1.
Deep sea is inverted domesticity
the stillness of a glass of water drawn
from the tap without the tap or the water
or the glass; a space where the idea of
home is a transparent sleeve I zip
my skin in, a portable repository
of felt safety, a potable turtle shell
clear as air, hard as uncut wood, offering
shelter that expands pliantly to meet the
branched demands of the day. A residue
network whose circumference is unlimited,
whose center is everywhere, is wherever
hands join even for an instant, even
from a distance, an imprint of hands clasped

2.
from a distance, an imprint of hands clasped
recast as nodes threading edges across time
in a web of points and lines we linger in as
networked afterlives; interdigitated matrices
waving to say “hi” or “help” from much too
far out, a pointer finger pressing “send”
before spelunking thru undersea fiber optic
cables as tantric data: call it a way of
seeing waves of dispossession break away
to reveal their opposite shape; call it waves
of spacious and respectful embrace of
the radiant other; call it laying out
pillows on the rip-rap, making practical
offerings for other people’s comfort. 

3.
Offerings for other people’s comfort
keep the web warm and soft, not stable.
People increase their pain tolerance by
knotting hands with real friends. Belonging
feels analgesic. Laying down a sword
at the site of perceived threat, lying-in
friendship to do less instead of more;
capillary waves of doing less, making
space for more people to swim in the
irreducible radiance of difference
as homecoming, as “calling in,” as
solidarity. When a cast breaks away
from the liquid, slip-filled cavity of
the mold it berths a reversal of 

4.
the mold it berths a reversal of
the core, clay form’s original
impression, a negative copy of
non-coding DNA, antisense:
a rejection of the idiom that women
are vessels, uh-uh, I’m coming out against
that version of “worth,” bounded by pulsing,
empty possibilities interred in
the forever-detonating womb.
As a woman bearing a child past
child-bearing age, or so my OB
told me, my reproductive organs tried
so hard they turned inside out, like berserkers’
war-contorted sinews before the great 

5.
war-contorted sinews before the great
cattle raid; my soul feels most at home where
my body is least in control like raiding
berserkers whose kneecaps face backwards
as they clash unto death among friends
over the possession of a brown bull
in the Táin, my role models growing up.
These are my peoples’ people, inter alios,
so I think I can safely identify
in my genetic flows their drive to stop
at nothing to regain something that always
belonged to itself anyway, like my
efforts to grow mysterious to myself
in order to know myself more fully. 

6.
In order to know myself more fully
I return myself to whatever “it” is,
the “it,” that animates the living bull,
that quickening “it-ness” passing through chasmed
matter en route to the supernatural.
Maybe I’ll name it spirit or genius
or divine dreaming, or maybe it’s a
goddess in someone else's pantheon
churning cosmic waters, agitating
the cloudy cream of galaxies until
fat cells break down into the “butta” Francis P.
the street cart vendor at 35th & 5th
spreads on an ancient grain bagel for me,
battling morning sickness with a carb-bomb. 

7.
Battling morning sickness with a carb-bomb,
David Harvey once said Karl Marx once said
you can predict the onset of revolution
by tracking what an average worker eats
for breakfast, but I don’t think either meant
reproductive laborers, or forced laborers,
which is childbirth without choice, society
without abortion, and back here on planet
Present-tense, prehensile Earth, green-bespattered,
blue planet, planet teaming with life, pregnant
with fire, wedded to water, courted by
natural law, where I live, my friend Aurash
Khawarzad points out that “accuracy
in one place [on the map] creates distortion 

8.
in one place [on the map] creates distortion
in another,” and I know he’s right, here,
so he must be wrong, somewhere else. It’s true,
that what I saw with the flashlight I overlooked
under floodlight. To survey the landscape
I turned my back on the sea. While spotting
between periods pointed toward
perimenopause, it turned out to be
a surprise pregnancy. The biggest surprise:
my desire to assure safe passage
to a person I’d always suppressed
my desire for, a child, this child
residing inside the person I’d always
suppressed entirely, I.E., myself,

9.
suppressed entirely, I.E., myself,
opting to be somebody else to be
seen and heard at all. All of us, the real me(s)
and the baby rappelling as a team
toward the vaulted, pre-life tunnel’s cut-off
into a day-like, violent source of sterile
light crowned in plastic gloves, an apostrophe
for doctors, ready to catch and measure
new life as it flops out of an open
wound or an open mouth onto a silvery
snow bridge linking the hospital bed to
the glaciated edge that borders and
bounds “livability,” inside our own
micro-Goldilocks Zone: a good job 

