The fetish—a route / to recapturing the past?
It was a heart-pounding, last minute rush
with which the boy was well familiar.
He washed his water-repellent hand
as best he could, the sweet ache an echo.
He set the petroleum jelly jar
back into the bathroom cabinet.
He stuffed the electrical-tape-wound sleeve
of banana deep in the kitchen garbage.
He ran the roll of that black tape
back down to the basement workbench.
He buried the panties that strapped his face,
just right for nostril tokes of the tart spot,
back into his mother’s dirties-hamper.
He shot to his room upon the muffler’s scrape
and recommenced his penny-rolling project.
The windows of his bedroom rattled
when the door slammed behind her,
startling him even though he expected it.
She placed her keys on the coffee table
to find, right there on the worn path
of the living room carpet, an image
pixilated on computer paper
of black thighs, spread-eagle, onto which
the hyperventilating masked marauder
had just moments before, squatting over
in ache, pumped out a diaphanous payload
that stank of starch and pool, and that cured
the ash of the so-called “Nubian Slut”—
a result of matte paper through cheap printer.
“What the fuck is this?!” she shrieked.
He jumped up from his pennies, possessed
by the fear that he had been found out. But
by the time he was opening the door,
confident that he just had to have covered
every track, he was more so possessed
by the twisted need to know, that if he had
by some crazy chance been found out,
what evidence there could possibly be,
what he could have possibly overlooked.
“What the fuck is this?!” she shrieked.
Clutching the printout at the top in a fist,
she thrust the gleaming gorgon head out
in his direction arm’s length, turning him
to stone there in the threshold, his expiry
dribbling coagulated to her feet.
Fortunate to have been banjoed to several times by Pete Seeger in elementary school, M. A. ISTVAN JR. was born and raised in what is arguably the psychic hub of North America (New York’s Hudson Valley), where it is not uncommon for a baby’s first words to be “futhark” or “astral.” Istvan’s fatal flaw as an academic is that instead of just pushing down a bulge in a carpet, where the “bulge” here is the position that he is trying to shoot down, he will staple gun the rest of the carpet in an attempt to ensure that there will be no more bulges. His effort, of course, is always in vain since he is a finite being with an underclass education and the carpet is more extensive than he can imagine. Such maniacal desire for totality is, by the way, what attracts him to the great systematic philosopher Spinoza and makes his skin crawl when Bill Murray can never kill the gopher in Caddyshack.—Listen to Shuggie Otis, watch Skin Diamond, and visit Istvan’s page at https://txstate.academia.edu/MichaelIstvanJr.
–Art by Joanna Jankowska