tales out of 'slow town' #1: picnic in glass.
"the cop is dead. the bowls howl."—Miles Forrester
Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of new or gently-used work from an artist who's earned our respect.
There is art that moves us, and there is art that moves with us. This is Fellow Travellers.
In February 2024, we published Miles Forrester’s slow town century zine, an excerpt from the sprawling slow town poetry project he’s been tinkering away at for years. Recently, he sent us a snatch of prose inspired by one of the century poems, a surreally refracted slice of life in downtown Toronto. When we asked Miles to explain the connection, he replied:
“Listen, guys, I could tell you that slow town is constructed from a diamond lattice, and I could tell you that every line in said lattice corresponds to another poem that you've never read. Maybe it might even be apropos for me to let you know that when a stratum is removed from this grid that I've got all drawn up at home (and no, you may not) it becomes the surface from which a tale out of slow town may resonate. I could do that, but why don't I just show you.”
Anyway, the two pieces are presented below.
From slow town century
gives long directions for where to find the right door to close in my mid-life, i didn’t think i’d be this comatose better keep working on your music, wind the tension in ossington, not the real one if you’re the orographer erosion, entropy, propinquitry produced by submerging it in acid following these newer birds’ migrations and estrangements from automatism to constant readiness and back as repetitive as vesuvius excavating clay ancient aliens truth, beauty. sure, a tautology, but paint takes surface what is livable it’s your secret skin
picnic in glass.
rom1, noon.
the sun's rind gets cut with several perimeters of thickened cloud by the reflected street. i am standing in the centre of that refraction, some loose teeth angled over bloor. in the big one's second facet from the top, a busker is playing a blanketful of clay bowls using careful hammers and a homemade bow. a knot of aux cables drapes across his lap ending in contact mics. the contact mics feed into a pedal array, which leads to an analogue console, or vice versa. somehow, signals end up coming out of a decorated amplifier, many pineal stickers, which makes its own noises independently. this is all powered by hidden batteries. a very long truck parks and idles behind him to empty that day's dust. it swirls from its bed in white and tan murmurations.
the scheduled summer funky brass band enters from the east corner, carrying heavy instruments, obviously frustrated. they march directly for the electroacoustician that has stolen their patch at prime time. the trumpeter-conductor points him back, west, to the annex, overextending his arm like a cartoon umpire. his face is red and he is starting to bald beneath his gatsby cap. the tuba player is coughing behind him. the engine gutters and spouts in time with the tuba and hacking clarinet. the original busker’s bow slices across the earthen rim and there are sounds of insects digging and a ringing in the distance. everything—clay, hair, stick, wrist, elbow—is covered in a building film of particles. the one kid holding the euphonium has to sit down.
our friend enters from the south point with two cooling cardboard containers of sour chicken. one is for me. by my body language, it is delicious and appreciated. behind us, in the glass, a museum assistant is maneuvering a rolling rack laden with dangling kimonos. shingled prints of antique tesselating patterns, flowers, and fish shake as she tries to take this train up the stairs. at the back are the contemporary weaves, all torontonian designers. chemically flattened animals and junk food float over iridescent gradients. they have warped slogans for neighbourhoods that have not taken off. is the elevator down? there is no one there to push as she pulls the rack upward. the assistant is the last to resign in protest. she knows her comrades do not judge her more than she judges herself. the kimonos tip a little, lean, and rattle across the glass.
we turn around and see if we can locate the tapping sound above us. our friend asks a question. i answer that maybe i do feel a bit queasy being there. our friend shrugs and admits indifference. it's not that history proves we're monsters but the collection of history itself is monstrous. it deforms the world. our friend sucks some flabby meat from the bone like a gunshot. you don't think there's something to be learned? our friend has been making these terse pronouncements intermittently since being hit. they stare at the intersection. in the sister shard, we can see as far as bay without much interruption. all northbound traffic is stemmed from museum station south as far as osgoode, but the lights keep bloor moving and stopping in its typical rhythm.
the truck is up to something, it does not budge other than short fits of pneumatic activity. the trumpeter is going nuts. he takes off his cap as if he is going to throw it on the ground, but it is too expensive. instead, he glowers at the ambient musician, who is ancient. this eldritch busker has seen these little hart house creeps before and he is not afraid of them! he was there when they were playing zydeco, he was there when they were doing baltic fusion, now they're still trying dilla beats and, yes, he is even less afraid! they will be selling real estate to their friends before the decade is over and he will still be playing his ceramics! the trumpeter stalks away in a parabola toward the line of police. the band, dusty and asthmatic as they are, can only gasp as their pay cheque disappears into queen’s park road.
it's not that our friend thinks travel's a solution either. obviously, people should stay where they are. if they can. if they can, sure, but we're talking about people who need to go somewhere else to learn something new, to burn fuel and use people as servants, it's perverse. we went to italy together. and what did we learn, really?
upstairs the kimonos lurch forward, the casters stutter on each stair step, silks rub against their protective sheets which rub against each other further. the world feels hot. a cop comes around the corner, the worst cop they could spare. the trumpet player is behind him, shuffling his feet, not wanting to outrun his decisions. under the grunting truck’s shadow, rhomboid, the bowls are grinding against each other. a filter somehow produces whistling noises from this interaction.
vinegar and chicken grease thicken in the rice beneath the bones. it comes up in crumbling bricks.
at the apex, not the last one but this one, before the plateau, the bridge follows, if i remember correctly, yes, maybe, the lateral pipes on the kimono rack, as in top and bottom, pop from the vertical one the assistant is holding onto.
i think i recognize him, our friend says.
somewhere in the second most southern part of brazil, the top of the bottom peninsula, rio grande do sol, is a hole. in that hole was an earlier secret hole encrusted by crystals, a geode, saturated by wash after wash of mineral-enrichened water, which gets everywhere. not sparkling. not until excavated, then stolen, sold, i don't know, and brought here where what is and what is not is open, violet.
silks shatter through the glass. any superfluous musician scatters. a cascade captures everything beneath it, vehicles and people outside, the world inside eviscerates. our friend, myself, and the trumpeter are just behind. it is a terrible miracle. kimonos ensorcell air currents in indigo, coral, orange, and a more contemporary verdigris, going and going on like ghosts. they catch the filaments we have been breathing in and bleach from that sacrifice, settling into the truck's gaping bed. it trundles away. the cop is dead. the bowls howl.
Miles Forrester is a poet in Tkaronto (Toronto). He runs the bi-annual Litzine workshop, *Zugzwang* at the Toronto Zine Library. His poems have appeared in *CV2*, *Acta Victoriana*, *FreeFall*, and *Bad Dog*. You can find his chapbooks, *Hippocamp* (illustrated by Haus of Decline) and *Slow Town Century* (published by Discordia Review Press) at TZL, where he usually sits on Tuesday nights.
Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.
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rom = Royal Ontario Museum, for those not blessed to live in Toronto. noon means 12 o’clock pee em, Eastern Standard Time. [Ed.]