Children in America, and: zoo/m/enagerie, and; On Solitude, and: Famous Writers, and: Time/bomb

Children in America

go to the library to learn how to administer NARCANto stop their mother or father's heart from overdosing.

The president tells the people to inject sunlight directlyinto the lungs. I go outside and open my mouth.

Because they have no teeth, the birds swallow stones.A jaw full of teeth makes you too heavy to fly. Birds

need sunlight to oil their feathers and burn out parasites.A bird has a song for the sun each morning

to let it know it survived the night.

Zoo/m/enagerie

Time is the distance between birth and death. Parallel universes appear in real time on your screen. Place is an illusion. For instance, I am in the Palace of Versailles. The Hall of Mirrors is a place of waiting. The mirrors reflect the fountains outside the arched windows: Water spurting from an animal's mouth is the animal's passion given voice. The labyrinth where the king's son learned to read fables and got lost is no longer there. In The Fox and the Mask, the fox remarks the mask is like the head of a dead man: empty of brains. In The Swan and His Owner, a man buys a swan and asks it to sing, but swans, everyone knows, only sing when they die. Said the man, I shouldn't have asked you to sing; I should have shown you my knife. The Hall of Mirrors is between the War Room and the Peace Room. Outside, the walls are made of leaves.

On Solitude

Rats can laugh, but the dogs aren't smiling: they're hooked on oxytocin, which rises when we lock eyes with one another. Oxytocin is not dissimilar to OxyContin, an opioid analgesic which can result in a similar sense of euphoria or attachment. The oxytocin makes angry faces look less threatening and smiling faces more attractive; still, the important thing to remember about the smiling selfie in your feed is that the person pictured is alone, smiling at themselves. You cannot tickle yourself, Aristotle says, because laughter is a deception: one does not make oneself laugh. We dream alone side by side, but the dream itself is untranslatable, prey to the narrative we impose upon it. Socrates says tickling brings more pain than pleasure, which scientists now call cataplexy, a sudden, temporary paralysis. Rats are ticklish and can't say no.

Famous Writers

There must've been some incident, something to push both Dickinson and Proust into isolation, the horse thought as a student, but now he thinks time and immortality require one's full attention. Time is essential, but the horse is writing about place: The seat of memory is a horse at sea, and the mind works like a crossbow taut between geographies. Proust, Dickinson, they could write about time by removing space or at least containing it in one room. Dickinson did not attend her father's funeral, but stayed in her room and cracked the door. Funerals are, for the living, social events, but to think about death, one needs a limited frame: a wooden lid cleft for viewing, a door suggesting passage or, one imagines, on the other side of the room, the window opened. Proust, on the other hand, in his cork-lined bedroom, is more akin to a body of ripe fruit. The French, you know, throw their wine corks into the fruit bowl to keep away the flies. For the horse, isolation is placed in his little cottage hermitage by the sea. Memory is corporeal. Downstairs, the body in the coffin is folded as if inside an envelope left unaddressed. The horse was tired and, while looking at a Twombly, saw a van Gogh wheat field, a point to rest...