Category Archives: Stephen Hastings-King

1. 2 is another. 3 is made from 1 and 2. 4 is 3 which is 2 and 1 and all their modalities 5 is the current produced by 4 which is 3 and 2 and 1 and all their … Continue reading →

This time he is a race car driver who struggles with recurrent sing-song strings of rhyming words that run through his mind disrupt his focus and interfere with his reduction to a volume in motion but then meltdown Piltdown the … Continue reading →

I remember at the top of the path from the footbridge over the multi-colored river in the basement of the house there was a collection of seashells arranged in transparent polyurethane cubes stacked with an eccentric sense of geometry into … Continue reading →

Words write themselves on my walls. They creep into paintings and photographs, erase elements from image, replace with themselves. Words take shape in clouds of cigarette smoke. They fill up my ashtrays and pile up on tables. Some days I … Continue reading →

Above the arrangements of leather belts cast iron wheels and saw blades hovers the rotting hull of a boat manned by ghosts in flannel who endlessly repeat the same slice of a long-ago winter voyage; in every photograph groups of … Continue reading →

She walks quickly past the same series of four buildings again and again like there is in this place a single series of four buildings copied and pasted end to end. A Voiceover accompanies her: The Assistant is lost again … Continue reading →

To the Editor: Some time ago, I began to write you letters with the idea of helping your newspaper become a more complete map of our little shared world. But as my work progressed doubts began to take shape. In … Continue reading →

In this sector of the estuary you swim through continuous showers of sunlight and krill and the array of regularly spaced wavering human forms floating upright seems to extend endlessly in all directions. Each wears a trench coat and private-eye … Continue reading →

His voice unfolds in hieroglyphics. They tumble across a wall and echo in a courtyard where they are caught by a microphone that translates them into packets which are diverted into cables that carry them to relays that bounce them … Continue reading →

Through a stone doorway left by a disappeared building I look across 200 years onto a patchwork field of alternating shades of green and yellow arrayed around a winding segment of electric blue river where the exiled court of Louis … Continue reading →

The people who together form an open-ended series A through N…, and who were scattered and adrift for a time, now constitute themselves as complex figure beneath a sign that says: “We missed you too” through layers of activity that … Continue reading →

Brother, I write you because I feel the need to tell you about my life. But each letter falls like lint into a pocket of routine self-recrimination that I endure until I feel right and forget again. And later, when … Continue reading →

Rain pours through the suspended ceiling and the building’s fire alarm sounds repeated bursts of loud abrasive distortion 1 2 3. In the pulse of red strobe lights, a large fireman who had moments before been sound asleep stands in … Continue reading →

That morning arrived with the sound of steel pipe hitting the ground again and again. Each strike at once swallowed itself and fractured into geographies of decay that gave way differentially to aspects of the day. Some opened up as … Continue reading →

Behind me are two doors. Each opens onto a room which is more event than space. Entering puts a sequence into motion that is every time the same. In the first snow falls through the ceiling and weighs down with … Continue reading →

He chews lamb peeled off the shank and hums quietly to himself thinking about the lines of birds arrayed along the opalescent gray ice surface of the river and the woman whom he talks from her own private ice flow … Continue reading →

I want someone who is attractive and funny, who is kind and who gets me. I want to curl up by a fire with a glass of wine/cup of coffee/dram of scotch and be mesmerized/lose myself. I want someone to … Continue reading →

When collapse is a wave that curls the floor under itself I give myself to it and fall through a white void where the only differentiation is a black square that recedes at a speed greater than that of my … Continue reading →

There is a here and I am in it, stumbling over gullies and gashes past vertical forms made from broken grasses and corkscrews of newly fallen snow spinning in the pressurized hiss of the wind. Here is a not remembering … Continue reading →

1. Elsewhere, alone, stranded on an atoll, far, Amelia Earhardt is being eaten by crabs. Every time she tried to sleep they came, legions of small armored things scuttling claws aloft across the purple sand, wave on wave as soon … Continue reading →

Once we were in love. Then we disappeared. Very slowly you fell through the floor of memory rooms that were brightly lit and entirely your own and dissipated into surrounding zones of detritus and decay, then in fragments drifted down … Continue reading →

That morning a lake appeared out back. Where grasses were concentric waves shudder across a silver surface of water. He leans against the door takes a sip of coffee and thinks about submerged fragments of Pharaohs and disappeared fishermen on … Continue reading →

