"Duty-Free Ossuary"

MLA Chernoff

MLA Chernoff is a poet, performance artist, meme curator, recovering academic, and—if the Canada Council asks—a novelist, who definitely knows how to write a novel. Their debut full-length poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in the fall of 2021. MLA is also the author of several chapbooks, including delet this (Bad Books, 2018), TERSE THIRSTY (Gap Riot Press, 2019), executive dysfunction (nOIR:Z, 2021), and SCRIED FUNDAMENTS (above/ground press, 2022). They hope you are having a real nice day; sorry no jokes in bios today, just vibes. :’)

“‘Duty-Free Ossuary’ offers mangled impressions of the binge-watching habits I developed over the course of the pandemic. I could literally be watching anything (even Family Guy) and not really notice or care, a strange non-epistemology that makes me (re)consider how intellectual property and algorithms have evacuated-exacerbated-excavated Walter Benjamin’s notions of the ‘flâneur’ (saunterer/idler) and the ‘badaud’ (gawker/bystander): ‘In the flâneur, the joy of watching is triumphant. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the gaper; then the flâneur has turned into the badaud.'”

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I want to wander through the
Woes with you,
my wobbling Wodin,
let’s make
the stone stony
and in all your
little likenesses,
the horn horny
in a non-partisan
promissory.

Will me higher
through your faculties
watch The Faculty and
remember the haze
that filters your memory,
that little death
memento mori
in such a tiny hurry;
will me higher
and provide me
a chance to jump
into your fault and stream
and swim under you
like breadcrumbs
mouthward in their
footprints,
sweeping the feet
until full fall falters.

Okay, but—
I told you, Peter,
you can’t handle
they/them pussy.
It’s just too lively,
too full of Spinozist
goop, gallons of metricity
and complicity in
paunches of potentia.

But what of Paul, Ringo, Mary, Lois, Stewey?
There’s just so many names in your web
of lies, your rhizomatic who-ha.
I’m all petered out of your little talk
of praxis, your fuck marry kill
of getting out of bed. I want
to be stronger, I was never baby,
just a bit
tired—wheeling for something
south of Sambation, talk of something
better, tastier, a Sabbath I can remember
in the black-walled room
with yellow light blaring.

It is here that I am singing a silent song
with no contradiction
in tone or in tune
that is to say,
saying that is too
much for me to bare, barrenly,
I am a baron, trumped,
I step into the living room
and slick my toes into the dune
of crumbs forming around
the growth of your claws
and I sing to it that I have

I have checked off my to-do list
most things, most other things, save for
“creative writing.”
And yet, these lines
fulfill the function
and the functionality
of time slipping through my cracks,
of mishaps so promissory, a promise of
being sorry for later on and
being pardoned for having-meant-to-say
I am not having had a good thought
on a good day.

What is the future of an archive,
a smile or a smirk in the pane?
What is divinity to a
yikker of hammers,
rolling through the hay?

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