—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.