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We Slept in a House of Glass

Under desert stars, warm bodies like coils wound tight, peering at the black dunes stretching toward infinity.

Then bare feet on cold sand. Eager shuffles. Muffled whispers. Children in animal masks! Elastic for guns, pebbles for bullets. Deranged little fuckers. Ready, aim…


Splintered ice. “Wake up!” 


Razor mosaic. “Cover your head!” 


Bloody sheets and gleeful screams and feral abandon and chubby fingers and gouged eyes. Splash, snicker; gash, giggle.


I thought I heard someone say, “I’m getting bored.”


Who can blame them? Every kid throws tantrums.

Heaven, MI

She asked, "Where you headed?" I said, "Heaven." The last bus runs half past eleven. "There's one or two things you ought to learn, have a seat, wait your turn." He said I'd rue the day I skip town. It doesn't matter, I just lay my head down.

Tap on my shoulder, jolt awake. "We're locking up the gates, it's getting late." I ask, "Can I stay here until the morning?" He says, "If they ask, I gave you a warning." Here I got no more scores to settle, and I don't mind the cold, and I don't mind the metal.

I grow out my hair and I grow out my beard. It's coming up on about a year. She takes a seat, puts her bags on the floor. "What the hell are you waiting around here for?" I say, "Well, you know, I still got forever." She says, "You're not very smart, but you might just pass for clever." I say, "I'm not ready to leave it all behind me." Then her bus pulls up, she says, "Well, when you are, just come and find me."

I've passively lived through renovations. Lots of new fashions and innovations. Everything I ever had is all but spent, but I'm comfortable. And I'm content.

Impossible You

You say I'll never know. You say I'll never meet you. You say it like you're right. You say it like I'm responsible.

 

Impossible you, do you have any idea who you are?

You say I'm not so far, I say I'm farther than I can think. You say it like you're right. You say it like it costs you.

You say I'm in your future, I say that I can't see it yet. But you say it like you're right. You say it like its gospel.

Impossible you, do you have any idea who you are to me?

Comedian

You hold yourself like a savior. You’re still a technical thief. I pulled myself the remainder of the way, and of course you ended up catching up with me. Ha ha, very funny, and it’s in bad taste. They said you got a voice made for TV and a face for radio. And if it’s irony, it’s irony I’ll win

 

Whose attention are you vying for? What do you want them to see? You wish you could be selling fantasy with a loose grip on reality. But who knows? You might have got it figured out. In your tricked out van, it made me want to cry my eyes out when you said that if it’s irony, it’s irony I’ll win

In My Dreams

In my dreams, I watched a city built and torn down again. I watched you sleeping, your eyes were wide open. You were laughing in my dream, the tears were streaming down your cheek, and when you looked at me, I melted into a puddle of acid rain. The birds fly into high clouds of acid rain. In my dreams the birds were all chained by the ankle. A queue of millions, they’re all chained by the ankle and they enter a slaughterhouse in the acid rain. In my dreams tonight, I walk the streets of a foreign town, the windows are all boarded now, the storm is coming. In my dreams the madmen protest death in the name of a killing god. The living weep and the unborn scream in my dreams tonight. And in my dreams the towers rise like cigarettes, the smoke lights up the sky on an all night drive down 95. In my dreams the tornadoes are surrounding us. I’m heading north to escape the storm past Marlboro towers in the acid rain. In my dreams you whisper, “pack your things but travel light." "Leave all your wares behind, baby, they won’t help you now” In my dreams we live alone in a nameless city. The people fled in a frenzy - they’re dancing now in the eye of the storm. In my dreams I drift through buildings, through rooms, and through people. You have no secrets. In my dreams, my dreams police my thoughts. In my dreams I’m going insane. I’m everything you want to be

Giant mosquito burned in Pagan-like ritual in Virginia

It’s about 8 p.m. on a chilly November night on a Gloucester County farm — the perfect night for a Pagan ritual.

 

I’m seated in a circle of lawn chairs around a roaring, six-foot-wide bonfire. Behind the chairs are a long folding potluck table and a metal bin filled with ice cold beers. Old Christmas lights hang between the low branches of the trees, and there are over 100 friends and family members talking to one another, catching up and sticking their feet closer to the flames, to stay warm.

 

“Oh yeah, pretty much everybody coming to this thing knows The Mosquito is going to be burned,” says 20-year-old William Schultz, the oldest of two sons in the Schultz family, which hosts this event yearly.

 

A man in a full headdress and cloak, carrying a cattle skull attached to a wooden rod, prods at the fire. Flickering orange light emerges from a distant barn as empty coffee cans filled with rocks make their way around the circle.

