Ethel

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Ethel

Ethel

The Parachutist

by
Joe Fletcher
Joe Fletcher is the author of the poetry collection The Hatch (Brooklyn Arts Press), the novella Jenny Haniver (Bored Wolves, forthcoming), and five chapbooks, including Kola Superdeep Borehole (Bateau Press) and Already It Is Dusk (Brooklyn Arts Press). His scholarly monograph, William Blake as Natural Philosopher is published by Anthem Press. He teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina and in the North Carolina prison system. He is Assistant Editor of the William Blake Archive.
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from The Parachutist

Nourished, he fell asleep, his head still submerged, bare ass in the air, his upper orifices still mechanically ingesting the water, which tasted like stale days before his fall, alien days, beginningless. Muddled, he became a house of dreams:

A woman with one eye and one arm and one bone rocked him in an iron cradle amid a gray rain that smelled of nitrogen as it splatted his upturned face. The woman would not look at him, but fed him clotted blood. She sang out of her one mouth, her wound. In the song an initiate is flown over a forest on a winged tiger; they stop to rest on a granite promontory, when a god parts the clouds and puts his finger in the initiate’s mouth. The initiate’s lips moisten around the god’s finger, which tastes of turpentine and eggshells, but the initiate cannot breathe; the tiger is now a spider, and leaps on the god’s invisible face, stinging it such that with a scream the god removes its finger from the initiate’s mouth, the spider is again a winged tiger and together with the initiate they fly the wounded god down into the forest and hang it like a spent menstrual rag on a branch of pitch pine. The song continued as he fed, its lyrics rinsing the leaderless network of light that was his brain. Above the woman and above the rain he saw a comet streak the sky, flung from the vortex of a neighboring system and pregnant with intelligence. So eager was he for it that he began to forcefully lick the palm of the one-armed woman once the clotted blood had been devoured. Her palm was rough and his tongue made a harsh sound against it.