Pig Photo

I was the pig photo because he asked. These ham shirts we’d been blessed in got stuck against our make, and the fridge kept coming open, ruining the Invocation dinner. We’d already lost the pudding and the yurt. On my black back I carried my ten brothers to the location outside Adam’s where we watched the sun unspool and make a halfie. More guests arrived, in seize. My father’s lover, the photographer. The invocation cloth was coming down. In sight of the officiates, I fed the gift pig his photo with my own arms, squealing, then I became the pig again, my best brother, another night. From in the pig I heard our landmine getting cold, its circuits spurting pearl juice in my ham. Still, the cauldrons would not stop screaming. In the ash I raised my hand.

Dog Photo

I was the dog photo for the second ceremony in which the women became cream. I had to hurry up and piddle so there’d be music. The floor rising toward its double: the house above our house above our house. My skin shirt had me on it, wearing another shirt with me on it wearing another shirt advertising assmeat, soaked clear through. Inside the shirt I was already holding the dog photo I would become when this began again, as it would have to. The dog inside the photo inside the shirt had become Adam. The furor of his cut glew in the divots around his “Love Me, Kill Me” smile: spittle fleck in rainbow peel over our Christmas, a ceiling we for some seconds could believe.

Crow Photo

In the crow photo I am fucking the crow from behind with a large white pillbox in the image of my mind. I did not want to fuck the crow; it called and called me over the silicon of my days endlessly and whitelessly until I could no longer feel my brunt or swim away. I came into the smallest room of the local arena of our fine town after Black Dinner, into a ballroom cordoned out of glass. Of the sand the glass was made of the mites will ride and listen while I fuck the crow into a man. Though I am not yet a man myself, I believe in the solemnity of cock, and when the crow spurts there are diamonds, and I cannot control my hands.

Dream Photo

You and me and the seven children my brothers plan to make from the same woman and the crow and pig and no one else, all here crowned in the smallest room where the next wedding will take place. The rates for pew and pastor in this day’s dimension are pretty high, but it will be a charming ceremony, full of ardor, and the aphid blood is free. Try the Anatomy Crackers, they are delicious, and will ferment in your heart of hearts a home. Unfortunately, this is not the actual ceremony, and this is not ours. Outside your body still is bone. In this picture of this picture, all my fur is upside-down.

Ram Photo

In the ram photo I am disappearing. There are all these other men. They have taken the ram quite far from me. You can see it in the grain. You can see the bulging in the men’s throats and in the cloth around their pants. They will destroy the ram. The ram was my dearest friend. He gave me anything I asked, despite his own silent, gleaming libido. Had he lived long enough to match you here, I would have took your name and made it his. I would have replaced your name with Cord of the White Brick, From Which All Future Gods Are Burst. You would have had to run through the streets when you were hungry with the termites spitting against any inch where you would walk, and you would grow erect in your clean places, the places of your childhood, and your new name would force you to make fuck: you would fuck weak and praying numbers, in the quiet manner of the whipped. You there at any hole in our fine stupid city of Worship photos. Within the hole of whole of what you forever are. Thank the ram for being removed. Thank me for disappearing inside the rump you left for dead.

Witch

3 cups white evening
3 centimeters shorn mind of the wild idiot by night
3 pulls from the cup of the betrothed father’s worming sample
3 cakes caught in a pill
3 udders sewn from brother leather, stuffed with the evidence of worship of a hole
3 throttles of Gug-Gar brand throatgrease
3 unshot pregnancy films by Anger
3 of my mother
3 of me

Child Photo

I knew the man who took this picture. His indigestion scores the lens. In that version of that year’s end, the balloons were handsome and all mine. I didn’t want to watch this any longer, but dad insisted, wishing for the stammer of the pop, which always got him shitty, my thirty other brothers begging from his testes all the hours of my life. Those aren’t my scratch marks, that’s the pigment. I am the one with the bowtie. The meatmasks in your image are as well my belongings. We ate them in ships we sailed toward upon a curd of titty meat. It was 1100 days before the ground grew back. You would have ate you, too. After the picture, the man, who is my father, confessed to having made love in his old age to a horse he turned to paste.