10.
micro-Goldilocks Zone: a good job
with health care, a railroad apartment
across from a well-appointed city
park, well above the post-Sandy FEMA
floodline, enough money not to worry
everyday about money. At our first
sonogram, I imagine my XY
fetus as a female whale in order
to approach the unapproachable, his
mystery, the way my soul bristled to
harbor a biological male, undergoing
spinal fusion surgery to merge trust
and fear in a single column, and tg
THANK GOD for abortion btw bc I got 

11.
THANK GOD for abortion btw bc I got
to choose to have a child even though
conception was shit! a sheer drop off a
level field outstretching forever into
free will, all mine, interrupted by a fall,
unfooting me mid-stride: birth. But I love
gilded-age interior design too
and my uterus is lined with wallpaper
drawn by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
faunicating ferns in blistering, arsenic
green, and I wonder if my lazy reliance
on single-use plastic, freon, gasoline,
and English literature, will make him
sick or ashamed of the part I played 

12.
sick or ashamed of the part I played
in liquifying the frozen permafrost
one day? Daydreaming in the dark hospital
tower block, I re-remember fondly
my affection for the fleecy, cobalt
fur of Cookie Monster as Alistair
Cookie in his crushed-velvet red smoking
robe sitting in his plush, overstuffed, crushed-
velvet gold fireside wingback armchair
introducing Monsterpiece Theater
to the Baroque soundtrack Fanfare-Rondeau,
with its robust bursting of trumpets,
timpani, violins, and oboe... but
then I chide myself for doting on my 

13.
then I chide myself for doting on my
inner child’s unslaked nostalgia for
the myth and texture of Euro-American
decorousness, especially cute expressions
of it, since there’s nothing cuddly about
Imperialism, but, “me digress,”
Cookie says. Light waves travel in a straight
line but bend at the boundary between
two mediums, they move more slowly through
dense matter, like water, which is why water
refracts light, distorting or exploding
repetitive patterns. Try this water
distortion experiment: 1: place
an empty glass 4 inches in front of 

14.
an empty glass 4 inches in front of
the image of an arrow pointing
left to right, the trajectory of time
and evolution, 2: fill the glass
with water from the tap to make a “water
lens,” 3: observe arrow flip its course, right
to left, west to east, the direction
of memory. But are memory and
evolution really oppositional
flows? The banking model of evolution
vaults memories of heritable traits
in the safety deposit box. What if
Darwin meant the survival of the most
adept at mutuality endure? 

15.
Adept at mutuality endure?
A different story. Water distortion
is most pronounced when linear patterns
appear to round and bulge through a cup
of water, half-drunk, on a walnut sideboard
buffet in a breakfast room wallpapered
with William Morris’ Trellis, its grillework
of rigid bars, swerving birds and deeply
recessed leaf shadows safeguard the illusion
of depth. Deeply recessed leaf shadows
repeat the illusion of depth, depth
intended to foreground walls never
intended as background, a blooming,
intrusive beauty as pure glitch. History 

16.
intrusive beauty as pure glitch. History
in (some) public K-12 might as well be
the application of Victorian
wallpaper in a bus depot’s locked public
bathroom, a repeating pattern completely
unembarrassed by its flat and authoritative
attempts to contain and control present
flows, papering over a palimpsest
of gray, lead paints, deadening sensitization
to the present. Wallpaper: a non-structural,
two-dimensional surface that covers
over solid, weight-bearing walls, walls
that contour three-dimensional space,
for example: a bus station, a space 

17.
for example: a bus station, a space
of transition; a space station, a space
of observation; a home space, the space
of the cave of the origin of the myth
of the nuclear family; a living room
where reps of the human species fête
eternity in ignorance of the umwelt
under the wall’s skin, crawling literally
crawling with littoral arthropods, a
shadow colony known most intimately
to the electrician wiring a home
into relationship with the power grid,
like biohacker Pierre Hughes’ seething
installation (infestation?) of ants 

