KEEP PLANNING – Matthew Spencer

Street of the Alsatian (For Eugene Jolas) A sudden early thunderstorm—(first of the season)—pelts excavated cobbles piled up along a formerly ecclesiastical sidestreet. Regional arts and entertainment districts: they demand!—they demand inventory to meet demand—they demand gas and sewage and electricity and other municipal services. Get to work, then? Not in this rain. Tools and machinery alike are left unmanned, traffic cones pushed prone, rolling in the wind. The crew shares coffee beneath the condo conversion church portal. The schistose clay, excavated the morninglong, melts into a fecal tan sludge that more professional passersby nervously sidestep, soaking quarter-zip sweaters, their figures headless beneath umbrellas, headless beneath unbranded backpacks and brochures held overhead; the passersby sidestep trenches and open manholes, alongside flowering laburnum, naturalized, bright yellow against the gray iridescent schistose masonry, a feature preprovided, outside the contemporary budget, regardless of confession. This rainstorm—(initiatory, it seems, of a season that should be months off)—pelts laburnum petals—(urinous color, so vibrant!)—onto the cobbles, onto rotten wooden gate pickets, through which, heedless of the rain, the open maw of an Alsatian lets loose a long snarl at these rain-harried professional passersby, who, to be fair, are not so harried otherwise, having seen appreciable growth in property values this past half-decade, including other church to condo conversions, a proven winner, a great portfolio component, charming historical residences in a regional arts and entertainment district, commodious, as the rain soaked brochures show, the feral flora, the feral fauna, notwithstanding. Oaxacan King Kong The old man, leveling with us, confessed a preference for the gringos of the interior, as opposed to the gringos of the coast, proffering his plastic liter soda bottle, refilled with pulque, homebrew he claimed, though not from his own home, and we traded swigs as we sat beneath a pachycereus, monstrous cactus, manifold arms, cardónes or candelabros the locals call them, waxy integument bluish white under the bluish white sun, monsterous manifold arms ensconcing tillandsia—(a real Father Yog-Sothoth, Wilbur Waitley could only dream)—ensconcing us in the shade as we waited, the trucks to take us downmountain proving infrequent, irregular, though the driver would certainly point out, as the previous driver had pointed out, as the old man was pointing out now, the profile of that most famous early-to-midcentury modernist ape, composed of sheer rockface, the resemblance uncanny, but you could never talk about such things with the gringos of the coast, the old man said, couldn’t talk to them at all, they pass by without saying a word, without saying a word to anyone except to resort staff, except to certain resort-recommended vendors, the gringos of the coast keeping to level paths on soft sand, silent they passed before him, and the only trace they left behind were dollars, which rustled like dry leaves in the wind, but we had to leave also, leave with nothing but our thanks for the pulque and the conversation, the dust kicked up by the hired truck rising to a considerable height, obscuring the old man, obscuring everything except the cactus and King Kong, which the driver did not fail to point out. *** Matthew Spencer is a writer, translator, and publisher. He runs Paradise Editions, a small press specializing in forgotten and neglected forms of popular literature. His most recent book is Territories of Soul/On Intonation (Sublunary Editions), a collection of translated short prose and poetry by the East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 01 May 2025