Sunken Ranch
Hannah Brooks-Motl

Last night I published a novel very brutal about a friend. They read it, were hurt last night but all other nights as well. For my revelations, no. For my exactitudes.

I said sorry I hadn’t known or understood the magnitude of the meeting I’d double booked my calendar it wouldn’t happen again but already the sensation was building toward this, my soul always lightly going out and enjoying though then fearing or feeling sternly and being late. My soul tripped on its way to a beverage-mart, stood abject before my boss who’d infiltrated this depth where one of us lived, returned to, in that closet, wept, and made art.

I was the deer or whatever it was—an unknown species investigating the plot. I came down from an apartment, met myself, and followed us back to the sky. The thing I was had found me nosed me wouldn’t leave me alone. Then I watched it go into bliss via stairs. In the version I’d chosen but still thought maybe I could do both kinds of living, split myself into a design. I filmed the mountain range. I had the same thoughts, slightly bored, that’s the trouble—not being able to remember the full content or scope. It was a ledge that could have meant there was a single mountain, a plain before it that met the formation in an angle where I went and was called—an effortless emblem there at the crux in the elbow of vision. Coming after me. Plentiful, nonthreatening. Just appeared, touched to sniff me. Further off men were around or I was missing the period when it was/felt as though enough was happening, just being with men.

Singular cold sitting in the lobby between grand staircases some older thought was waiting marginal to the crystal ceiling and the half cherub organized/organizing underfoot. They peek down on the problem of many problems of material translation, jargon, guilt. A flow through the atrium. If you’re ready to be moved or produce a child out of thin air, provide for them… an argument about peace with war, about health with death. An elaborate hotel and being approached in a grand ballroom that will never fill. Essentially without style but emitting warmth radiant from the roseate carpets, angel peeking off into the world of knowledges. 

This is different, the rough stuff to put a boot down on. And a fire going. The friend said I could stay here until I don’t want a drink anymore…

I think the best analogy is going through rooms talking to the ideas. Call out to them or ask is this you. It’s a short communication.

If anyone looked and maybe some did “we” were on a second floor, top floor, doing “it.” Younger people from a previous decade—the 80s?—went up and down, drove trucks so the headlights shone on my lover’s bare ass and we covered up eventually, closed the door. I heard them say for me it would be hard if the characteristic symbolism stopped in any way. We slept.

Running across grass that’s all I remember.

It was all about preparation and seeing the horror as a blow job was given, I took over, then made my way to a “main house” where I said what was coming. A crew of us prepared, it was like tidying up and somehow intercut I’d see the other order, a huge stack of files workers floated up and down with, contributing. One or any or all realities of the mind would go, those contents picked up and cleared from the floor or the staircase boarded up and Avie was nervous as a dog in all this. Of course the cartoonish “aliens” or other beings who ate the woman’s face transformed her once she’d given the bj, nothing more which is all some kind of easy externalized projection into received categories of death against which my relation struggles juvenilely—so rather than the baddies, green and swarming, face-eating, showing up, me and whoever wandered to a poetry reading scene the typical rows of folks, not too many like 8-10. Radically I got fully naked, people talked or pointed but I didn’t care. 

Last night, a furry thigh. Just one. Kind of pelt-like, good to the hand underneath but pathetically embarrassing—though whose fault would that be?

Snowed overnight. Now it’s just worry with all the weird shit burned off—pulling out of me the dissolved stringy mess and my mother’s coldness as she opened the bathroom door.

I left to get some food, saw it there in pink light. Cruised, no real thoughts. I’m sleeping, while asleep. It can happen I assume. Anya comes in to make sure I lock the door at night. In this world the bugs are around, my brother gives a speech. There’s no form worth keeping doing, going back to the winter before. Fully now the unreality says all, says words don’t that can’t.

I could not find my character. He was lost in this hissing yeast that settled, spread. Was found floating as this little piece of plastic who typed please don’t be disappointed. 

April 29th, just barely that day. 1:45 am job thoughts and then trying to think in French pulled me out but I was imagining bugs as I’d set myself the task of—some kind of hot dusty space enclosed with the spirit of bugs crawling through then across the counter. My car was stuck or abandoned there I found dirt in the tire drums and leaves on the dash—very lonely kind. No one around.

He wore a lavender pretty sweatshirt, said it wasn’t very good, I loved him. 

Strolling along with scissors and cutting flowers from people’s yards for my bouquet this loving and taking of all that was one previous life, now something has to happen to you. Or this other fragment coming in where I’ve written a poem about my struggles to pronounce l’horreur. In French pronunciation in public I often make a kind of desperate vowel-y gulp or drowning on vowels I don’t know my mouth’s open to the thought of an aspirated open-ended long and rounded live forever r sound there but in public. I mean the real image is Noah from the morning performing something, odd dance of grief whole life of frustration telling me I’d used him most assuredly with his hands and his face and then turned on his side or pulling something off his frame to go on.

Who were the relationships? I was alone then someone not quite my mother came asking what drinks did we want from the store. A big disaster collapsed everything pinned the body/not-body on the couch and when it threatened again my version ran upstairs and here’s the kicker somehow got peed inside of by a wolf. Because next scene I’m getting/giving the explanation. Trying to connect a potential customer (also it seems a friend?) with Lucas about his boat.

It’s May 12, 3:45 something pulled me out I don’t remember the classroom, the way now I felt the whining ego-filled lines the creep of ego spreading making over all and I knew my path would be with that other person out walking their dog “in between the rain drops,” having their biggest idea.

