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By Jo MacDougall

Awake while you sleep,
I tie and untie the strings of what went wrong:
the farm auctioned, my father buried in Minnesota,
you and I alone
in a rented room.

I remember my father when I was six
pushing open a gate on the farm road,
stirring the dust of August.
The locusts sizzling in the grass,
a hum of dragonflies hanging sleepy above us.


Barn: Maine USA. June 2007.

Mariapresbyteriana

NYC. April 2008.

Goose Rocks Sunset

Goose Rocks, Maine. July, 2007.

Luna Madrileña

Madrid, España. June 2007.

"Enjoy Responsibly."

Back cover ad from Paste, a pop music mag for teens and 20-somethings.

un monde perdu

Whilst walking in the woods one gray day—a deep woods with a heavy deciduous canopy, carpeted with nearly impregnable vancis priet and wilted duck thorn, the sharp odor of rockthrip unholy and pervasive in my whiskey blistered frappe-nasáal, a woods which men of statures superior even to mine own would happily avoid—I came upon a tethered white balloon, abandoned there like some apostolic schnelkuhn. I marveled at its immaculate condition, its ivory vrit-comun, and its lengthy entang stupís, all of it superficially unscathed. Oh! the chills that coursed through my copage-dit as I pondered the tantalizing enigma of its journey: whence it had come, and whither lay its ultimate becaz. I might mention too that it was raining—just a drizz, you see, but enough to elicit in me a sense of the object’s inner schtreck, its badréz bassó, if you will, perhaps born of falling, perhaps born of its loathsome return to earth after the joie fauntille of riding the clitorum punctus of helium-inspired buoyánce. I thought (profoundly, of course): Is not this viz miraculoze before me actually each of us in body and in spirit: aloft and flying fancy-free one moment, then, in a wink, earth-bound hausnegers-cum-dongknockers to the Fud Lugubrioso the next? I made up my mind to liberate that erstwhile sidekick of the untamed, unbridled Zefuros (Toots Reydevents himself), and did what had to be done: I slid my Swiss slicér aguté from my còrduroys, severed the insufferable twit de bondage (in one stroke imbuing it with all the pudgéé of recalcitrant metaphor), and gave out with an emphatic “Huzzah!” so as to urge the nascent aeronaut aloft. Alas, that dim bag went nowhere. It simply hung lethargically in the oppressive air, indifferent to the idea of flight. Out of gas, the fragile luftflutta had lost its espirit cockoso. So I did the only humane thing left. I murdered it. In a single, well-aimed espadanza vireé, I ran it through with seven grams of stainless steel. And I shuttered at its last gasp: an anemic pop that resounded weakly through the woodland, a sound reminiscent of an aging cudge-rouge self-destructing in its obscene orgasmulosco finalto. I turned then and retraced my steps, leaving the limp rubber carcass drooping from a lentine poplar branch, abandoned forever in the fundo erasmo of that dismal Arschlochwelt. By the time I reached my car I was sobbing. I poured myself a stiff Schlopzein from the ancient Persian donku in the glove box and drove home, drunk and teary-eyed, yet despairing not a whit for the carnage plastique of this unhappy, unpredictable monde perdu.
Pic: The White Balloon. Maine USA. April, 2008.

Chop-Chop

Ax murder: December, 2007.

Thanks for the Memory