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whycantihavemorethan32characters · 5 years

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Fireflies

Pairings: Romantic Logicality

Warnings: None, just a bunch of fluff

AUs: None/Cannonverse

@just-get-all-the-butterflies

It was absolutely exquisite, all of it. The wide open field had a solemn few trees, about five sprawling angel oaks in the endless acres of prairie. The grass was speckled with bluebonnets, flag irises, blue columbines, and virginia day flowers. It was uncut, reaching up about knee high, thin and soft enough to be visually pushed aside when Patton and Logan tread a path through. In the background, you could hear a small, tinkling clear water stream. The water was habitat to small fish, hunting ground to the cranes, birthplace of miniscule frogs, backs wet with dew, as well as watering hole to the harmless rodents, felines, and canines that snuck in the dark. Everything was given a dull, pulsing glow by the millions of fireflies and rest languidly on the grass and ground, some buzzing around the air, going high enough to look like false stars glinting in the distance.

However, the most beautiful, positively bewildering sight was the night sky. The dome of midnight blue was comparable to a planetarium, better even. Logan could see all the constellations clearly, and point out bright spots that were actually planets in the distance. The two of them could see whole galaxies, and whenever Logan pointed out a constellation, it would connect and the image would become somewhat of a transparent drawing around it so that Patton could visualize the picture better. Soon, the sky had warriors and animals drawn across it, and Logan explained the history of each one.

They were laying in the grass, stargayzing, and pointing at the sky. Patton sat up, resting his body’s weight on one hand and picking a flower with the other. He twisted it between his finger and thumb a few turns, and then placed it behind Logan’s ear, tucking it behind his glasses. A small peach bunny edged out of the grass and to the pushed down vegetation that served as a type of bedding for the couple. Patton’s face lit up, and Logan smiled warmly at the sight. The tiny creature moved closer with each hop, eventually reaching Patton, who was now sitting criss-cross. He reached his hand out, and it sniffed him hesitantly, whiskers tickling Patton’s fingers.

“Lo, look. Look.” Patton whispered excitedly. He looked almost childlike, his hair lit up by the lightning bugs’ glow, cheeks and nose catching the light as well. His clothes were covered with stray flowers, the stems of which had wormed their way into the fabric. His knees were grass stained, and his hands were just slightly reddened and dirty from climbing the trees and dragging his fingers through the grass. The picnic basket beside him was since emptied and then refilled with a bouquet of flowers to put on the dinner table back at the mind palace.

The rabbit had decided that he liked Patton and Logan, and hopped into Patton’s hands causing the side to almost cry of joy. He was petting it’s little head with his pointer finger, and marveling and his ridiculously long ears. “I suppose he likes you, Patton.” Logan remarked, cocking his head slightly to the side. He reached his hand out a little, stroking the bunny’s spine, to which he arched said spine in delight. Patton gasped, and the lightbulb above his head was almost visible. “Oh, Logan, can we keep him? Please?”

He chuckled at his boyfriend’s euphoria, thinking it over while Patton placed the small creature in their basket. He nodded. “Yes, Patton. We have the means to keep him, and I think he will make a good pet.” Patton practically launched himself into Logan’s arms, wrapping around his torso, half sitting in his lap. They nuzzled into each other, and both giggled at the other’s happiness. The bunny settled into the picked flowers, laying himself down for the night and dozing off. They watched the thing for a few beats, and Logan grasped Patton’s hand.

“Come, starlight. I have something to show you.” And ask you he added to himself, blushing at the thought. They started walking over to one of the trees, fireflies scattering, and lighting up the atmosphere around them. “Almost seems like we should have mood music, huh?” Patton looked around at the scenery, baffled by the detail that Roman had produced for the “perfect date” that he asked him to create. He must be the luckiest father figure figment in the entire Thomasverse to have such great friends, and such a wonderful companion. The moral aspect gazed over at his boyfriend, and was almost brought to tears for the millionth time that night, overwhelmed by love and adoration. He remembered why he brought him out here tonight, why he asked for this date, and he almost let a tear roll down his cheek.

