How to Disappear Completely // Genelle Chaconas

Once you learned how to turn yourself inside out no not just inside out but complete from the bottom outwards in the hungry directions of your young flesh. Every inch flexed and torque keyed to the highest gristle of strung. Amped to its terminal key of taut. The edges of your soul tearing from inside, rippling like vivid shift. You ran your tongue across your own innards. Tasted the neural serum of the raw organ. The flavors more intricate than possible to imagine, rotting squid, oyster, liver, brainstem. Once you learned how to invert, to disappear completely. To slide into some vivid slot of yourself. Through the many mystical tortures of being. Your sex turned on itself, pulled into every violent pocket. Sometimes even now at what seems the length of eras eons and god mind lengths of time you still remember the strange game played with yourself in the basement where you knew then nobody would look. The expressions of the limbs. Many swelter welter days. Every finger its private beckon. The house would remain. Nerve joy of every popped joint. The deep fissure closets of darkness. The pockets of cooling pus alive on your skin. Steam rising from the pine pitch boards. The emerge of every new limb like the crackle spit dribble of a fresh sun. the sound of beer cans rattling tumbleweed from the porch. That rises like a violet flush of heat red as the florid fresh just under the placental. The shape of your father’s cigar numb across the shiver bright mosquito netting. You’ve seen that layer of greasy film just beneath, clear as livid plaque. Popshots firecrackers cherry bombs hawk grenades and rockets through the grass. It’s sometimes solid like a tough piece of film. The sound of your brother’s voice. Sometimes as large as a deposited sphere ringing with private transmissions. The crackle snap musk of his muscle striding his ancient and elegant cruelty. You couldn’t have resisted the urge if you had tried. Small enough to slip through the dark fingered holes in space. You swallowed it whole. The man who would round the corner caress the side of your face with a dark liquid hand brushes your lip then slips past the mouth of the veil and is not the hallway with the spastic rippling bulb still connected has folded around the bend. Felt it course through to the end of your bowels, vibrant every inch of the way. The bodybuilder magazine was long gone from the basement. And end in some incredible void where nothing lands. The warm cocoon of the roundup keroscene glycerine, the pop rocks of disinfectant shiver in your lungs. In the weightless closed recording studio of the imagination, sub zero gravity mark, absolute zero. They create a texture of flavors across the munge palate, chemical as bliss. The new vocal chords stretch, yawn, purse and open. The echoes of the lust oceans vast as time lengthens towards each perimeter of space.

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Genelle Chaconas is genderfluid, queer, feminist, an abuse survivor, and proud. They earned their MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University (2015). Their first chapbook is Fallout, Saints and Dirty Pictures (little m Press, 2011). Their work is published or forthcoming in Primal Urge, NAILED, The New Engagement, A3, Sonora Review, Fjords, WomenArts Quarterly, Jet Fuel Review, Milkfist, Menacing Hedge, Image OutWrite, Bombay Gin and others. They enjoy schlock gangster flicks, cheap takeout, noise music, lowbrow art, the cut up technique, queer writing, and long walks off short piers.