strange moisture occludes the windows. slow news day, a mango rots in the kitchen, two leaves have fallen from the sunflower by the window. someone has disposed of them. it is cool, and the air is thick with the stench of nearby mushroom farms. the smell of shit permeates everything. insects cling to the screens and the walls, they hardly move.

hopelessness the room in which you wake up. you must choose in order to exit, and may do so in whatever way you like: the door, the window, the hidden passageway behind the empty bookshelves, a crack in the wretched mirror.

glutted with products, the supermarket gleams falsely. they have wrapped two blackening heads of organic broccoli in saran wrap. everything shines under its bar coded sticker. men and women speed through the isles, they fill their needs. gymnasiums are set up, so that we seem balanced physically. we run and climb nowhere. we repeat choreographed movements to simulate physical work. our bodies resemble the forms they had before value and work were estranged from one another. we create new markets, to forget we are made of meat. the animal need can now be sold, and in this, can also be politicized. sex, for example, now has a value dissociated from reproduction. we cover our genitals in plastic and imitate what we have killed. this is also called evolution. women are generally the purveyors of sex, a craven instinct to profit from the vestiges of biological imperative left to men. they degrade both sexes by inserting biological function into the realm of the economic. vendors of the love facsimile, and calling it liberation. liberation, in the way that we have liberated ourselves from what we are. liberation in the sense that we pretend we can leave our bodies. artifice.

the butcher is named doc. he receives the corpses of animals in the mornings and evening and cleaves them into pieces with sharp blades. the flesh is new, he sets it behind glass, he sells it by the pound. he washes his hands with soap containing bits of pumice stone. his white clothes are splattered in blood and every night before turning off the lights, with a hose he rinses the blood from the tables, the walls, and the floor. he creates a murky pink flood that flows into a vortex before dropping down the drain in the center of the tiles.



françoise héritier argues that the roles of male and female were created by centuries of different practices. she argues genealogy. she extends the argument of clause lévi-strauss, going beyond the trade of females to avoid consanguine marriages, saying that even the food a female eats was kept different from that of the man. she argues that our forms, apart from being built to privilege reproduction, evolved to our limited rights dependent on culture. then so, one might postulate, our minds. then so, one might postulate, our sons. it all brings to mind marge piercy's poem, work of artifice, and also the geishas and courtesans of every age, the whores who trace their traditions to forever. who gain power in emulating male freedoms and male power. our masculine and feminine tropes have been subtly changing into dominante and subordinate tropes. new feminism needs to take into account the tendency to judge worth by the masculine standards of power and domination. this all said, i'm still waiting for the day when a woman sits down and pens a war song that lasts until we destroy ourselves if we havent already.