“Yeah, mood music would be nice.” Logan replied, and not a moment after, a few notes started to sound out of nowhere. Maybe it was the manufactured sky, or the creek, or the ground, or the trees. Whatever it was, it sounded like water dripping in a repeating melody. It played over in the same order a few more times, and a tenor voice started singing, tambre just a little robotic, but soft enough to slow dance to. You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies… Logan smirked, and Patton laughed out loud. “Fireflies, Lo! By Owl City! Like the lightning bugs in the grass!” He almost doubled over at the situational pun, and when he settled, Logan offered his hand.

Lit up the world as I fell asleep. Patton took his hand and they started to dance, slow and swinging. Cause they fill the open air, and leave teardrops everywhere. The world lit up around them with more displaced fireflies buzzing around the couple. You’d think me rude but I would just stand and stare. They looked into each other’s eyes as they waltzed, speeding up just a little, pace matching their heart rates. I’d like to make myself believe that planet earth turns slowly. The chorus crescendoed as they picked up pace, going from their simple waltz to Logan spinning and turning Patton in his arms, pushing out and pulling in as close as they could go. It’s hard to say I’d rather stay awake when I’m asleep, cause everything is never as it seems.

Their dance continued until the song was over, ending with a dip and a kiss that they never wanted to end, and continued to linger on their lips when they broke for air. They strolled for a little longer, taking in the starlight, fireflies still lighting up the grass, but mostly settling back into their original positions. The couple held hands, and filled the time with a small, mostly meaningless conversation, both of their minds off in some other place, pondering.

“Logan, the reason I wanted to be out here tonight so bad, in fact the reason I was so happy when you accepted, was that. Well. Gosh. I...I need to ask you something.” He looked up hopefully at his boyfriend, waiting for a response, seconds seeming to be minutes.

Logan cleared his throat. “I too, wish to ask you something, Patton. It’s good that we seem to be of a one track mind on this.”

“Logan, it’s just that you make me so happy. I almost don’t know what to do with myself.”

“Patton, love, you are… indescribably beautiful. Inside, out, and everywhere in between.”

“Oh, you’re so sweet Lo. From the tip of your nose to the tips of your toes, and everything above your nose too. I really do love you, so so much.”

“Darling,” he took a breath in, “may I ask you a question?”

“Well ya just did! But yeah, hit me. I need to ask you something too.”

Logan seemed slightly taken aback. “Oh, then you first. I insist.” He straightened his necktie and his back, ready to answer whatever Patton’s query may be. “How about at the same time.” Patton proposed, smile bright, but nervous. “As you wish. On the count of three?” Patton nodded, and began to count down.

“1… 2… 3.”

“Will you marry me?” Both men had taken a knee at the same exact time, summoning rings, and proposing to each other perfectly in sync. And for a heartbeat, only one, they both were stunned silent, each looking at the other in utter disbelief. But then that heartbeat passed. They both jumped into their fiance’s arms, tumbling to the ground, fireflies erupting and lighting up the moment. They were both lying down, taking in the petrichor and crying in each other’s arms. They put the rings on each other, and kissed. Patton sniffled when the embrace broke, looking up at Logan with watery eyes. “I guess that means yes.” Logan nodded. “Yes. Yes, always, of course, and forevermore, yes.”

The binoculars hanged in midair, Roman willing them to stay suspended as he watched from a tree branch in the distance. Because, you see, he had been approached by both of his friends, both planning to propose to each other tonight, both begging him to make them the perfect date in the imagination, which he had control over. He smirked, looking on and the newly engaged couple. “Hehe, gay.” he whispered to himself shoving another handful of popcorn in his mouth.

