Lupus est homo homini non homo quom qualis sit non novit: alpha

came back, he had become a dog’s head. Peaceless and withouten freed. He bares lupinum caput from the day of his casting out: and he is cast out utterly: and the English call this wulfes heud.

the dog: 1

The human capsule in which you find yourself, entirely by accident, is other as the others.

2

The alfalfa fields two curves of green on blue; near yard a flat of green. The big house is dust green. The two headed barn is red, and that faded.

3

The dog what have a mannes name, the dog 

Front legs bowed backward, broken cees. Shorter than the back legs, sway back, head down clattering behind them. He tries to keep up, twisted legs.

Omnipresent: you wake every day with something else’s hairs stuck gently to your face. You rake them out of your own hair with your nails, short and stiff.

the gift: A

Ancient pile, since bed and breakfasted. You thought it was an artists’ colony when you got here, or a boarding house for academics. An indeterminate number of men and women with unknown names and shifting appearances. They practice mutual aid. They live according to the syllogism of the gift.

B

evicted and I thought you had a room free, can I put you two in touch?

Yes, I have a room. Does he need a ride? Is it an emergency?

No he has the condition of short dog.

I don’t know what that means.

He has the condition of dog in the head, and also he’s been evicted.

He will be welcome as long as he needs. No human being is illegal!

4

You brought a cutting board with you and nobody uses it. You brought a pound of ghee and nobody eats it. You brought measuring cups, and nobody uses them. You brought a thick wool coast guard surplus coat and a hat of real rabbit fur. You brought three red and white kitchen towels and an oven mitt with two eyes drawn on it in sharpie to make the mitt like a little face. People use those but probably because they don’t know that was you. You bought a composter for the group as a thanks offering and they still dump their kitchen scraps on their own compost pile, at the bottom of the field, in secret. Massive tomato vines downhill from the compost, darker more thick than any seed. Don’t look happy: volunteer tomatoes bare no fruit. If they do it’s toxic.

5

Your shadow on the gently warping floor, well shaped as any man. Two arms, a powerful torso, two legs rotate in the sockets of their particulars, feet splay, soft undone penis in its nest of wires. In this you are no different to anyone else.

If you knew how others see you, you would be 180 pounds of reeking meat. If you saw yourself, the which would be gang green.

6

You uncomfort them. When you enter a room they’re silent. You come into the kitchen through the screen door and someone’s tote bags on the table full, cup of yogurt with his name on it. Someone’s about to cook when you come in for coffee and she leaves without coming back: three eggs on the cutting board, one stick of butter, a little bottle of olive oil, and the pan greased.

C

Gratitude for bringing your energy to this space. Here is the pantry. Here is the food, which is for all. We don’t believe in microwaves here, which is queer AF. Here is your room. Is it OK? Is the bed OK? It’s king size, which means: two twins together. If you need anything, like a dresser or a lamp, we could get you something from our sharespace supplies. Does the overhead fan work? Does the light work? They don’t, neither. Do the blinds open? Do they shut?

D

Hidden systems govern this house. One room is stacked with clothing, another with dishes, shelves, and luggage: that one is closed off with two wide black curtains. Dimly it feels like someone sleeps behind those curtains, later you wander in and find that someone does not. Two living rooms, one for meetings, because they take government by the group seriously here. That always dark. In the other, two identical doors: one to the basement, and the other to a study nobody works in. From this reverse entrance it looks different in a slant way, like your own face upside down.

7

You are repulsed of yourself. Your rotten internals, and your stench. Not even hatred: more a feeling of desolation and pity, even a form of empathy with yourself, although you hate everything about yourself. You are nothing but a sack of wolves in a coat, you are a walking genetail.

As time passes you feel of yourself something soft and giving: spongy, like nougat.

8

One month you tried to give yourself a hug addiction, you were trying to convince yourself you were a hug addict, you were saving pictures with hugs on them and did other hug associated things and you failed, no matter how hard you tried.

9

Hands the size of half the table, prim and capable, these have been your hands all their lives. Since you came to this house, what machine they handle they destroy.

E

Up the back stairs, a second story: your bedroom the second door. The hall is far too long for two bedrooms and at the end it turns sharply left. One narrow door: tiny storage room, empty. Another: a huge, well-lit, hidden bathroom. Exit this bathroom and it’s an entire other second story, almost completely separate from the wing where you live: three doors face you in a long hall. You never open the rightmost door, but at least three rooms nestle behind it, shrink and curl inward.

Under your feet this floor is soft. This wing must be carpeted. You open the first door in front of you: another storeroom? Hello? Sorry.

I didn’t accept your apology because I knew right then there was no way you were intending to make amends.

You don’t seem to follow the unspoken rules, so I assumed you never intended to make amends.

What would amends for walking into someone’s room by accident look like?

F

If anyone wants to, maybe some people could chip in a little for rent.

Do you want me to pay rent?

No pressure!

How much?

The people who have stayed here before…have paid…between nothing and six hundred dollars a month.

Halfway between nothing and six hundred is three hundred. Is that OK?

That’s wonderful!

