7 thoughts on “Animals of the Exodus – Alexander Zelenyj”

  1. TAKING KAREN AWAY

    “He’d never known it before Karen.”
    Surrounded by forming then fading walls, this is a short ever-resonating vision of love-making as an Anker in a “miracle-place” that is cruelly or kindly bespoke to its particular coupling, “before the crickets were awake to greet the new day”.

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  2. CELESTE HAD TO GO AWAY

    “— the strength she got from the music created by this mysterious collective, from the words of their songs and what it all meant when taken together…”

    A luminous story about a 17 year old girl called Celeste and her Dad’s spiritually pragmatic facilitation of the mythical punk music band, The Deathray Bradburys, that she yearned to see perform in a return concert – as a means of transcending the painful irreparable trauma in her previous life, so as to take her away as a version of Karen (Anker) being earlier taken away, but whereby, with Celeste, this archetypal paternal anchor can somehow become a release via aesthetic euthanasia because of – or despite – its earlier anchoring of her to the earth, such a mooring depicted by the ankh- or anchor-winged device from the book copied above, a device now a gathering angel formed from the effulgent visionary escape vehicle purposefully floating untethered above, at times like heat lightning. Celeste was not the only one in the small audience to share this exodus or deathly diaspora. (As an aside, the celeste or celesta – after which musical instrument the 1970s group Celeste was named – was neither here nor theremin.)

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  3. SOME SAW THE FIRE EXODUS

    “In the deepest place yawning like a black hole inside of you, begging to be filled —“

    Here a different ‘our Father’ as anchor. And we now as readers seem again to be linked into this trauma-healing deathly-diaspora or exodus, now with both Celeste and Karen reappearing in interface with a sibling or in connection with some “weird hippy commune” or more serious sorcery whereby a white-robed congregation of disciples reach towards their gathering angels, a träumtrawling here as fires leaving the roof and rising into the summer sky “into the heart of the twin stars…” (Also a game of hopscotch is mentioned in this Zelenyj, and only this very morning by chance I read and reviewed here a work entitled ‘Delivery Night’ where hopscotch is connected with angels coming for you upon your death. And in 1990 I had a brief story ‘The Tide of Time’ published in ‘Dark Star #7‘ (republished here), a work that I now find to be in mutual synergy with this Zelenyj work.)

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  4. THE MAYFLIES WANT TO FLY

    An important substantive work of literature, of love between boy student and his “goddess” teacher, she attracted to him because of his nature of Greek poems and uncruel eyes, his love for her on a cruising car journey, she sometimes a statue, where guilt and mishap happen, even human roadkill and a pair of stars, a pair of rare birds, crickets, mayflies, fireflies, birds, motels, and we fit together a “pattern of forward motion”, a pattern of what happens and how they dealt with it, with additional elements towards the end of this work that echo people and events in the previous works of this chapbook. Roadkills. Holes dug towards some puddly heart of darkness, and here is where I go off kilter, even in my own terms, my own star field, ghosting the lines between the text’s own raptures, ruptures, and other listless students. That “old dream”. And that ‘girl-child’ in the goddess teacher’s arms, blood upon the vivid geographies of a white dress. A procession of animals like an exodus. Then a new dust ghost. A new place. Anchors are magnets, too. A Lawrencian balance of two stars in the vastness above and below.

    “Mayflies fluttered everywhere, following in the air over the procession like a host of frenzied guardian angels.”

    end

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  5. Out of character, I watched a Netflix film this evening. This was a result of a request to see it by someone staying with us. It was THE ENDLESS and it turned out to be a wonderful blend with my Zelenyj reading earlier today!

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