Soap In A Dish Below Rain In A Valley by Connor May

Soap In A Dish Below Rain In A Valley

Connor May

Published by Electric Frog Ltd 2023.

If you are unsatisfied, then welcome.

— Peter Gizzi

O, O, O Bananas peaches a pomegranate ◊ in the training session Deanna has her

with difficulty

camera turned off and so does Owen I

find the

turn mine off so that I can make a

nightingale’s nest

cheese sandwich I’m still listening to the presenter though I can’t see the slideshow now this is the suicide awareness training I was talking about someone once thought that Deanna was my mum because of our accents

are

similar

after

this

presentation there is an emergency meeting it is 8pm already and I am thinking about watching an episode of Columbo I have recorded before I go to bed

the grass that has been cut and heaped

on some Japanese

into large mounds and has become a

islands the snails

hiding

place for insects young

have made one

children and playful mechanics has

problem even

started to rot and become slippy the

worse

colour of it is a very funny shade of green it makes you think of something your maths teacher said once you can’t remember what exactly but

the wizard’s

something about the way she moved

favourite dinner is

her mouth is reminiscent of the sickly

udon noodles with

green pallor of the grass a wizard

fried tofu and

emerges from an alleyway

orange nam jim

◊ I never would have guessed that one day I would be standing in my kitchen trying to get soap out of a dish bel ow rainfall in a valley

the wizard walked down a hall of

I am a fragment of a

pulped yams in his pocket was a brass

shadow

hyrax a clog of bone & the concept of milk ◊ a meeting room where several people are sitting on listerine blue chairs on a

everything changed

whiteboard in the centre of the room

when we caught

are the words ‘Hopes, Fears’ above a

fire

list of things in slightly smaller font the

categories

are

ambiguous

zeppelins is written just above goat dehorning a man sat in the corner climbs into a giant zip lock bag and seals himself in everyone else turns to watch him slowly suffocate they begin to slow clap

and therefore on the birch was written the first Ogham inscription ◊ Charles Olson didn’t like the concept of irony because he couldn’t see the iron in it the ◊

leathery

sea

squirt knobbly invader

excuse me! the bream is the lord of the

in Korea they are

river’s fish when I woke up in October

steamed

and saw the leaves coming off I knew

but here they are a

I would have to record it all the manta

menace

rays

the

sulpadeine

max

the

dysmorphia the sore stomachs the bruised nose (very sorry Samantha)

the idea is to get service users involved in the community in a meaningful way which means going to the chippy on a Friday night shall we go to watch the airplanes good man he doesn’t want to get out of the

astrophysicist shot

car have you tried showing him a

through wall

series

of

stickers

representing

activities in a sequence of time like walk juice car? we don’t know if he reads right to left or the other way or horizontally starting at the top the idea is that if you combine part of the community & meaningful activities & independent choice making then you have supported them to develop personhood we have replaced the triangle of impairment with another thing that doesn’t mean anything please bear it in mind always

the corporate language that these care

and the winner of

charities use is facile empty and

‘Bake off’ is

metaphysically wrong we make

nine dismembered

things

possible

corresponds

to

bodies

saying you can make something exist when there was nothing which is false and the acrostics they use are bad and not thought through properly so that they use a word like tenacious because they need a word for the ‘t’ in positive tenacious is a word whose connotations seem at odds with the idea of caring in a meeting a manager who was exactly my age said there is a big market for this which isn’t a comforting thought when you’re being put in harm’s way on very low pay power with not power over

all of us are Ahabs

it rained all morning but as I walked

the stage where a

to work I noticed a dish of soap

conflict might take

bubbling in a nearby creek what

place is now gone

caught my eye was not the soap itself

occluded by the

but rather the way that the rain was

receding state that

glistening on it

says there is no conflict though ◊

there is still the police logic of judges and law ‘we

the wizard had three lairs or hideouts

are the managers of

across a wide area the first is a house

the only thing

under a ridge the positioning of which

possible’ & the

was somehow worked out carefully so

only thing possible

that it sees only one hour of daylight

is more cuts the

the second is a listening house on the

destruction of yr

coast here he listens to whales

communities death

yawning a man masturbating on

just keeping

Rathlin Island the hardening of a gall

yourself alive is

stone inside Boris Johnson he records

radical now at the

all this every detail the third house

start of November I

was a cupboard inside a room in the

had three weeks off

probation board’s office

sick from work it was like restitution

is India planning to shrink its army?

