—currituck sound appendix—

  She wanted to tell a story shrouded in
    mist at the beginning, to give and to
withhold in giving it, the telling not the
                                                                         tale
    but its perfume. She wanted the per-
fume to be less than the sum of it, no
  obvious allure but a pungency thought
                                                                         to
      be at its core, bouquet the strain im-
  agining it would impose… She wanted
    aura, bouquet, to say it but be more than
say-it, a not-saying one would step into
                                                                         more
  than hear, step into and be allowed to in-
    habit, mind a remote ambition, all grasp
and going-after, arousal, risk… But this
                                                                         was
      writing, not telling, she reminded him,
  the noise it made not admitting it made it
    and the noise not admitting it made not the
                                                                                    same,
  an antithetical telling could a telling it be said
    to be. Her distress, he remembered, a cer-
tain reticence perhaps, had all but announced
                                                                                    as
    much, an untelling one was drawn to even
        so, an abiding grace one stepped, if not 
      into, toward… So went the story of Anjani
                                                                                   and
  Bouadjé, new to our crew, as if Stella played
    the role, requisite teller, the what-sayer
bounced off, tale told at more removes than
                                                                                could
    be counted, the what and the what-of tight-
ly knotted, the told-about and the tellers all
  in our crew… So went Stella’s aside, sugar
                                                                                coat-
ing, hush money’s tale with no money, a tale
    too raw for telling, some said, others, all the
  more to be told. All this as Rome exploded,
                                                                                 raw
    romance’s legs agape gone. Baton Rouge,
Falcon Heights, Dallas cut in on the broadcast,
                                                                                      trig-
  ger-happy Nub on a
run               

 

       _____________________

Ed dreamt he died on the Outer Banks. A
    broken taillight in league with a cop’s
  gun called him home. Bouadjé dreamt it
                                                                            too.
      A fleet of cars each with a taillight out
  were ships of state, a ghost fleet gone
    come back in a burst of bullets, batons
                                                                           a-
      gainst the side of his head the new and
          old blue, red what mind might be left…
        Each pulled away like a train pulling
                                                                           out,
    each another quickly pulling in. Red light,
      blue light, white where the light was bro-
  ken, Nub’s birth in blood again rehearsed
                                                                              and
      re-rehearsed, white the new gray, new and
                                                                                    old
    gray


Editor's Note: Con Alma by Nathaniel Mackey is the second issue of On Civil Disobedience, a new pamphlet series from The Green Lantern Press. The series recalls historical precedents set by Thoreau, Gandhi, King, Arendt, and others while also considering the pamphlet’s important role in American revolutionary history. Filtering civic responsibility through the combined awareness of histories and disciplines, On Civil Disobedience asks how citizenship and resistance intersect within the pledge of democratic ideals.