18.
installation (infestation?) of ants
and spiders at LACMA, where Human, a
pink-dyed, doe-eyed whippet pup slept on mink
stoles next to an open book. I think it
was Huysmen’s À rebours, translated Against
Nature or sometimes the Grain, about
an aesthete supplanting the present
with artifacts of decorative excrescence
suggesting “memories of more congenial
times,” begging the question, congenial
to whom? The magnitude of his visionary
disaffection is embodied by his pet,
a diamondback terrapin whose back is
glued to a lattice of diamonds that suffocate 

19.
glued to a lattice of diamonds that suffocate
the reptile in the breakfast room, wallpapered
slime-mold-orange emitting the morbid
radiance of a mesh safety vest hanging
from a chain-link fence at a nuclear power
plant mid-meltdown. But the important thing
about water distortion is that linear
patterns appear to shift when looked at through
a liquid lens. On the slide deck, Aurash
overlays “these are all accurate”
in Barbara Kruger cherry red lipstick
slanted sanserif text on a grid of nine
flattened, spherical maps of the globe, nine
solo globes representing nine different 

20.
solo globes representing nine different
if not conflictual worldviews, umweltons
of worlds ordered by friction, fiction, and
collision, and those are just the human
forces at play on planet give and dig,
planet give and take shelter immediately.
I imagine trueing Zeno’s arrow and aiming it
at recesses in recesses, the hole in the hollow,
a home full-boled in a nuclear-proof tube
planted in the backyard. I imagine
getting deeper as a means of good-old-
fashioned escapism, going down to get
out. I donned a hospital gown at “the
edge of time itself,’ watching the nominal 

21.
edge of time itself,’ watching the nominal
trajectory of the James Webb Satellite
on my cell phone, guided by, no lie,
D.D.O. Jean Luc Voyeur and M.O.M.
Carl Starr on Christmas Day unfolding
its spectacular golden array. M.O.M.
for Mission Operations Manager,
by the way. Every puddle is a portal Maya
Deren travails and I picture passing through
en route to David Bowie’s living room
where Ziggy Stardust passes tea to Tony
Conrad, all watching Yellow Movie raptly.
Breathless, I feint at the asphalt bottom
of one last, watery crevasse to discover 

22.
one last, watery crevasse to discover
it’s just a puddle. But just? I dove
competitively in high school and spent
the better part of puberty holding
my breath in the silence of the diving well.
As a swimmer I sought form in formlessness.
As a lifeguard, I honed an eye for struggle
on the horizon. As a platform diver,
I courted the spins, dizziness a soft
slew of fresh interpretation. I sought
the spins, dizziness as a chimney gifting
fresh interpretations of the answer
to the question, “how did I get here?”
I was trying to reel history in so 

23.
I was trying to reel history in so
I could recast the line as a path
out of the past. The sea is nothing
if not re-interpretable, right? Like
The Swimmer, one summer, in other peoples’
paradises, my friend Amy Ruhl chills
on deck chairs, gazing languidly at pools
nobody ever swims in, their absentee
owners enjoying the privilege of neglecting
privilege from their second, second home.
From my third eye I peep Amy falling
asleep with no sunblock on and UV
radiation seeps into my dreams. The burn
is invisibly deep, a micro-fascial flame 

24.
is invisibly deep, a micro-fascial flame.
I am keeping space stable by counter
balancing the real and the ideal,
the pool and the sea, I am keeping space
to myself for privacy, holding space
to grieve for anybody or maybe
nobody but me. Grieving for anybody
or maybe nobody but me breeds private
instability that I pit against
the public grain. I begin to live to
wreck the wrecked order of the day for personal
gain, I begin to see my desires as
social research: I am my desire’s name,
hungry to be intimate at the company 

25.
hungry to be intimate at the company
picnic but militantly anti-trust
among stately corporations; I am
the desire to be a last-ditch host
holding a soiree poolside while helicopters
spray orange fire retardant over
the winery’s grape-laden trestles.
I’m imagining me and an amoeba
on a dating show. Home is about hiding
the family firm from the will to community,
the will to live, to live well, pitted
against the will to power. All the whaling
captains’ mansions come with widows’ walks for
watching the sea, the end of every sentence is 

26.
watching the sea, the end of every sentence is
a full stop: a caesura, a monthly
molting of my uterine lining. My
period returns after 2 years;
beginnings repeat. My desire to produce
excess order expresses itself
at home, in homes, my desire likes
a long corridor swathed in dusky
botanical prints depicting cat-eyes
glistering among succulents. My desire
is a well-lit kitchen island, reflective
chef’s knives sharpened nightly, neatly sliced tri
colored peppers for the vegetable stir-fry.
My desire wears matching sweats in blush 