#logicality #logan sanders #patton sanders #roman sanders #romantic logicality #logicality fluff #the bunny's name ended up being winston btw #fireflies by owl city #fluff #hey heidi #sanders sides #thomas sanders

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5questions · 5 years

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Richard Wehrenberg

Richard Wehrenberg was born in Akron, Ohio and is the author of Abracadabrachrysanthemum (2018), Hands (2015), and River (2014), co-written with Ross Gay. Their work has been published in The Academy of American Poets, Peach Mag, Bad Nudes, Monster House Press, & elsewhere. They are a poet, writer, artist, & designer living in Bloomington, Indiana.

I want to start with the cover. I admire its minimalism but also the way that minimalism allows the title to speak for itself, carrying the reader along as they go to the next page. What are some of your favorite book designs? How has your own design aesthetics changed since you first started designing chapbooks and websites over ten years ago? Do you have any sort of codified process for your design work?

I perceive Text as Image and Image as Text, in a kind of infinite stirring/reworking. My aesthetic/process for design feels necessarily influenced by how my specific body-form perceives/reads the world, via its various miracles and supposed ‘deficiencies’—ie. having one barely-able-to-see (left) eye and one incredibly-over-achieving (right) eye, as well as having benign hand tremors (ie. my hands shake, inexplicably). I understand designing as the praxis of ‘de-signing' (ie. removing the signs from) this Earth/traditions/meanings/images. To quote one of my fav poets, Mahmoud Darwish—“I love your love / freed from itself and its signs,” which to me means: I love you ‘best’ when we shed the layers/masks/images that bury us in stories, when we dwell in our original and base-form—which of course has to be, for me—Love—the desire to see the world as un-riven, as One, despite everything working against the infinite forms love embodies. I feel my design aesthetic as ‘spiritual,’ or at least to me it feels like it springs enigmatically from a spiritual impulse/condition/base. All to say—my style/praxis is mysterious, even to myself, and my design depends on this kind of unknowability/improvisation. For Abracadabrachrysanthemum (and Three Crises by Bella Bravo, which share almost identical design elements), I viewed the circle on the covers to be a kind of gravitational wormhole into the book’s work, like you implied. A simple entranceway that has, like a planet or black hole, its own gravity to pull/cull others in, to merge and connect worlds. As far as design influences—I love love love Quemadura’s work (who you probably know as Wave Books’ designer.) I remember seeing their stark, simple, text-based covers as a younger poet/designer and being moved by space they allow for the text (exterior and interior) to become its own image/meaning apart from other visual suggestions. Also, Mary Austin Speaker’s work—who does design for Milkweed Editions—is always so precise, gorgeous, and enchanting. Outside of the poem-world, I am constantly inspired by fellow Bloomington designers/friends Aaron Denton and Sharnayla. The beauty they channel is astounding. Since I began designing, I feel that I’ve just become better and faster at designing, and my core aesthetic has mostly stayed the same. Being self-taught, you kind of just pick up little preferences, skills, and potentialities randomly along the path of work. I’m in a constant state of knowledge-acquisition re design and thus my process is really just experimentation. One codified process I do have is to meditate on a book’s content, to summon its image by intentionally dwelling on it within an unconscious states of meditation, dream, trance, etc. Usually I can call up a color palette, or image/font/et al that each individual book/design is calling for via these means. I believe in this kind of prayer/listening in my work, and I cite the unconscious as my main source of artistic capacity and production. I’ve also dreamed book covers before. That’s the best.

Many of the poems in this collection have geographic allusion, descriptive precision, and a general sense of place becoming character. This reminds me in many ways of your book RIVER, co-authored with Ross Gay. While that was prose and this is poetry, this is something I have noticed in your writing. How would you describe your aesthetic connection to geography? nature? environment? This book seems to expand beyond America in ways previous writing of yours doesn’t...

