Augusta’s brother, Roy Demetrius Service, noticed this quality about her while he was painting on her face. Though the siblings used to trade-off painting her, his skill was promising, and so their parents, like attentive managers, gave him a position in the family.
On Saturdays, she got to wear a tight sweater made out of shamrocks.
“Augusta, I see your brother put your hair into silly buns today. Very good.”
Jasmine Kirk Service and Hope Ursa Service, Augusta’s sisters, were her teachers, and the vibrancy of their existence often rose to a lurid and pulsing state of life; it wasn’t uncommon to find them and Augusta all crying together, violently.
“I am ready!” she’d say. “I am ready to cry!” […] “I am Augusta!”
“It wasn’t just that I found him like that. There was a sound to it all; this long, top-heavy sound. Brass, and no place to put your mouth. A low, static, gutter-full-of-shit sound. A sound that you don’t know is following you like that until you see something like this man, alone, doing nothing remarkable, resting on the hood of his car in front of his house in the sun, staring at a photo like it had just stopped breathing. Mouth agape. Stupid eyes. Kinda sad looking. Could have been like that for days—clothes were dirty enough. And that’s how he was, just staring at this little square. His beard was tucked into his shirt, and, if I weren’t a mechanic myself, I woulda thought his hands were covered in oil. Trust me, that wasn’t no oil. We spoke (just another character I’m thinking). Beyond a ‘hi-how-are-you-well-I’m-fine-I’m-good-thanks-how-are-you’, he was like this…dog. Smiling at me, then going blank. Pacing a little, then catching sounds I couldn’t hear. Guess I broke his attention to that photo. I was there for the smell, of course, and that’s what I said to him. I said something like, “buddy, it smells like death out here. You know anything about that?” That’s when I noticed the sound. This fucking awful diced-hum, and right then he started walking at me, towards the road. Had to move; he was walking through me like I was a swinging door… Didn’t look at the photo til the horizon had cut him out of existence. My hands found it before I did. Moon coming out, I pick the thing up and it’s just these two beds. This…room. And this din filling everything in from nowhere.”
O N E M O N T H O F S E R V I CE
1: trap-black
2: nipper 3: precious
4: between my
5: space 6: grasping
7: again, always
8: eating 9: past parts
10: preferring silence
11: a language 12: kind epiphany
13: desolate island
14: of light 15: full
16: flying
17: passing 18: setting
19: for holes
20: key-looking 21: obsessive little
22: swimming past
23: of the moon 24: lunar fray is
25: just
26: microscopic 27: typically yellow
28: fine
29: like pollen 30: on your legs
31: stuckfree
Neo libertine popping
up on apocalypse plant,
harvesting wave-distorts.
Open source wounds
a White radar attracting
lumpy monotones. Self-starter
stopgapped emotion in stereo
types of continuums—overdetermined
growths, an other-word
for animal—inductive reasons
soaked up some numbered
chroma, gadget’s thick
upper lip, personal reflection
of a mis-chanted micro-climax,
so unbecoming, so raster-prone
to fevers, antidote’s doting down
the throat, no aloe-going-
vera kind of pain receiver.
Sieve of datasets, deprived
of faceless-ness; after-act often
acronymed, Blond-o-matic
static’s lacquered selfie stim.
It’s in the feed, grain to bolus en
route to glut of happenstance.
Love sound …, and
highs the I can-
mind… not be-
I mean
Mind love cause (and
sounds the be caused),
high… by love,
I mean
Sound minds I am
the high never
love… above
I mean
The high being
mind loves under
sound… a bell.
I mean
Approaching, v.: the typical† Kafka
journey through an insectile situation;
so, ON ONE SIDE OF THE PARTITION
(FIRST, OUR CHILDLIKE SERVICEER):
I have been having impure
memories; ON THE OTHER SIDE
OF THE PARTITION (ONE IRA GLASS):
When math fails, what do you have
left but sheer faith?‡ PARTITION
SUCKED INTO VACUITY (CUE MUSIC)—
† “The real stake of capitalism today is the pharmacopornographic control of subjectivity, whose products are serotonin, techno-blood and blood products, testosterone, antacids, cortisone, techno-sperm, antibiotics, estradiol, techno-milk, alcohol and tobacco, morphine, insulin, cocaine, living human eggs, citrate of sildenafil (Viagra), and the entire material and virtual complex participating in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitation, relaxation, and discharge, as well as those of omnipotence and total control. In these conditions, money itself becomes an abstract, signifying psychotropic substance.” —Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie, tr. by Bruce Benderson
‡ This American Life, “Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time”
Yesterday, I saw her in the woods with
another criminal while I scarfed an
onion on the porch; our shoulders holding
tight—in folds, in clumps, in knots—onto that
singing memory of pestilence… I
couldn’t help it—I started sweating milk,
something sticky; my mouth and my yards of
guts began to rearrange like a juve-
nile pollywog hungry for flesh. Nothing’s
happy like this anymore, nothing like
these two women lying there—young commas
writing themselves, dimpled and bowed to their
tips in dirt and dawn like June bug grubs.
Kenneth Morehouse is a Los Angeles-based artist and Los Angeles native. He has shown work in both LA and Paris. He studied Art History at USC and later received his MFA from Art Center in Pasadena.
Giovan Alonzi is a poet and musician from Van Nuys, CA. His writing has appeared in VOLT, PANK, Entropy, The Believer, and other publications. At CalArts, where he completed his MFA in Creative Writing, his thesis was awarded the Emi Kuriyama Memorial Thesis Award. He is currently an English professor at East Los Angeles College and a CalArts 2018 REEF resident.