Each issue of KNOCK, we feature one or two new
books that made a mark on us as we put the issue together. Books that
are either just released or set for release within the next few months.
Christian Hawkey’s new book came out in
April, 2007. He is also the author of The
Book of Funnels—winner of the 2006
Kate Tufts Discovery Award—and the chapbook, HourHour.
Hawkey teaches at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York..
*
Next issue, look for an excerpt from Jayson
Iwen’s novella, The Momentary Jokebook,
winner of the Cleveland State University Novella Prize, and set for release
in early 2008.
The Enterprise
The hatch opens, read the instructions,
only in one direction: into you. Instantly
I pulled my hand away
from the handle
while a voice, my own,
but deeper—movie-trailer deep—spoke the words:
He’s pulling his hand away from the handle.
The hatch was a glass hatch, six inches thick.
I could see the magnificent blue marble
of the earth, which bored me.
Even if it looked like an enormous eyeball floating in space
it would still bore me. An asteroid
rotating like an asteroid—that is, slowly—
passed by. I thought:
perhaps this isn’t a hatch
after all, but the glass surface of a game, a video game…
Certain electric typewriters
have a silver, round typing ball, circled
with letters, symbols, punctuation, all slightly raised. When you hit
a key…
& the first telegraph, invented in Spain, involved 26 humans, each
holding the end of a wire. When a letter
was struck in the next town, sending an electric current
down the wires, the corresponding human, once electrocuted,
screamed its assigned letter.
The earth returned, this time
even smaller. A thin script of clouds
began to form, increasingly dense,
swirling inward, or rings swirling outward,
unwinding from some furious, endlessly regenerating center
or into it, I couldn’t tell.
Nervously I squeezed food from a syringe
directly into my mouth. This,
despite the warning label:
Insert Only Into Abdominal Feeding Tube.
My mouth, at some level, is still a feeding tube.
Also, conceivably, my ears, my ear canals. Perhaps
the first instructions were not written down,
or out. Perhaps they weren’t even spoken.
The earth, by now, was nearly invisible, gone.
BIRTH OF A NATION
“We are witnessing the birth of a nation.”
— NPR journalist on the inauguration of East Timor, 19 May, 2002.
Did the world squat down & push out
a nation? Was it a nation before the world
called it a nation? Do they have customs?
Do they honor the power cats have over ice?
Is their nation-birthing being observed? Hello, I’m Hans.
Do they have a way of identifying their citizens?
Do they brand them? Give them a number?
Are they immune to certain diseases?
Are pharmaceutical operatives surreptitiously
lifting during the night skin samples from their shins?
Will they have a military to defend their borders?
Perhaps they are an island. Can they defend
themselves against the sea? Are their children
born with missing limbs, heads fused to armpits?
Do they consider such children Gods? Heads of state?
Beings who are born into pain and, as a result,
capable of sensing rogue cellular structures
from great distances, capable of dreaming
their way into a perfect world, capable of
feeling the future of an entire nation
in a phantom limb? Do they have
a national language? If someone says “crustacean”
will another think “well-armored vehicle”?
If someone says “soda jerk” will another think of a
large, possibly obese child
attacking a coke machine with a crowbar?
If someone says “spirit” will another start
choking, uncontrollably, to his death?
Do they speak in clicks & soft exploding accents?
Do they sound, at large gatherings, like a popcorn machine?
Do they communicate with their strangely powerful shoulders?
Do they articulate panic by squeezing air
through their tear ducts? Does this cleanse
the national language? Is it on the brink
of extinction? Is a dead language a body
that has consumed itself
to the point of having no point? Is a dead language
any empty stomach, growling? Is a dead language
capable of speaking beyond its own grave, late at night,
when a low moon drifts
through the banyan roots and a child wakes,
unable to wake, and begins whispering for the sake of
whispering, for the sake of keeping time with his pulse?
Do they incinerate their dead? Do they make soap from the ashes?
Is cleanliness a way of honoring the dead? Do they,
as a nation, have a genetic weakness
for alcohol? Are they predisposed to sudden defecation?
And is the measure of a nation how they dispose
of their waste? (If an island, how sad for the sea.)
Do they have a flag? Is it a thumbnail, a painted tooth, a tattoo
on the eyelid so that, at night, the nation sleeps
as one nation? And the colors? Lampblack
to celebrate their powers of night vision? Peach, for sensuality.
Neon mahogany to symbolize their love of wood products?
Would other nations refuse to fly such an ugly flag?
Do their children reach 300 lbs before the age of eight?
What is their relationship to pornography?
If it was declared a national holiday
would it be a more productive nation? Do they flay
their grapefruits section by section
or do they surrender to a total mess?
Do they teach their children the delicacy of inhaling
low-flying clouds? Do they worship herons, or long
to break their legs? Do they worship, upon waking,
the first object they see—even if it’s themselves—
or do they move through the day as if it were another day,
not the one they’re living, the one with cars
shining quietly in parking lots, an infant sleeping
in a chrome shopping cart, a man hurling
his cell phone against a brick wall
and the clouds opening up, draining the sky blue,
starlings unwrapping a sycamore tree,
the long migrations about to begin?
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to Issue 7 |