I can’t not attempt to constantly locate my Self in this World—can’t not see/feel/attempt to understand where/how/who/why I am in relation to ‘others’—to the land, rivers, oceans, to other animals, to the incredible manifold instantiations of plants, to the water with which without we would vanish, to all the ostensibly separate “I’s” on this shared Earth/consciousness/World surviving, dwelling, praying, creating—Being. I am an empath and embed/imbibe my surroundings almost automatically/unconsciously into myself. I become wherever I am. And thus its violences and gorgeousnesses alike become my own. And thus I speak for them, to them, of them, with them, in service and toward the healing of them/us/I/we. I unbecome my self to reset my churning and lumbering around this planet, to geographize ‘my’ position within this unpositioned House we find our selves. I am also quite of the mind that we are indeed both Here and Not Here. This Not Here is completely devoid of the drama of the body/ego, which we so often encounter and identify with today (and have since arriving on Earth.) My body, it’s specific forms and desires, languages and impulses, with yours, in conflict with theirs, with the scarcity, the low amount, the abundance, the never-ending forsaken nothing-everything, all of it, all the time, ever, ever, never-enough or always-too-much, the never-quite-right. You compared to me, thine in yours with mine of we. In spirit realm, there is no time and ID like we think here. Both Here and Not Here are real/valid places—the corporeal realm and the spirit realm—and I know, at least for now, I live in both places. I realized recently one of my main hopes for my writing is for it to re-embed the divine into the every day, re-pair it with the quotidian—to reunite these worlds-torn. What I mean is: I identify heavily with wherever I am in this 3D reality called life, and also identify heavily with the spirit realm as an (un)geographic place where I also reside. Over-identification with either realm leads to misery/suffering or disassociation/location, to paraphrase A Course In Miracles.

There is a sense of unity between the voice of these poems and everything else in the world, seen best, in my opinion, in “Signifying Brown Bear” wherein a stuffed animal becomes a virtual tunnel into all sorts of real human and existential experiences. Do you think something fundamental has changed in contemporary consumer society from ancient or medieval or even early modern societies, in which we have too many outlets for our emotions and experiences? Maybe too many is good (whatever "good" means)? In this poem, the stuffed bear almost represents your own yearning to connect as fully as you already are with universe around you. It has many of the conceits of a love poem and, at times, a tongue-in-cheek tone. In the end, the poem is what makes us think. You have turned a mirror on the reader. Was this your intention? How do you decide when to write in second-person versus first person etc.? Is any of this interpretation at all on point? In “Signifying Brown Bear,” I am referring to an actual brown bear (ie. Ursus arctos) and the poem is just kind of about how people/entities who I become close with can begin to feel like sweet-tender-almost-cryptozoological-creatures to me and I want to also just be a sweet-tender-almost-cryptozoological-creature—or hell, I’ll settle for even a plant or a rock—back to them. Anything but this warbling, incomplete, stammering-maunderer of a human being! (Exaggeration.) I do not want my humanity at times—my human-being-ing—which has been categorized, documented, and shrink-wrapped for societal use and relation, who is part of the decimation of Earth via capital. I want the freedom (and I’m sure we could say unfreedom) of the brown bear who is in relation to the Sycamore by the river, and the salmon floating above the stones, the water gliding over, ever-thinning rock into sand granules—slowly—and back again—and back. I don’t want to be (and can’t be, is perhaps my thesis) relegated to the realm of signifiers and signs imposed via any of the manifold categorization machines we navigate on the daily to obfuscate these kind of otherworldly, ancient connections I feel as Real. To decimate that last paragraph—I also believe in becoming fully-embodied/present in the form we are in in this life, too. So, it’s confusing, this ever-always-transforming-ing perceptioning. The confusion about what energy/thing I am and what you are is a little about what that poem is about, too. I was reading Agamben’s The Use of Bodies and came across this ancient Greek word, poiesis, which appears in the poem and means, “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.” I love that idea, and think it is what we are here to do, in part. So often for me the unprecedented-something we are trying to bring into existence is ourselves and the art/energy we carry in us must be made into song. I want to always make the reader aware of their presence in my writing—to me writing is a collective act and readers are always existent, even if they never ‘read’ your work. The imagined, the dead, the unborn, the spiritually uncanonized, the already-gone-never-was reader, writer, seeker, be-er. I switch between tense often and freely, because in poetry, at least for me, we feel/fall into each word/line we write and there’s less of a need to be ‘coherent’ in the sense of the popular notion of storytelling/fiction, which (I might have another thesis here) feels like a symptom of capitalism, too. Of course it feels really nice to have a coherent story. I love television and pop culture. I want to write for television. I want to be perceived as coherent. But I want to say too: the ‘incoherence’ of poetry is a kind of coherence, a prayer toward a ‘new’ form, if you will, despite being so old itself. Poetry coheres to a perhaps more experimental way of telling a story, a precedentless next-ing, and this variation is vital—these unforeseen forms, stories, ways of being. We are a species that evolves, and because the mouth/mind is the site of evolution now, I am playing accordingly.