When I woke my hands were straining against their shape. They were large purple, fashioned from sausage and pain. I thought perhaps I had fallen. What I did was worse. A mediocre conga player builds no calluses and never remembers … Continue reading →

After my father died, I went to his house for the first and only time. It was a network of trails through sprung organizations. Illness had pulverized his collections. Everything was covered in dust. When I knew him, he collected … Continue reading →

She is blonde and pretty. He is a shadow. She warms to him after a drink or two. She reveals intimacies through her assessments of television surgeries. She falls silent between characters, fidgets between narrative points. . Later he holds … Continue reading →

Every morning he is awakened by jack hammers. He feels around his head to make sure all the parts are there. Then he says his name to see if it still fits. Over coffee he watches a video loop metallic … Continue reading →

. 1. For the next-to-last journey he muled a stolen car from Gloucester to Florida. He brought with him a .38 and a bouquet of cheap flowers. He left the flowers at her door on the way out. 2. Their … Continue reading →

The box kite floats high over the marsh. You follow the string and its downward trailing arc across an abstract blue field past the curious geometrical forms of white and yellow & a cloud of mechanical birds that wobbles their … Continue reading →

Her engagement announcement arrived this morning. He retells the story so that it came like a calling card placed on an elephant foot umbrella stand in his hallway. De gustibus non est disputandum. Their stories were once intertwined. Then she … Continue reading →

The Black Mariah pulls into the driveway. The next constellation of awareness finds me against the wall beneath the window. The war they wage seeps beyond informality. The war they wage happens behind stories that say there is no war. … Continue reading →

1. When the head of the king popped off the royal body, the lackey thought about historical necessity. That was the first sentence. Because of it, the story ground to a halt. 2. The famous writer has just been daydreaming … Continue reading →

In the faintly orange air of a late afternoon I sit at a tiny metal sidewalk café table across from another. I ran into Julian again. I remember the book he comes from but not how he migrated from it. … Continue reading →

She drinks a chocolate martini. I fold myself up and slide into her pocket. There I join the others.  We seven in her pocket talk animatedly about space, travel and the topologies of her breasts.  She pays us no mind. We organize … Continue reading →

Once there was a man who wrote in code. He was comfortable among substitutions. He never spoke about work.  He never spoke about other-than-work.  One day he was killed. He was stuffed into a duffel bag and left in a … Continue reading →

Where I work you cannot see the sun. Where I work people use words like leverage.  They do not appear to denote anything. Where I work everyone sits in a little cube in the middle of which is a little monitor … Continue reading →

1 Part of an arrangement of trapezoids and triangles, lines and loops I move across the water. The sky is a field of cracks. Pieces come loose and fall. Some land on the deck. Nearby string musicians play the same … Continue reading →

Zeno is keening for shore.   Under full sail, cutting through the water, leaning in: the boat makes no headway. Full of sail & full of rum he heads in beneath a sheet of aqua sky.  A marble in a maze … Continue reading →

Inertia was broken when I walked in my spacesuit down the long white corridor toward the strobe-lights and launch pad.  I already felt weightless. Strapped into the seat of the capsule I focus on the backward series of numbers, each … Continue reading →

Once the expression finishes repeating it writes itself again. I write it again. From the repeating on my monitor it travels through every node in every network. And every node repeats it. Everywhere is the same. I do not remember … Continue reading →

Path Posit a room from remembering. Arrange windows around its perimeter, a perimeter that is open, is continuously self-correcting. Position a table. A glass with rings of red wine, cutlery and a plate. An architecture of couscous and partially chewed … Continue reading →

The fields that Arthur Parsing parses are frames and variables and motions.  Organization is how Arthur’s parsing parses. First he notes insects clouding grasses and that the sky is bereft of birds.  Then the wind comes with a transparent cheering.  Blushing, … Continue reading →

She says: I don’t know what happened to my little Jean-Pierre. I was getting water about a hundred feet of curious hermetic stillness from where I left him playing.  I turned in time to watch him disappear into the black … Continue reading →

  For a time he documented his facial expressions. He arranged the photographs on a storyboard. With his finger he traced pathways through fields of possibilities. Guiding himself with a hand mirror, he mimed the resulting sequences and waited for … Continue reading →

1. The plastic sphere snow does not stop falling through glycerine onto the model New England village, center of a permanent storm into which no people venture. 2. In a glycerine temporality places set for lunch lift from shaking tables … Continue reading →