No Help for That | Jackie Clark

(Stark room, one chair facing panel desk with four chairs, though no one is sitting, Girl #9 is front of the single chair, Screening Room Security General in front of the desk facing Girl #9, while three lackey, mongrel looking men are behind the desk dressed in uniform, the one on the left has a…

Anonspecificarticle forreferring oneto general butoften unambiguousreferents further awaybelonging only in spaceexisting of many whose likenesscan not be separated: a lonely wailthrough my speakers, not the lonely wailthere is no ownership—to be a the instead of a afixed with present and possible future, definite pastunfurling among stories of conviction and pressed uponbooks that make ideas and…

1. Remember that Odysseus’s scar remains even when he returns home. 2. The highway will always be backed up; the side streets came from necessity. 3. In this way time welcomes a pause. 4. Carrying enough supplies in one bag for this trip poses pragmatic problems. 5. This does not imply that attempting is purposeless.…

In the bed there is a body. It is a room with no door. The lack here implies openness. The lack implies loneliness. There is a desk with a chair, a couch with coffee table, a reading lamp for the evenings. Despite the horizontal wish for language, it still only descends vertically down the page.…

It’s a relatively easy task was the first thing that she said. Actually, it was the first thing that she wrote. She had been up all night. There was no real reason to be writing now. Many choices have already been decided for her. She writes anyway. It was easy, she said, because it didn’t…

There is a hole in the story; a shade. On some days there is time, he said,but what time there is never adds up to anything much more than halves. In this hole, the accomplice is the accomplice only without the name. He issomething other than what she knows. Often times the weeks go by…

She asked him what she should have been doing this whole time. The physical space had accumulated so much so between them that plugging the gaps,the layers of space which can exist between people, was more than each could sustain. His physical space was small. The lines that drew him out of the house, twenty…

It was around that summer that the willing began to read Proust.Ignorant to the succinctness of it being read during that particular season, she picked it up on what seemed a whim after the accomplicehad loaned it to her months earlier. She had in fact tired to read the book then, had read the first…

the accomplice had a sense of excitement himself. he had always enjoyeddriving through tunnels, thinking of the men who had laid the asphalt some morning at three a.m., wearing their hard hats, making the worldbigger. as a passenger, the lights in the tunnel look as if they were one running consistency, firm enough to catch…

eventually, the skin between my toes will expose bone i will say that my dishes were always cleanand that i only drank beer on the weekends. i hold the door always for the person behindme but the timing is never right, i linger.