yy | by Mike Corrao

yy says: I can feel the geographies of my body being extracted. yy says: there is a difference between a body with organs and a body without organs. yy says: that I do not want to exude these types of characteristics. yy says: I do not want rivers to form inside of my bones and my teeth to weather into fangs. yy says: that I have a dream about my body. It climbs over the horizon and disappears. yy says: my body never comes back and my brain becomes celestial. yy says: the essence of my soul lifts itself into the sunset and creates a new architecture. yy says: that all love is disingenuous. yy says: a body without organs must contain something else, that it cannot be an empty cavity. yy says: empty cavities often contain labyrinths. Like in the Theseid. yy says: Labyrinths aren’t real. They are the mythopoeia of the rhizome. yy says: Empty cavities are damp and often the birthplace of new ecologies. yy says: I would like to contain a universe inside of myself. yy says: but these geographies are being extracted from my body. yy says: what does that mean? It means that the grooves of my intestines are being smoothed into circular tunnels. yy says: I does not know why I was named yy. Or who named me yy. Or what yy is supposed to mean. yy says: that I do not remember what it felt like to be an organism, before I evolved into an ecosystem. yy says: that memories are stored in a structure that I no longer contain. yy says: organisms are made out of language. All language is made corporeal when it drips out of the mouths of humanoid creatures. yy says: I met a two-head being named Manoman. The heads tried to eat one another. Like titans. Like praying mantises. They were lovers trying to swallow the contents of their affection. yy says: manoman said, “I can’t bear the weight of your death.” yy says: manoman said, “What you love you must take.” yy says: Manxman said, “Planets are the largest category of assemblage. They are the three-dimensional collage which shapes the existence of its existents.” yy says: I want to be an assemblage. yy says: I do not want to live in stasis. I want to change. Permeate. Mutate. Die. And return. yy says: I want to be a living text. An organismal text. Even if it means reducing myself into something I’m not. yy says: I’m not sure how. yy says: I do not know what I will contain when I die. yy says: But I do know what I crave. yy says: self, existence, bread, milk, clothes, the taste of copper, open wounds, fertility, emptied cocks, columns of fire, muscles encased in fat, cum, airborne fungal spores, growth, change, the assemblage, the collage, to be loved by celestial bodies, to love celestial bodies, praxis, divinity, movement within enclosed spaces, geometry as it shifts from rigid to fluid, pools of architecture, the shell of gravity. yy says: he does not he, but he will do for now.

yy says: my body is a temple to the erotic. It is the curation of all of the objects that I am made up of. A body without organs is not empty. It contains multitudes like Walt Whitman’s fat tongue. “You constructed a labyrinthine narrative to negotiate where you came from” (M Kitchell). An alley of pine trees nourishes my blood. Needles protrude from my veins. The contents of my thingness is unknown to me. One day, I wake up and I exist. I do not know when it happened. But the fatigue of this realization is near unbearable. I can only move when I heave myself forward. The miracle is unexpected, and manoman sees it happen and says, “Christ, will you look at that.” And they’re right to be so shocked. The mechanical performance of my joints and muscles is impractical. But I am not swallowed by the void. Not yet. I am Earthly and fragile. The soft spots of my skin are easily punctured. I do not know what I contain because it is always changing. The predictions of what I might be are subverted by the mutations that respond to their pronouncement. Words drip out of my mouth because they are too heavy for my jaw to hold onto.

yy says: an assemblage is a human body after it loses the ability to identify itself. This narrative is a labyrinth. It’s labyrinthine. Like the Theseid. I am the walls and floors and ceilings. The sacrificial woman and the house of asterion. Asterion themself.

yy says: there is a lodge and a minotaur and a two-headed figure watching me undress. They can see all of the small and delicate pieces that make up my assemblage. I do not look like a collage. I look like a human being.

yy says: the lodge is an ugly pale yellow. It’s wilting and jaundiced.

yy says: there is no need to act hostile. manoman said, “all of the moments that led up to this one are meaningless.” manoman said, “not to get caught up in the details of one’s imprisonment.” manoman said, “there’s no difference between dying and dreaming.” manoman said, “to love what you become.” manoman said, “he cannot bend his neck enough to wrap his lips around his other head.” and it hurts me to watch them try.

yy says: the structure of a sentence is dependent on the sturdiness of its speaker and that a projection is only as clear as the lens of the projector is clean.

yy says: manoman have short stubby necks. Someone made them so that they would never be able to fulfill their desires.

yy says: the lodge is only accessible in my dreams. I’ve never gone inside of it. But I’ve walked around the perimeter in order to enter the house of asterion and feel the pleasant aura of the nearby sea.

yy says: the lodge is yellowing rapidly. I can’t go inside because it might collapse and kill me. It’s not good to die in your dreams.

yy says: I might change again if I die in my dreams. I know I won’t be dead when I wake up, but it might give birth to an idea that I don’t want to be the home of.

yy says: mutations happen after you die in your dreams. Narratives appear post-mortem. Poetry is the naked body before it’s stopped changing. This is a place for chameleons.

yy says: It feels like I’ve been in the lodge before, or as if some variation of me has. But the other variations of me are not me. They are different beings occupying the same body at different moments in time. Every variation of me is a new entity inhabiting this mobile assemblage.

yy says: this is what I’ve seen. This is what made me.

codes written in essays / colors arranged into hieroglyphics / necklaces of teeth / books written by the french intelligentsia / occult rituals in the lobby of the jaundiced lodge / carnivores eating carcasses on the side of the road / hallways splitting like river deltas / someone with a movie camera / celluloid hanging from shower rods / images of my face / euphoria and the sublime / inexperience / nervous hands / the killing of a sacred deer by agamemnon’s soldiers / missing ceiling tiles / the blueprints to my labyrinthine narrative / house of asterion / things that my mother and father said to me / a pastiche of their exact words / the desire to remain here / my family’s holy mountain in the distance / portraits of the stranger who’s been following me / stealing photographs of my visage / the removal of my old visage, and its replacement by my new one / the meshes of the afternoon / a conversation between Maya Deren and someone that I don’t recognize / the jaundiced lodge as it caves in / the weakness of soft and sickly weight / resurfacing from underneath the meniscus of a wide lake / crawling onto shore and heaving over the banks / seeing someone who I thought was attractive / a temple to organs / the sacking of the temple to organs / wanting to die / remaining

yyy

yyy says: that I feel like I’m wearing a man suit.

yyy says: every tragedy changes my biology. Every action has turned me into a different kind of being. I am not the same human or cavity or ecosystem that I used to be. I’m something unfamiliar to even myself.

yyy

Mike Corrao is a young writer working out of Minneapolis. His work has been featured in publications such as Entropy, Cleaver, Fanzine, and the Portland Review. His first novel, Man, Oh Man will be coming out in fall of 2018 from Orson’s Publishing. You can learn more about Mike and his work at www.mikecorrao.com.