Snail Trail Press

Jace Brittain

excerpts from Permeable Fortress

Brittain sub permeable fortress for snail trail 01-1
Brittain sub permeable fortress for snail trail 01-2
1 Beeswax
lets begin with the commonest matters take for example, the piece of wax—quite freshly of the honeycomb, the contained sweetness of which it has not yet lost. It retains still somewhat of the odour of the flowers from which it has been culled, a scent as apparent as its visible color, size, figure…hard, cold, easy, it rings waxy when struck. Each book is the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions, says he, and, there are, we know, we’ll see, folded forms and dull, apparent, enfolded, [sounds][like], [two][words]: visual acoustics. beside the flame, it melts. the same wax unchanged except in every sense which perception allows. says he: meet my body at the innermost heart of a star-shaped forest a dungeon cut off from the outside world says he: my body, a permeable fortress, stems of which, the earth worms have already treated not according to the shapes, but to the taste. The guide rope of each functional cycle insofar as it runs through the body is the nervous system. Says he: the only true way is along a rope. Not spanned high but only just above the ground. More to stumble than to be walked upon. No perception sign announces to the larva the path which it has never been down and must follow nonetheless. alls well ends well well well well
2 Digestion
Says F Nietzsche: the so-called ‘good-conscience’ is a physiological state which at times looks so much like good digestion as to be mistaken for it. Says she: thousands of bacterial and fungal taxa colonize the roots and leaves. Says too: two types of bacteria Coprococcus and Dialister are depleted in the stomachs of people with depression. Says I: The entirely inhabiting noumenon of this good plane are as nonsensical and unspeakable as a breeze through a dead pine stand, the inscrutable and divine tide which rolls over these wood. A book, a bug, a body of blood. A book, a bug, a body of blood—flows the faster the nearer the heat of the heart until it is spirit too. A blood, a book, a body of bugs is also the sum of the occasions it misunderstands. A body, a bug, a book of blood written blank as illegible as anything one feels they ought to be able to read. A man waking from his long death as under the skin bugs bored. The star-shaped fortress pointed toward the places he’d like to be invaded. For years as the plague raged on, those who avoided a written language repeated the causes associated with the theories of nearly distant relatives. Says he: our aunt Ida kept a small house for swallows, think how far and fast and loudly they communicate. Eedle eedle eedle eee. Says she: one day my brother was scratched by the cat he had pestered for years. Whatever hurt he had done it cursed and killed him in a week. Says another: you’re the wrong way in fact both of you since whether or not the cats scratch they eat the birds and wherever or not the birds live and sing the cat eats the bird and the bird eats the snail that in the morning write hex with their foot against the grains of every garden path. Mother told me.
3 The Squeeze, or YSUAIL
Donc fingers the lines of the bark beetles chewed paths, spelling. On the forest for the trees, says A Clark: I know for a fact the bigger the front then the bigger the back. Says F Saussure: aligns allons donc! and nonsense! Donc, a private eye or dick, a health inspector who, she, shaws hawk on the side. Donc who trusts her Gut. Gut who knows the way and whose lurching pull hunches the back of the sleuthing woman, and Donc like an epiphanic beam chews the bottom lip of another idea entirely: it wasn’t so much money or even what it might buy but the little patch of land and what it might afford Its near always a real estate game and a shell under which to— so Donc like therefore or the solution presents itself in the fizzing seltzer tab and the caution toward seemingly slugged drinks since dont wanna wake up to the villainous well well well and the turning the screws on you and the putting the squeeze on since the squeeze designs whatever comes out. Gut tells her like a parasite, only eat whats offered and then eat endlessly. The nonsense of sleuthing: a running general terms description of the scene. Nothing is insignificant to record and so she takes a rubbing of what a mountain pine beetle crawling inscribed: an emergent narrative which she reads on a whim and then after can only read as Y SUA I L

Jace Brittain is a writer, translator, and poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sleepingfish, Destroyer, Deluge, Dream Pop Journal, and the Babel Tower Notice Board. They received their MFA at the University of Notre Dame. As a PhD student at the University of Utah, they study fiction, illegibility, and the intersections between digital, animal, and ecological writing. They are an editor for Halophyte Collective in Salt Lake City and founding co-editor of the independent press Carrion Bloom Books.