Spotlight series #47 : MLA Chernoff

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

STATEMENT

The texts that follow are part of a larger autobiographical serial pome, tentatively titled “Squelch Procedures,” after Erin Mouré’s Search Procedures. Written during a debilitating bout of depression in the summer and fall of 2019, my squelches effectively and affectively theorize a poetics of secular Jewishness and a techno-mysticism of pop culture particular to my experiences as an Ashkenazic Torontonian brought up in the Bathurst Manor during the bleak age of Mike Harris.

The process of composition emerged from an urgent need to alleviate the tensions between so-called procedural/conceptual poetries and lyric poetries; that is, the need to acknowledge that all writing is, in some form, constraint based. There is a certain machinic intimacy intrinsic to my sweet, beautiful squelches, my hissy-pissy babies, by way of an algorithmic automatism — the only consistent constraint was the kind of media (and weed) I passively consumed while squelching about. Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify could be considered co-authors of these pomes; their selections routed and rerouted my memories along countless neural pathways, a blissed and blitzed detour(nement) on the way to my dirty Macbook screen. Pop culture as telepoiesis. After all, a squelch is — amongst other things — a circuit function used to moderate the strength of audio and video signals, suppressing the output of the receiver when signals fall short of the input’s threshold.

Additionally, I play with the conflicting definitions of “squelch” as a springboard to contemplate trauma, poverty, and the rigorously enforced gender normativity of my childhood. “Squelch” etymologically denotes a heavy, crushing fall on to something soft; so too is it a gentle sucking sound made when pressure is applied to liquid, as well as the act of forcefully silencing or suppressing someone or something. “Squelch” is simultaneously sound, silence, and the sound of silence, an aporetic onomatopoeia reverberating with glee and glumness. “Squelch” is the key to a deeply personal idiom with which I have only recently come into contact, an idiom that emphasizes the linguistic possibilities of defense mechanisms such as projection, avoidance, and dissociation, all of which come coupled with CPTSD — my traumatic returns. Each squelch explodes various events from my life, while attempting to redefine normative ideas of health, wellness, and communication. To squelch is to gob a psalm, to spit the sacred out into the world of the profane, and vice-versa.

TWO POEMS

SQUELCH i (Mercury in Paris)

The Simple Life (2003–2005)
is an intrusive memory of the future —
a squelch shared by all, goading psalm-gobbed etches
onto the underside of rare Pogs I bog into a swole-ass cymose
next to the squelch I find under the couch
during a crying spell ‘bout the metaphysics
of mommy and other ontic antics in
a well-mannered Bathurst of familiar fun.

At the clean-shaven seder, I singe for a
type-token cache to adequately analyze
Frank Sinatra’s snot-poshed knavery
while his pall-mall voice projects itself in and around
the jeers of astral wax nuggets I call ear — damn.

Squelch is that feeling when
your only family heirloom is being
lost in a Walmart full of shit-rusted Norman Doors,
where us poors go for the privacy but stay for the Rollback’d™
sense of sylph. But here’s the tea: I am that I am — that’s hot.

Simply footed, squelch lobs me into
a circus of circuits, imbibing so many
forgive-me-nots and cherry rots,
such-that-the wheelchair’s crust childs my husk and paints
the uncharitable lightness of tomato soup
all over my goddamn Being.

I dunk my Sailor Mercury in the soup
and drink of her; I become her,
if only for a lip-exonerated blip —
you shout at me. But why?
It’s canon, it’s retrograde.
I stain the plush chair in all
its cinnabar glory; I walk away
Assigned Measles At Birth,
my toes in my snout, spitting up Gryfe’s,
attempting to access the grief and peel back the anger,
barking about as a foregone skin returns to envelope me.
O! shit-brown carpet — doth thy splinter kiss mine foot?

Then and there, squelch emerges as ping-pains;
For $1100 a month, it rents the space between idealism and ideation,
where procedure is as moot as the balcony
I find myself thrusting toward, over and under gauche-greencurtains, miles away from your volume
and the guck of your bathroom where clipped fingernails ween
hot compresses into a macabre dance of comedogenics,
fucking genetics in the key of acne-free eugenics,
sitting without shitting for hours on end and
twiddling my bums around the memory
of a cockroach greeting my wetness with the
hiss of a decorative towel, damp with
magmatic miasmas who down issues
of Women’s World and suck the stream of
non- in a good binch’s conscience.
In short, the squelch of old hat and old house —
a never-knot in remission — founds my body on the
tenderness of a too-hot-4-u spleen pouring bisque, misdelivered.

SQUELCH iii (Lyric for Lyrica)

The pome mirrors and mires das kapital,
makes aliyah with its own ass and
smooches everything in seams:
a thirst for terse — been there, done that;
a delet function for the baby that I am
and the comrade that I want; oof.
After a thousand retweets, some counter-vampire stuffs
the blood back in, like a coffee enema
out to munch on the complex rhythms
of stardust wearing your favourite strap-on.

The word is vital, the word is throb;
it’s palindromic if you’re
looking for company and need it to Be.
Does Pagliacci even eat ass?
I’ve only one request:
I’ve only one regret:
No funeral —
I feel great, I love sports.
No funeral, no minyan.
Only minion:
this is the best I’ve ever felt:
I’m fitter:happier:moreproductive:
like a pig in a blanket,
a cop tethered to the upended sword-wise side
of a mop; please let me revolt myself,
I say to my revolting self.

No funeral — I’m well medicated and porous,
the pharmaceutical industrial complex has truly
shaved my life; give me another decade
to fish for some marks and really get it together.
But if you can’t, I’ll settle for eateries and eternities
of shit, shan’t, and shunned, which become
memories of spring, spraining my sprung —
a moment in which I am the
blue of my own breath,
a system of synapses aeroplaning under
some dogged and milligram’d sea,
squelching “that’s hot:
dee dee, dee dee.”

MLA Chernoff (@citation_bb) thanks you for visiting their profile. They are a Jewish, non-binary pome machine, a postmodern neomarxist, and somehow a PhD candidate at The Neoliberal University of York University. MLA’s first collection of pomes, delet this, was released by Bad Books in the spring of 2018. Their second collection, TERSE THIRSTY, was released by Gap Riot Press in the summer of 2019.