What ended up happening with MHP? Why did you decide to stop active involvement in it? What are you doing now in terms of day-to-day life? Monster House Press has evolved through many forms. In 2010, it began, semi-naively, as a collective publisher of zines and chapbooks in the eponymous punk house. It then expanded and evolved into a project I was maintaining, mostly on my own, from 2012-2016 in Bloomington, Indiana. In the summer of 2016, MHP rose again as a officially collective project—an amorphous mass, as we liked to call it—primarily because the workload had become unsustainable for me to do on my own, and we were doing more and more, gaining recognition, et cetera. We decided to lay MHP to rest at the end of the 2018, as many of us involved in keeping it going are moving onto graduate school and/or starting new projects/lives. It felt apt to end this specific instantiation in my career-form of publishing, as I have moved away from the punk/DIY scene from which it was born, and the name itself has too become divorced from its origin and who I/we was/were then. I’m sure I’ll always be editing, publishing, reading, designing and helping steward others’ work in this world, as that impulse is something part and parcel of my being, this collaboration; however, the terms and boundaries within this specific modality as MHP have expired to me. In my day-to-day life, I am a freelance graphic designer, artist, editor, and writer. I usually sit at my house with my dog, working on whatever project I have in my docket at the time, or go out to a coffee or tea house to do work. I also just finished auditing a graduate poetry workshop called Joy & Collaboration with Ross Gay, which was, in a word, divine—and I currently spend my days/time helping out with the growing at a communal greenhouse as well as generally just reading/writing/watching/listening to the Earth/Universe, hoping to be of service, use, and care.

What future projects are you working on? Do you still play music with organized groups? Have you thought of writing long-form fiction?

I’m hoping to start my MFA in Poetry next year. As far as writing projects—I’m writing a collection of sonnets about my alcoholism/being an alcoholic in the United States. (I’ve been sober for 5 years now.) The sonnets are these kind of little, tender love-songs to my alcoholic/former self (who I can never fully extinguish) which—I hope—also reckon with and help shed light on addiction, malevolent masculinity/whiteness, and which also seek to forgive and release—to heal. I also have this big, kind of far off ditty of a dream to open a Poetry Center one day, in the Midwest ideally, kind of a little like Poets House in NYC, where events, workshops, reading, writing, and magic can happen. A hub for poetics/healing/joy/collaboration. There will probably be an herbal/plant element too, somehow, as I love working with/growing plants. And music! I haven’t played music in an organized group in a while, but enjoy being able to play piano and saxophone here and there, when I can, however that happens. I helped transpose, sing, and record a score for a little art movie project, along with Ross Gay and Lauren Harrison, which was super delightful. Music is the literal heart of the world, imo. I listened to 36 days of music this year, ie. for 1/10 of the year I was listening to music, which was kind of staggering and incredible for me to realize. I love writing long and short form fiction, but have found it removes me from the world too intensely, which, I feel I am supposed to stay more rooted/involved in the World in a proactive sense, so I tend to write poetry and other forms over fiction. I am interested in the hybrid essay form—with poetry hidden inside—and creating/seeking new hybridized forms. There’s so much potential for greatness—and so much to come.

#richard wehrenberg #monster house press #hybrid essay #fiction #poetry #ross gay #lauren harrison #music #midwest #mfa #graphic design #wave books #andrew duncan worthington #bloomington #indiana #cleveland #akron

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