| Dear Editors: I am writing to submit to your journal. May I suggest? I have some sense of your style—which pocket your hanky is in, so to speak—so let me tell you my intentions. I am looking for a way into you. You’re asking for it, you know, your bottoms up, but then just when I’m ready you turn. You make me read you, decode you, scale your sheer language—fractured, yes, but sheer. I am looking for your password, trying all the combinations. I’ll quote Althusser Augustine, Barthes, Benjamin for you, whisper them in your ear. I’ll quote Althusser, Augustine, Benjamin, Barthes for you, in the original yet. I’ll be Nabokov for you, your pale fire burning slow to dark. I am trying to cohere, just enough to be something like a story, but loose enough that it all threatens to become unbounded, collage, maybe nonsense. I will scatter, come at you from all sides, invade you maybe infect you. Give you a fever and make you want it. I am waiting for you now. Follow these words to their beginning, jumping-atop-railroad-cars-up-to-the-locomotive> You’ll find me there, wondering if you’ve been chased. But the scene dissolves, it’s all just light anyhow, leaving only a screen of paper-white. Enough already. You have exhausted me, exasperated me, outlasted me to the ground where I now lie. Take me, I won’t make you pay. Just tell me what you want. Write me, you know how to reach me. Yours, Paul VanDeCarr |