 

“That is the Herald of the Bitten,” explains 56-year-old Edward Schultz, who plays the role of Mosquito Doctor. “So he’s in a cloak and a mask, and he starts to get people warmed up. Then I show up.”

 

The Mosquito Doctor blows into a horn, and the crowd falls silent.

 

“Behold! It is he whom we despise!” he shouts as he points toward the barn.

 

A group of men in plague-doctor masks emerge from behind the barn. The three at the front carry a mural, and two lit torches, while the six in the back support a 10-foot-long effigy of a giant mosquito. The mosquito is made from a pastiche of wood, plastic, papier-mâché, and fabric.

 

While the ritual appears authentic — enough to be mistaken for a custom passed down through centuries of Pagans — I would soon discover this devout Christian family performs the mosquito burning in jest, despite good reason to despise the blood-sucking insects that pester the rural farm.

 

At the sight of the mosquito, the crowd erupts into a frenzy. Men and women of all ages start banging on their paint bucket drums and shaking their coffee can maracas. The two men by the fire begin a crazed dance. At the fire, the masked men start to parade the mosquito around.

 

“Burn it, burn it!” scream everyone in attendance.

 

There is a cacophony of sound as the mosquito circles the roaring flame, the Herald of the Bitten dancing frantically in front of it.

 

“My mask slipped down below where I couldn’t see [the giant mosquito],” recalls Edward Schultz. “My conscious mind said to adjust the beak so you can see through the holes. Well, I let it stay down there for awhile as I was doing my dance stuff, and it was like… the effigy, the symbolism, the ritual took over.”

 

The mosquito makes several revolutions around the fire. The Herald gestures toward the flame, and the six men throw the effigy into the fire. The crowd erupts into applause and laughter.

 

We all stand around, gazing at the body of the mosquito as it becomes engulfed in flames.

 

The men take off their masks and watch. The Herald continues his dance, waving the cattle skull around. As I stand in the crowd watching their reactions, I’m left with a lingering question: why?

 

“Well, we started it when our friends got married, and we thought that it would be a nice thing if we put on a big outdoor party,” Edward Schultz says, “It was like the weekend of Halloween or something.”

 

The Schultz family started hosting Halloween parties on their farm in 2009, but after two years, they wanted to do something more.

 

“What if we came up with something different that’s full of ritual?” mused Edward.

 

“The area that we’re in is called Guinea, of Gloucester County, and it’s a marshland, so it’s really ridden with mosquitoes,” says William.

 

Few of the family’s previous efforts were much help in eliminating their mosquito problem. William goes on, “we were like, well, the mosquitos are really bad. You know what the Pagans did? They did sacrifices to the gods so they would have good fortune.”

 

“This thing has to come off, or we’ll be bitten for the rest of the year,” Edward says in a tongue-in-cheek way. “I want a guarantee until December 31st. So, it’s fun, but there’s some kind of deep-seated thing.”

 

Edward explains that he has always had an interest in various types of rituals, from the Green Corn ceremonies of the Cherokees to the Black Ram celebrations of the sharesies in England.

 

“What we want as human beings, we want and desire these rituals… and we miss them as a people,” he said.

 

When Edward was studying his master’s degree in American studies and folklore, he went to Kachina dances in the southwest where the Hopi Indians danced in costumed rituals. The experience resonated with Edward, despite not knowing exactly why they felt the need to dance.

 

“No one knows why, but they must dance for the well-being of all people of the world,” Edward says. “That really stuck with me for 25, 30 years, that they have to do it. So, we have to do Mosquitofest, until time ends.”

 

While Mosquitofest is a fun, outlandish event for all the guests, it represents something far more significant for Edward.

 

“It’s trying to find a ritual and meaning to modern life, where we’re so scientific and so analytical. I’ve told this to visitors: it’s OK to wonder,” he said.

 

Edward continues, “if you want to know something, you just Google it right there. It’s instantly on your device. I don’t want that in my life. I want to wonder.”

 

“When I was a kid, people would say things like ‘you know, I wonder why the red oak turns yellow.’ And it was okay just to wonder for awhile, and then you would find out,” Edward said. “Well, we’re gonna add wonder back into the world with Mosquitofest.”

 

I think on the feeling of wonder I had at the event, the bizarreness of it all, the curiosity at its sheer uniqueness. If his intent is to get people to think and to wonder, Edward has achieved just that.

 

As for future years,  William says the family plans “to just keep doing it bigger and better.”

 

“I personally want to make it as weird and extreme as possible,” Edward chimes in. “We must raise the level of kookiness. This kookiness that, like I keep saying, is ritual and meaning, not just stupid, silly stuff, you know? Everything has a story.”

 

"I guess besides a really good party and some really kooky shit, there’s some meaning behind it,” Edward Schultz concludes. “If you don’t have it, man, just invent it.

photographer

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