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© 2011 copyright J. A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods

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ISBN: 978-1-937543-30-3

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Cover art and interior art by John Dermot Woods. Cover design by Debra Di Blasi.

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“incantatory, hypnotic”

“What Tyler and Woods depict so eloquently are the lowlands … after the passion is gone and the wide-open stink of intimacy prevails.”

—Nava Renek, American Book Review

“J.A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods have made an object as beautiful as a paper ship.”

—Luca Dipierro, author of Biscotti Neri and Das Ding

“Tyler and Woods volley language and image to construct a new and bracing presentation of identity as at once smeared across a centerless space and anchored by the weight of a single human heart.”

—Evan Lavender-Smith, author of Avatar

“The incantatory, hypnotic examinations of ‘me and you and how we are connected’ unfold along an edge where Martin Buber meets André Breton.”

—Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch, authors of Ten Walks/Two Talks

In this startling collaborative novel, Tyler and Woods tell a story that explores the closely linked experiences of communion and suffocation, creating their narrator’s world by setting a beat with mesmerizing chapters of rhythmic prose exploded by frantic full-color illustrations. This book could as easily be described as a horror novel as a love story. The authors’ experimental techniques come together in a book that tells the most classic tale of passion and loss.

About the Authors

J. A. Tyler is the author of Inconceivable Wilson, A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed, A Shiny, Unused Heart, and Girl With Oars & Man Dying. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Diagram, New York Tyrant, and others. He is founding editor of Mud Luscious Press.

John Dermot Woods is the author of the novel, The Complete Collection of people, places & things. He writes stories and draws comics in Brooklyn, New York, and edits the arts quarterly, Action, Yes. He also organizes the online reading series, Apostrophe Cast and is a professor in the English Department at Nassau Community College on Long Island.

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How We Have & Make This We

We hold hand in hand because these hands in our own hands are the only hands that we have available to us. We say all of this in the name of we because the name of we is the name that we have been called. This is what we are named. We is the way it is, has been given to us, delivered.

We collide.

Inside of something there is another thing and beyond that are the things that we cannot control. This is something we cannot control. We guess on the over / under. We guess the weight of the men and women who pass us by, these men and women in passing, these people. We shut in the breath of our bodies until it is absolutely and thoroughly and for one time only the space in which we are to breathe. When the speed of certainty increases. When the language finds itself.

And the words that are our words are structured solely on the meaning of ourselves, of the we that we are, pinned entirely to us. These words that we are supposed to say because only those words would leave our mouths when we opened them to speak. As if to open them, these our mouths, would be the same as opening a door. In us the language like a closet of objects pooling at our feet, making pyramid steps for us to climb into the sky. These words, our words.

We are conjunctions.

If this were a pier, because it is, our feet would melt to the ocean below and the fish would waver around us, ripples of fish-shaped waves. If these were boardwalk stairs, because they are, we would be stepping on and our legs would pump, as they go, and the ribs that are gone from our bellies would make the room for our lungs to expand outside of us, blowing full of wind. These the same ribs that would have protected us the most were they still inside of our bodies. We, outside of our bodies, holding the hands of our hands, one in another, gripping the ceiling of this sky, holding tight to the clouds and each other.

So there is that, all of this holding.

And we try not to ask questions, us, but some questions do come and we are obligated to ask. People passing looking at us indifferently or without eyes, hollowness, empty faces. We feel the screaming that they do not voice. Us talking to each one another’s ears, our mouths moving. We stride differently. This when our two eyes watch our other two eyes and the emotions come out of us something opposite of monotonous and dry, something billowing and white.

Carved.

We have moved towards all that is light. The spin of us our heads and the colors, hands in hands.

How the crowds swing past us on their own separate feet.

In our seated watching and the holding of our hands we have copied down the world in these tiny books we keep in our back pockets, us, the we that we are. The imaginary stories we pretend to create and then let escape in wisps through our teeth, salt water bowing through, spouting, if we were whales, though we aren’t.

We are we, because this is what we have come to be named and called, us sitting and holding the hands that are the only hands we were ever given. The hands that we use to hold the hands of the other, a mesh of fingers that we have become a becoming.

Hold on.

We must be we because separately and apart we only amount to the marks on poles that show where the water once went, met. These places where the people drowned. All these water washed stones that people around us call sand but we know are the places of floating bodies. Because this is how we think, us our fingers and our mouths, our ears and the words we are saying and hearing, the stick-pin point of our dark eyes when they look through all this brightness.

We stay together and become we because that is what we have become. As us individually we divide and subdivide in the same image of splitting cells until the adam’s apple and the breasts are the things that keep us most apart. Standing from outside of one another’s smiles and having the people in-between us waving and gesturing on past the eyes that are ours.

This makes us sickly, and we whisper the wish of silence to all the un-reflected stars.

We have been watching ourselves like this, us and our eyes in the choke of this.

And the time there is, is the only time there is, and that as always is the fissure in our existence, the popcorn smell that hammers into us as our hands hold and those hands that are our hands become just the only hands that we have. Our cotton-candy faces, our jelly bean bodies, the playful chipped dreams that soak in our heads, we our mouths.

If this was love, because it is, we would burst into the blink of lights, covering our eyes with the hands that we have, un-shouldering the weights that we have been born under, these moons. Tilt-a-Whirl and Whack-a-Mole, the breathing that we have held in, the hands that hold the hands that are we.