Horse Photo

Already it was ending and would begin again and end. The colors of the linings of the gifts made purple where I’d wished white over the white. The ascension was ascending. Each ceremony had to hide. Knots grown in along the hair around my new cerebrum ballgown. Already there I was. Already with the knives and all the bunting, calling the Dad back for more smell of my pregnancy nightlife. This horse, I didn’t even get to rub his neckpiece, though you can see that he is sore around the holes. The 13th staircase was a doozy getting jammed on. I was spurting all this milk. I knew the strain Dad put on his own surface soon would render somewhere else for our vacation. By the time we got to here, the box would be beat to cities and the cities sounded and from the sound there were mayonnaise buffets and shirts with [my name] and passion fits that gave us kids. I’d have more than I could take to bed. The heat of the horse’s hide against my vulva made me come more in my mind than he or any man had ever, and, and.

Cat Photo

At the top of the surface, our glands were mink. The prism of someone unfolded in my breast pocket and flew aboveground to kiss and kiss the sore inside that brother-murdered buzz. You could hear it for a thousand meters. Then the blooming rumpled up. Then the groomsmen had their dicks out and beat the mainframe codex from my mind. I knew I wanted to be wed to father. I knew I would stay white. Then the surface strobed in pickle. My cords. My legmeat rubble music. The hole was far. The prism went on and on unfolding, screaming its old glow.

Photo Photo

Dad’s legs of rubber. Dad’s reverse mind. His arms already weighed a house. In each house the animals were doing buttfuck, and I was in them, and beside them, though I no longer was the pig. My mom was with us also, and my ten brothers, and all the women Dad had rubbed. All my lives. Dad’s codex nostrils. Dad’s obliterating thumb. In the houses more were coming. They came out of the spooge. Dogs from pigs and pigs from kittens from the photos from the wash. More than the houses, it was swearwords. It was anything we’d been asked off of by god. The fuzz around Dad’s kidneys. The lash inside his pump. Look at my Dad’s eyes. See how they’re trying. Do it. See the child inside the dump. After this look, he would close them. Do it. The color would be glue. He would never see again, me or mom or any of his wives. This silence would be the all for which through every wedding night he’d prayed.

Grow Photo

In the last I was the Grow photo, in unseason, because that’s who stuck around. I could no longer get my nipples wet, or see the zippers, so I let him have it all. I let him eat the whoops out of my manger and my center and my mutt. The holes left would be Christ. Christ is risen. We’d walk around for hours, have a long lunch. I’d learn a language. It would snow dice. The guns would come down, in my rising and resizing, flame pushed under flame. Here light would mention anybody. Light would let me know.

Blake Butler lives in Atlanta and edits HTMLGIANT. He is the author of Ever and Scorch Atlas. In Spring 2011, Harper Perennial will publish his novel, There Is No Year.

 
Writer’s Recommendations

Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes by Wayne Koestenbaum.
A series of crib notes re: the sex life and operatic life of a strange creator in the mode of a more modern Genet with insane sentences one after another. Lots of awkward fucking and suicidal weirdism and ruminations on making and getting on.

Omensetter’s Luck by William Gass.
This book makes senses out of sentences and sentences out of senses: there isn’t really anything else like it. I love most Gass, this is my favorite.

The Cow by Ariana Reines.
I wish I could pull of what Ms. Reines pulls off: she is just spitting from the center of somewhere else. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to actually put this away on a shelf, I want it out.

Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate by Johannes Göransson.
This will be coming out in late ’10 or early ’11 from Tarpaulin Sky and is just phenomenal, like all of Johannes’s writing. A weird stage show of atrocity and bodies and language poses and syllable mirrors.

Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, by Pierre Guyotat.
The most brutal book I’ve ever read, and one of the most gorgeous; it is relentless in ways few could ever hope to be, in any medium.

Homepage photo via Flickr by loes kieboom