Short Flight / Long Drive Books: I HAVE BLINDED MYSELF WRITING THIS by Jess Stoner

Jess Stoner writes book reviews for Necessary Fiction and her prose and poetry appear in Caketrain, Alice Blue Review, Everyday Genius, Horse Less Review and other handsome journals. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Denver and now lives in the brisket and sweat of Austin.

Release Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN 978-0-9749541-6-0
$12.95 US; 192 pp.; 7-3/8" x 9-1/4"

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I Have Blinded Myself Writing This was written by a woman with an affliction: her body needs her memories to clot her cuts, to heal means to lose parts of her past. It is a collection of the blueprints, lists, and photographs of memory meant to be private. It a book written for you. It is a question: as we lose our memories, do we become fragments of ourselves? It is a plea: participate with me in the remembering and the destruction of memory.

I notice a spot. I think as it seeps that Nietzsche said he loved only what a person wrote with her own blood Frantic. At first. I am. Swatting. Yes. I remember. How it began. I remember. Yes. At a horsefly. I was swatting. With something to prick it in my hands. I remember.

These things happen. There's been similar incidents. Now there's inflammation, a bit of wet, a severed tendon. No. Not yet. A bandage underneath a sleeve would keep Teddy from worrying. But he doesn't worry anymore. If I severed a tendon I might never remember his name.

It wasn't Nietzsche who said that what we write with blood isn't meant to be read but learned by heart. Or it was him, and this, what you're reading, is meant to be both.

There is this advantage: I enjoy several times the same good things for the first time.
Teddy leaves me a note in a drawer underneath underthings:

There is this advantage: Crossed bridges burned in rearviews nothing to show of blunders not even the smell of smoke Teddy left me a note inside a pillowcase:

There is this advantage: the palest ink is better than the best. Teddy left me a note in my pocket:

We reconstruct lives; we do not record them faithfully. Or we do neither. After he burned the Temple of Artemis, the Ephesus leaders ordered Herostratus' name to never be spoken again. Damnatio memoriae. If we remember to not speak it aren't we remembering it? Sometimes memory is just noise and a life like an abyss, where I wait, with Joseph Ceravolo, "for the masonry / to show a little slit / for my soul to get through."