A cardiovasc

BOBBY ALTER

Grand Prize Winner

Sing goddess, the fuming, of the fuming Christ-anger of the ancient angry, fuming demi-god Peleus, and of his son, Achilleus, and of their devastation, and of their crying, sing O goddess of their great big crocodile demi-god split-heel boohoo tears and, crying lacrimosa, sing to us in thirds & thirds & thirds, give us guns to shoot each other

“bangbangbang oh haha oh how nice what what oh, how nice: Crépuscule (the flesh; diurnality); a cardiovasc. A cardiovasc is a singular rue in an angular labyrinth of numerical avenues and bellowing blvds. at the end of scarborough. A cardiovascular fairy tale is therefore an algorithm of carefully placed proteins, and a crépescular fairy tale is a child's mind-toy involving a dusk-colored terror. In scarborough there is one fairy tale that is prevalent above all others about a man named Roland and his wife the whore-at-work Alice. Roland is a cardiovasc, which is a machine that transmits capitalistic desires into a series of binary operas. The language of scarborough is similar to our own save for a shift in logical substructure i.e. the reconceptualization of the act of vomiting transposed into color theory. There are only four colors in scarborough, and each color has seventeen different names depending on what month in is in scarborough, and in scarborough there are seventeen months, one for each of the holy founders of scarborough, six of which were identified cardiovascs. The number seventeen, however, is only a euphemism in the language of scarborough, for a number whose quantity must not be uttered, nor even conceptualized, and those who attempt to undertake such a task are biologically succumbed to fits of prolonged orgasmic sensations, which is the desensitizing defense mechanism of the cardiovasc.

Roland becomes before a mirror. He takes a pencil which he has sharpened in the holy waters of the fountain in scarborough. He holds the pencil in his left hand which in scarborough is the hand relegated to the holding of surgical instruments, the hands of virgins, and the penis during the act of male urination, which is a holy act in scarborough. Roland stabs himself in the torso where his liver is. He must remove the pencil quickly so as not to poison the organ, whose function is unknown in scarborough. Remember bugs biting at your big heroin-like big blue-like veins each time you tried

to read a book

tossing massive invalid pages, shrieking, ahh, bahh, them books !, them pages

pissing and crying like pissing at every page

hands getting smaller and smaller

that them there all the world &. all the world your friend in loneliness


yes yes yes yes yes I remember.


The fairy tale of Roland and his wife the whore-at-work Alice begins in a certain café like all the rest, it was a sort of newspaper amidst the headline "Czech-land Losing Sparrows" or somesuch because that was the time that desperate sparrows began flinging themselves upon the earth. A café thrust upon. The ineffable imagination; the pale palette unique to the tile and wardrobe; tireless ‘75. Pink rose-patterned plastic, garish, overflowing construction acrimonious, malleable, unsettling. A material a skinned exogenous rhythm poised between things organic and inorganic; bountiful kitsch: garden of garrulous neon: effervescent Eden:

From here unwound the chairs and tables and endless perfect rows of jams and sugars and also white-suited chainsmoking Roland Gallimard. In one corner greasy-haired Sad Sam Timothy a hustler. Fingering a bouquet of paper flowers. A whore roles a gumchewing eye. Bursting through the front, yellowish. A glassdoor: fantastic foreigner, carressing. The hair of the nearest child's toy; an ironic cupola's bonbon tune, aghast.

Skillful premonitions towards a dubious orchestra. Stunning blonde lollipop baristas each with names ending in -a; four bourgeoises emerging: dripping with blood and coke, a leatherjacketed afficionado waits behind a wall with a perfect pickup line. Fall out to the giggles and coos of the cocaine: "O row-land!," their wide eyes dripping in hopes for a sip of a man's teeming decadence.

Ladies wipe noses, precious, white powder on a white glove, blood on a stolen fur, princesses of the city's indeterminable class of penniless aristocracy. Gallimard folio editions. Contemptuous pin-up: a photograph.

Roland who is one of the seventeen wise men of scarborough remembers a time apart when the heart grew fonder, the second act of his endless vomiting; one day the room was dark, and she was gone. Then he saw her in store windows, street corners, large elevators, dim stairwells, musty streetcars, concerts of elaborate orchestras, crowded parties, alcoholic deliriums, obsolete libraries, within corn fields, at the feet of maples, among the homeless; she dominated his peripheral; at department stores he ran his hands through a red cloth.

In summer on the street Roland sees a boy yawn for eleven seconds. Roland stops and lights a cigarette. At the end of the yawn the boy drools gleefully and Roland says, What's your name and the boy squints. A woman appears and takes the hand of the boy and looks at Roland and holds two fingers to her mouth as if smoking a cigarette. Roland takes a drag and walks away and feels thinner and repulsed by the woman and at an alley mounts a bin and grabs at a brick-rimmed window and asks the woman within, Where is she, where is my dear sweet wife Alice, is she out yet or still here or what.