I am going to learn ◊

ancient ugaritic

reluctantly listening to a colleague who desperately wants to tell me about the history of the Godzilla films I like the one with Matthew Broderick apparently they are not all

lamb chops stuffed

about Hiroshima recent versions

in car exhaust in

speak to contemporary issues in

UK meat attack

Japanese politics and culture ◊

his death allowed for a panther to

one day amidst a fierce gale the sailors spotted

a

red-checkered

pigeon

fluttering wearily up in the sky

appear who could show them how to live without desire

how may one provide a relationship to

only October the

a person that would be advantageous

5th and already I

to their growth?

am doing the five pound a day thing ◊

which is something like a Tesco meal

I am the rogue affect in your corporate

deal and then a

structure of feeling

bowl of cornflakes later some toast

◊

maybe some tinned tomatoes and fish

the skull of a first-born dog is used to

on toast the wage

heal rashes caused by stepping into a

gap

dangerous space ◊ the Aveeno cream you apply twice a day after his flannel wash or evening bath to any scratches or irruptions the salbutamol inhaler he takes before bed using the rubber fitting that helps him breathe it in

the humiliation of one’s own void is

the

wizard’s

the only authentically lived emotion

favourite dinner is udon noodles with

◊

fried

tofu

orange nam jim I like my mechanical pencil cheers Connor ◊ tango with a I’ll get inside your bones and bleed you to the floor ◊ a person’s happiness is better when faced with the morning happiness of another

Norwegian fox

and

inside each pitcher was strung out on a tension wire screwed at either end

I could eat these

to the walls the room I was in was 6ft

chandeliers like a

x 10ft the pitchers were arranged like

souvenir chocobo

this in terms of colour: yellow blue burgundy purple gold inside each pitcher was red wine that was so dark as to almost to be black under each pitcher lay a man five in total they all were shirtless and breathing heavily their stomachs going up and down like the surface of the ocean a

Kurt Cobain was

mechanism

lactose

something

like

a

miniature crane had been placed at one end of the tension wire and every few seconds it would move the wire so that some of the contents of each pitcher would tip out into the mouths of the men I noticed that whether from sadness or joy the men were crying

intolerant

conspiracy theory

apparently walking is good for the mind and the body on one of these walks Charlemagne and Kafka fight

the somewhat

about the credence of Julian Jayne’s

unpredictable

novel The Origin of Consciousness In the

nature of the

Breakdown

Rumspringans will

of

the

Bicameral

Mind

Charlemagne throws a handful of

always be of

wood lice in Kafka’s direction that

concern

night I sit up drinking with Kafka until three something he is so drunk that when he gets up to go to the toilet he realises he can’t make it so he pisses on my leg and we both laugh ◊ my neighbour is training a Bedlington

YouTube search for

Terrier called Haneke to sniff out

Hannah Weiner

invasive Argentine ants

leads me to a video titled “Hannah Montana’s Giant Weiner”

dream in which I am cleaning a garden

jet engine

shed out for someone but they’re

manufacturers used

ungrateful for it I have nearly finished

to test for

my task the floor is swept the

birdstrikes by

gardening implements are stowed

launching dead

away I notice two small rabbit

birds into the

hutches stacked on top of each other

engines

in the corner one is empty but the other one contains a dozen tiny people in kneeling postures as if praying in one hand they all are

Tetanus, erysipelas

holding a lit torch I tip the hutch

and anthrax are the

upside-down

price most

to

evacuate

these

people but it is now apparently full of

frequently paid for

Dijon mustard the mustard oozes out

these particular

all over the shed floor and onto a

caresses

toolbox in the garden I notice a dead lizard that wasn’t there before it gets suddenly very dark and then I wake

this will destroy

up

bourgeois subjectivity

he cooks me a meal in a rusty pan

in fractal blissfully

funnily enough I can’t taste the rust

angry woodspurge

but instead the grated cheese that has

in the pebble slit

clearly gone off

the autograph dizzy panic heron ◊

gobs pollination pad lineated grouse

Why did anyone administer LSD to an

ripened sink

elephant?

