I’ve forgotten the way someone else smells frictive and pleasured. The shadows wrap themselves around my legs and make themselves available in ways lovers never can be. This is how I tell time etches bodies bright to sallow. There I am-one star, the sickle constellation. The aforementioned self-examination becomes blurred as reader and speaker are both bodies of aged stardust contorted by the frailty of shared emotion, the uncertainty of voice: Someone offered fleeting moments and a sack of teeth that clattered and clashed against a touch that smelted numb.īody parts-sometimes human, sometimes animal, always precise-abound in various contexts resulting in multi-tiered transmogrifications affecting speaker and reader alike. She listened to someone singing in a rain soaked sky at the bottom of an ocean. In doing so, she left this reader feeling sculptured, but not at all fearful:

There is nothing to stand and declare loneliness when the wind scratches against saplings-initial here, initial there, toward anything, something seems.īrown crafts precise catastrophes designed to enlighten and frequently induce hallucination. From the onset, she delivers an intentional, intelligently snarky heft which challenges the reader to engage in immediate self-examination:

Brown has crafted dreamy, sometimes nightmarish, micro-worlds that challenge the confines of three dimensions. This is a fascinating, musical, often melancholic collection from an alternate dimension. It is fitting then, that Rebbecca Brown’s brilliant prose collection Mouth Trap, Arc Pair Press, 2018, landed with a boisterous thud through my otherwise uneventful mail slot. October sings to me like a sexy yodeler, alternating abruptly between chest-voice and falsetto, simultaneously eerie and enchanting, vocal vibrations shaking foliage free.

Mouth Trap by Rebbecca Brown