If it felt like possibility, certainly there was a certain amount of confusion—a parade of some sort, we wandered under Lower Wacker, Lauren was there, disaffected, that seemed odd. We had to crawl into a tiny cell and hurl ourselves unknown down a chute—I went first—to get to our graduation. We landed in the backlot the storage area of like an amusement park, someone’s very personal, idiosyncratic vision. Different kinds of ruins/“follies”—Ingrid found a person to talk to and we stalled. Steven in his smooth slightly whining way said we should really go. I got a letter in the mail then inviting me to buy books from their old press. 

Went into the house and looked around we had a key so it was okay. Sunken ranch with the fireplace in a kind of den, carpeted. Totally suburban, a home given at one point to a group of people, to a head of household, with specific though unacknowledged similarities, qualities, the government, federal agencies, laws gave this wealth of space, ways to live, each bedroom family room the kind of hygiene given the dimensions functionalities of the bathroom now my mind has complied also, my subterranean architecture submits or has been captured, I’ve used the word given—was and was not a gift. When we wander into the house it’s because the keys have come into our possession, we leave them on the counter absorbed by propertarianism.

Took a train intending Berlin—where I was originally? A train before now going somewhere then. It stopped in a country or a region I had never visited, didn’t know existed I believe the conductor said Maestricht. Think that’s Swiss but it was not. Persons sat with small livestock. I was not perturbed. The compartments were full so I stood in the hall and the window could come down, I pulled it open to the sun setting on wheat. 

They entered together it was something like a bedroom. A painting had been accomplished—forged—one of them looked around and while the other thought that this would be where they’d sleep the first encountered their own ordeal. 

Walking up Mansion Hill though in an older time. Things weren’t so so nice there was bit of repair. Noah took us to a beach he was driving. I was in a shoe store watching or following a couple looking for shoes for their kids. I knew one had died somehow. This was all in Madison where I was supposed to have lived my life. 

I had hoped reading Greg’s old copy of St Augustine before bed might lend me noble thoughts but to prove the litany of human failures I had a petty story running all night about going to a reading at which I was not honored, denied a seat at the table where folks stayed up chatting and drinking while I drove home with instructions to return in the morning. Then a long scene with Dan wearing some kind of onesie. We’re laughing in a strange niche with old furniture. I guess a noble reminder after all.

I imagined a life with animals yet was unable or unwilling. And then the tentacles came out snaked or moved to their gravity, thrust or curled, thrust in a curling sensing fashion from the figurine. I was horrified I threw it down not understanding horror but letting it live at the expense. 

It was only yesterday or a lot longer ago that version of—it’s always coming through an expansion dilation when certain animals appear. This was horses. They ran along the fence line at the bottom edge of brush. It was a kind of corner.

I spoke French, JB and Bene turned away it was humiliating. I was trying! Then we went to a student center, they basically were for college kids and stocked a lot of VHS. Don’t know what year it was. Allison was my guide so maybe 97 or 98. In the dance class next I articulated my spine rolled happily over myself and spread across the floor. Then I was driving all night, leaving home or going there.

There was a box all people currently were being made from. It would ensure the correct politics, the praxis of justice equanimity and the rising up of, the leveling of regime… it was located at the bottom of the first half of the spine, just below the neck so the new people were heads plus this box and the idea was that their bodies would grow to surround it. Not new hearts but a different program to keep life going. A forum of the old people was called how could they get the box inside them? Could there be a procedure? At this point a friend was tending to their second or third baby by putting it in a hole in the ice. It needed to be watched but not moved. I peered in and the baby was putting ice chips in its mouth. The box idea had been abandoned. 

Any particular way to capture it—fine. I admitted I’d never coded before, the feeling was college but I was somehow displaying grace of a liked well-enough TA by being there. Earlier I’d been in an apartment, refused to take the elevator and knocked on the wrong door but they were going out anyway, opened the door five secs after my knock so I could slink away. I was on the wrong floor. Concurrently or maybe in a different world these reading groups are being organized by—? Or is it a workshop? Again it’s something known to whoever/whatever is “me” in this segment—there’s a neutral feeling to this whole part, not totally sure why I’m bothering with dropdown menus on a website etc. The only possibly interesting thing was the feeling almost like real life—comprised of—and another section that’s dance class, Duncan class, and here I can tell some motivation, actually all these sections with their quotidian surfaces are deeply clandestine. Someone is there to take pictures and make a book of us Duncans. We’re not in tunics and I don’t think we move in any undulating way—there’s a kind of top-floor makeshift studio feeling that more than anything lets me know what this is. But later I’m moving or going through drawers or in a car and am about to throw something away, push it back into place, I turn it over or open it up and it’s a book of us, our dances.

Necessity, circumstance—unclear how long I’ll be staying or what could be my next move. At some point he was toweling off and I said his chest hair was like a lion’s mane, it was weird but it was.

This was someone looped up in electrical wires walking across their basement. I was trying to get but also give something. It was intended mutually to be mutual an exchange unfortunately power still remained generative. A pair of headlights in the fog balanced there like nipples. The kind of stairs built on the back—wood aligning the series of porches in bright flat neutral tv. The whole thing was tv, I was trying to extract whatever it was. The idea of a suspect unraveled but there remained harm. What was to be done with all the harm remaining? You couldn’t dream it out of existence.