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SETTING A FEAST ON ME / November 18, 2017




       
            I am the avalanche after eruption revealing slenderly yet I say a lot but don’t mean to. At the appointed writing hours Grandmother Gertie has mentioned scarcely the adverb but what little of it I have much inherited I yet love it on my own. For the few words I tender I may yet also modify. I am sick of loneliness but in a different place say Pittsburgh or even Turin or a far cry from time say 1945 or a slighter manner even circumstance say dieting or conditioning or when after having stared straight at the sun the love I yet name awakes. At private tables I dine nom nom nom le nom and the masticating restores munch munch much munchly the love I may have already mentioned the kind involving gulp gulp a kind of indigestion. How unpleasant is a noun “mastication” when l’insinuation of the noun itself that is someone or something yes Grandmother Gertie says always remember a person place or thing reduced to a pulp how the noun its self sounds far more attractive between mouthfuls of sauerkraut. Grandmother Gertie has always warned to not let this go on for too long but she is one to talk as if she still even says any thing any longer. Know that suddenly in the writing I am yet seized and under siege are the names of said or perhaps known no longer things around me unwritten pause unbedded. Sometimes I think my body is a frame and only a frame when during today’s lesson with Grandmother Gertie while yet I toil to write on the ottoman at the foot of her bed she says instead of doing her minding a “frame” could be among other possible meanings suchly a rigid structure formed of relatively slender pieces joined so as to surround sizable empty spaces so on and so on she goes on or quite remarkably simply nonstructural panels and so on and so on so love is construal a rendering and I am yet a panel yet famished yet furthered still just unknowable a stranger to the word though I feel an affinity an affect an appraisal stir in common strangeness. I fall asleep natal after having poked holes through the pages of my notebook dreaming of rusted panes shielding me from the rain but I am yet wet drenched in a trench I dug. There is an echo and it says the thing about love and words and their obscurity is that they force one to look again did I say one to repeat themselves when yet I am less careful with how I gnaw gnaw gnaw. Love was a dinner just beginning setting a feast on me.



Jared Daniel Fagen is the author of The Animal of Existence, forthcoming from Black Square Editions in 2022. His prose poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Prelude, and Caesura, among other publications. He is founding editor of Black Sun Lit, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an English instructor at the City College of New York. Born in Seoul, he lives in Brooklyn and the northern Catskills.