terracotta brown painter’s stone ◊

posser gushed acrid marsh cuckoo

I have heard it claimed that if a

radio road

human's metabolic rate was somehow

introductory

increased

chumbawumba

to

match

that

of

a

hummingbird the human would burst

gratiné

into flames is this true and if so how

pip crazed gutter

was it calculated and for that matter

chakra wet billiard

what prevents hummingbirds from

candle-smoke went

spontaneously combusting if their

igneous bitter

metabolism is as high as this claim

evacuations

implies

retracted hazel wambly leaking

the snail’s mouth is an opening on the

two days now I will

underside of the animal’s body this

have to spend only

opening presses firmly against the

£3.60 or something

tomato skin each time the mouth

like

opens a rough tonguelike strap rakes

divided by 18 is

across the tomato the strap sweeps

£4.444444444444

shreds of tomato flesh into the snail’s

444

mouth the snail keeps this up all night not far away other snails are rapidly consuming

broccoli

melons

and

cucumbers as they glide along eating they leave a trail of damaged rinds chewed-up stalks and slimy leaves ◊ the experience was all the more poignant owing to the distinct cheese smell on the periphery of sensation

that

£80

when he moved in the house had fairy

I’m in Girls Aloud

stickers on the wall mottoes from neverland we both spent an hour scraping the stickers off the kitchen tiles some of the bigger ones in other

observes as a tubby

rooms are only half peeled off the one

tardigrade crawled

in the box room now reads: “if you

across the sun’s

in yourself

surface

thing

is possible” in

his bedroom one of the stickers on the wall says ‘SPARKLE’ ‘how can you cut yourself when you’re looking at a wall with SPARKLE written on it?’ I asked

spooky action in a

we laughed but it’s a very serious

piglet

thing ◊ it all seems a bit white cis male at the top of the RMT

while out in the field on November 7th an eagle-eyed officer spotted a German

ammunition

train

and

wanted to send word of this to HQ aware of his sterling reputation he chose the Poilu for the task as the bird flew back to Cuisy he was hit by shrapnel multiple times but kept

Jair Bolsonaro is

flying with flesh and feathers on his

sick and can’t wear

head and neck hanging in ribbons and

pants

reeling like a drunken man the Poilu landed in his loft with the message intact ◊ scientists

made

coming in from the rain after buying a

snails

remember

sandwich I feel like taking my shirt off

something

I think about the gaze of the other as I

never happened to

am doing this

them

that

the city of Haarlem fell to the

the last act of Sir

Spaniards in 1573 because they

John Tiptof

learned of a relief attempt from an

humanist book

intercepted pigeon

collector and impaler of men was to ask the

◊

executioner to chop off his head

the foot is the body part that you can

with three blows

see most easily at the foot’s front end

for the sake of the

is the snail’s head with a mouth and

Trinity

two pairs of feelers the feelers are used for touching smelling and seeing ◊

I watch Haneke’s film of Kafka’s The

a wooden leg and a real foot a man

Castle

with a glass eye with a hole drilled

cornflakes I think I

through it so he can see

must be depressed

the

and

light

orange

eat

glew

a giant African snail searches for its

regrets

next meal the sun is setting and the

interwrought with

large snails are beginning to move

small wins

about the garden one snail glides forward over the smooth surface of a tomato as the snail moves it eats nonstop a sign or a string of signs

I don’t spend time

signifying the same things at all times

in

and in all places

because the plants

the

garden

just seem wrong ◊ Elvis was so pathologically attached to his mother that he could not have sex with a woman who gave birth ◊

quantum entangled my lasagne al forno

visions of a crab in the fabric of the settee this can’t go on it goes on

giant African snails have entered the

I am entering the war on drugs on the

United States many

side of drugs

times

Mark E. Smith sang into the bass

landscape of thorns

drum with his arse facing the

forbidding

audience

spike field spikes bursting ◊

I lie to my managers a lot and they lie to me ◊

solitary cardamom pod sits on the arm of my sofa

grid

blocks through

despite everything we can still produce songs that are beyond our condition