"Out! Out Roland, no one is anywhere!" says the horse-haired catholic mother-lady of said Alice, matriarch of family, sputtering Catholic-type woman, saying again, Out out, until finally Roland convulses with boyish chuckling, hops around the alley-street corner, jumps the row of dead flower beds, steps up the half-undone brick steps, rasps at the door, and chimes, "Mother Steinmann, your darling, boyish, flowers, things made of candy, so open open, yes yes yes" thinking furiously, O but God woman, keep that bald man Howard at bay!

The door swings to a half-open, Roland enters with a cheeky French salutation, sticks a curious neck into the dark livingroom, eyes just missing dormant Howard, enters into the small, precarious kitchenette and, first taking a glossy tour of the icebox, terminates a neglected naked burner, sits at the wobbling circular breakfast table, pulls at a morning-old teapot, pours and, the mother entered, says, "Look here!”

Annabel's mother says, "I could call the police," and the cardiovasc, crazed stubble crawling backwards into the skin of his cheek before the matronly Catholic, exclaims in a voice,

"Look here the police: my badge," a desperate phantasmagoric: a peniscular, a panicule; a ring of eyeflowers…

"Enough Roland," says the mother, and, despondent, turns towards the alley-window as if to tend to the dishes.

"Oh but I come to talk, mother," says Roland, lapping a cold liquid.

“My ruined daughter…”

"Ah yeah maybe I haven't seen her, so I've really three stops left, so and I thought one idea might be that she'd come all the way home to mommy and daddy to be fed some lovely bowls of ah, cornflakes and pancakes and take little soapy baths with little rubber duck things see, maybe just needed one night or seven or so in that old pink-sheeted shortish little bed of hers, a thing of freud in any capacity, for there's O so much more I'm afraid, you see."

The mother continues on with a silent washing, and so the cardiovasc seems to say, "For do you know, mother, that your darling palish red-cheeked pursed-esque little daughter, being my wife and formally Steinmann but now formal-like Alice something Something-cardiovasc Gallimard my surname, that she, mother, being your daughter and only wifed-child, now employs her self vicariously, a red light-type hourly lady?"

The mother, hands within a drawer of silverware and things, pets a large knife and, silent, turns to that meticulous cardiovasc, the anti-abstemious, virginity-larcenist Roland, and, streaming smog-like rivers of that garrish contemporaneous mascara night-of-the-times, turns the tips of her red mouth toward the yellow linoleum floor, and Roland says,

"Well then, mother, is that girl upstairs then?" and the mother many times nods her head Yes, biting her lip and waving one hand about, stabbing about dumbly with the knife in the other.

But Roland says, "Ah no no you are wrong," and, delicately undoing himself from the table, handles a clean cigarette between his lips and leaves. The door behind him, the mother raises her voice so as to reach the living room, saying, "Howard..." and from the living room, the amphibian-throated father croaks,

"Woman I told you never to let him in again," to which the mother replies,

"Howard I tell you that boy loves us all." And Howard thinks, CHRIST IS FIRST YOU SHITFACED SON OF A BITCH.

A Marxist dinner engagement at the meat-packing assembly line. A burlesque affair. Peter Quince kept making jokes about fondling the chicken breast. S. the thirteen-year-old daughter of Peter Quince performed fellatio on six meat-packers and eleven Marxists and blushed. Roland the cardiovasc was called upon to clean up the blood of those who did not survive the affair.

pounding synapse-coiled cool wet unbalanced sensual subclausal conventions signifiying and unsignifying, and Roland thinks, O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, and is unable to look at her directly, from the corner of an eye reconstructing the contours of the light upon her in broad strokes against the soft grey back of his mind, and he thinks, Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and he smiles and feels his heart in his fingers, smiling, and she, Alice expressing, says,

“YOUR COCK: YOUR SHOULDER.”

Grey, glossy-eyed Roland lights a sort of final cigarette, and, turning at last upon the full form of her naked, overwhelming femininity, says,

"I crossed the city in search of you, lady, you."

"I've done the sheets over, you at last."

In the morning Roland awakes to find a decadent Alice sprawled on the morning-cold wooden floor beside the bed, she at work about to lick a sort of glossy, thin photo ripped from the inner hinge of a dark, rejected picture-magazine, and, seeing Roland, retracts the small pink tongue and announces,

"Roland: there is a God above us."

But in the same morning Roland had done a thing, and Alice came upon him with what begin with the pencil within him and what had ended with Roland holding his liver in his hands and singing a child’s song and thinking that it was a baby and dying knowing that he was a father and the last cardiovasc of scarborough.

Ah, ha-hah, no Roland, coffee nice, oh black battery-acid nice night-type &

“medium roasts,”

boardcreaks, ‘Ah’ say all, ‘thine Alice... awaketh…’

I hear there’s a port city



drink it now