27.
my desire wears matching sweats in blush
pink leopard print all day and plain old white,
mole-constellated skin at night. On a
vegan leather couch, my desire watches
reruns of I Love Lucy in a private
screening room overlooking the end
of every sentence, the sea, while my baby
drinks donated breast milk from a BPA-
free silicone bottle with its gold-standard,
“shouldn’t cause cancer,” seal strip-
mined among mounting, ambient environmental
hazards: poor nature hasn’t felt like itself
since at least the advent of calendars.
Whales crave space, a pod of six swimming 

28.
whales crave space, a pod of six swimming
six miles apart covers thirty-six miles.
I’ve said it before, but repetition
is key: if proximity is redundant
to the pod, it’s not to me. I want to
be in a room with you, in a body
with you, in a brain with you, in a unicellular
home for two or more with you and you and
all of you. The end of every sentence
whispers “come in,” an invitation to swim.
Sperm whale oil is a lubricant used
to wax watches, sewing machine parts, and
pistons because it doesn’t corrode metal.
Tick after tick, its film is a flimsy 

29.
tick after tick, its film is a flimsy
skein that keeps the gears slipping. In the sweat
shop a worker works the thread’s tip into
a tiny spear with his lips so it fits
through the eye of the sewing machine needle.
Two whetted lips have kissed most commercial
textiles. Kiki Smith exhibited
a glass microscope slide with a smear of blood
next to a silkscreen reading, “Kiki Smith,
1983.” Swathed in a spec of spit,
each stitch is a self-portrait of the seamstress
preserved as DNA. While I button
a silk shirt, fold the crispy linens, hang
a shower curtain contrived of eyelet 

30.
a shower curtain contrived of eyelet
lace: I think “I’m that intimate with people
toiling at impassible distances.”
Desire is the keyless house, not the house
that can’t be entered but the house that
can’t be contained because it's everywhere
for everyone forever. The new word
for want is every word in the English
language. My desire to disrupt order
is irrelevant because the sea surrounds
my desire, swamping everything that felt
like a fact. I miss the facts but I’m berserker
for a future that hasn’t been written, so fuck
the facts but fuck the people who don’t believe 

31.
the facts but fuck the people who don’t believe
the very fact of existence warrants
respect. If not factual accuracy,
something else has got to be guiding
the historical script, right? Isn’t it relentless,
ethical reinterpretation of not
so much what’s come before but what’s coming
next? And isn’t that what water does when
it distorts an image? A medium that
precipitates an apparent if not actual
shift in patterns? To be is to long,
belonging dwells in being, longing is
a lubricant that doesn’t corrode desire.
An underground volcano erupts and 

32.
an underground volcano erupts and
a microbial bubble on the lip
of a vent on the bottom of the ocean
bursts. The coral reefs produce calcium
carbonate more slowly in acidified seas
and my teeth, leached of calcium by my
baby’s growing bones, deteriorate
at astonishing speed. That’s my birth story,
a diminishing of self inside of love.
Now I’m making room in the deep sea
for the things I miss, making room in the
deep sea for the things I want to say, making
room in the house for the deep sea is unnecessary.
Making unnecessary room is the work 

33.
Making unnecessary room is the work
of privacy. Privacy is deproductive
labor. Swimming with friends (apostrophe
for eternity), I am titillated
and alarmed by the vibrant proximity
of unknown life like a swimmer in a
bloom of stinging jellies craving safety
without isolation, I don’t know if
I should flow towards or away from the source
of anxiety: people. Swimming is
social, but the deep sea is privacy
by other means. I think in company
but I live alone or I swim in company
but I think I’m lonely. I guess I’m the kind... 

34.
but I think I’m lonely. I guess I’m the kind...
of witness who lets things happen
instead of intervening. In the deepest
seas the never seen sun presses reset
once daily in the pitch dark because we
agreed to do our jobs irrespective
of their measurable impact, or, can
we agree to that? Giving birth bought me
my goodness back but it cost me my teeth.
I keep my dentures bedside, suspended
in a glass of water from the tap.
A liquid lens distorts history, wakes
different worlds from every REM stage sleep.
The deep sea is inverted domesticity.