10

You ask if you can cut the grass weekly in the near lawn. For sure you are the only one strong enough to shove the old push mower. But the rains come and the grasses’ heavy heads pop against your ankles walking. One day the engine only catches after three quarters of a minute hauling on the starter cord, it bucks and coughs black smoke. One day the cord won’t pull out at all, but catches ticking five inches out of its housing. You beg to be allowed to pay them back for a new one. They refuse.

11

Your fingertips ooze oily goo which dissolves some but not all inks: book covers, the hard glossy pages of magazines. Where your fingers have touched the ink is marred, white fingerprints eat into it. On uncolored paper you leave sticky prints. Black is these colors mixed.

12

Even your pores exude a fatty yellow substance. It works into the keyboards of your laptops, into the vent gratings, between the keys and the housing, between the wires, where it dries into a thick gritty burnt orange paste. The keys fail, whatever internals that enable one computer to know another fail.

G

Well it looks like you’re working when you read at the kitchen table, and I don’t want to interrupt that. I’d rather use the common area to socialize.

I’m not doing work, this is how I socialize: I like to sit near a group of people.

I don’t want to be forced to perform emotional labor by gratifying you like that.

If you don’t want to socialize, we don’t have to socialize.

You’re spending too much time at the kitchen table. You move to a table in the living room. You’re spending too much time in the living room, and it changes the atmosphere.

It’s not that we don’t want you around, it’s

You utilize space differently.

H

Hi! I’d just like to check in, see if everything’s going OK…I’ve been checking in with everyone. There are six—well, one doesn’t count—well, several—people in the house and every one of them said. Now, they don’t want you to become…unhoused, but

Have they been talking about me? What did they say?

That’s privileged information.

beta

At the age of eight the boy was bathed, shaved, and given animal skins to wear. Eight years later, at midwinter, he endured a ceremony in which he ritually died and journeyed to the underworld. After this he left his home and family, painted his body black, donned a dog-skin cloak, and was exiled from normal society.

13

When you eat black beans, blackberries, cherries, and figs, your shits are dark and a blueish tinge off their shoulders like watered ink. When you eat tomatoes, red beans, and kidney beans they’re red, and when you eat turmeric they’re olive drab. In all cases they’re too big to flush. To find a plunger, you’d have tell this house your shits are disproportionate.

An ecstasy of terror. Plunger in the back of one closet, in a bucket. You shove it into your toilet, pump twice, and the cup tears soundlessly away from the top and turns inside out with a wet pop. The ancient rubber has disintegrated. You pick up the rubber cup and the wooden rod. Icy wet and smeared with shit. The trash bag, is not quite long enough to tie shut around the handle.

14

As far as you can tell your head is what it’s always been: a fine head, poised, curly hair layered tightly on top. You think the angle of your chin was particularly nice. Now you are a platybelodon, a gnathabelodon, an oil-dwelling gomphothere, your lower jaw is the back end of a claw hammer. The metaphorical jaw is the one that aches. Water passes through your rubbery pale tongue like thirst in a dream. If they put a wolf’s head on top of your head, the which would be so heavy you could not stand upright.

15

The shell that entraps you still yearns for pleasure, and even the smallest sensation disgusts you. In women, it would be the cycle. For men, it is the nocturnal tumescence. It is a constant reminder: you are nothing but life.

I

I’m sick and tired of mediating constant disputes between you and everyone else here.

I didn’t know there had been any. What have people been saying about me?

That’s privileged information.

J

ate his tangerines.

They weren’t labeled.

He never labels his stuff because he doesn’t believe in ownership. 

pure physical self focus, which is the heart of late state consumerist capitalism.

16

The flesh of the twist legged dog is warm and almost fuzzy. It touches the bare skin of your leg and adheres to it. The dog’s right shoulder, bent upper arm, skewed elbow, and wrenched lower arm down to the paw in a Kaethe Kollwitz sideways swoop.

17

You are a teeming biomass. Ticks cluster along the seams of your body like currants, smell like outgassing. Lice like the skeletons of leaves. Fleas pop against your skin in a movement so abrupt and vigorous you imagine is in fact a kind of sound.

18

Bones and joints pop, crack, and grind as they open to new form. Always aware of it and find it uncomforting. You can never bring yourself to sleep naked, just thinking about the skin flakes and hairs that fall off; you couldn’t bare to rest soundly like that.

K

I mean isn’t this like, the greatest fear, that people are angry at you but won’t tell you they are, or why, or what you’ve done.

Don’t make me do emotional labor by managing your fears. Plus we gave you heavily subsidized rent!

L

Don’t think of this like you’re being kicked out, think of it like…a breakup! Now, trying to live with you taught me a lot about myself, and for that I’m grateful.

gamma

While excavating the Bronze Age site, they unearthed the bones of at least 51 dogs and 7 wolves. All the animals had died in winter, judging from the telltale banding pattern on their teeth, and all were subsequently skinned, dismembered, burned, and chopped with an ax.  The dogs’ snouts had been chopped into three pieces and their skulls into geometric fragments, an inch or so in size.

19

Cysts riddle the dog’s doughy body. Fatty lumps, pimples, and growths. Is it cancer they say. They pull the biggest lump out softly and bloodlessly, they sew up the hole with black wire.

Pushed-out-ed-ness is your body. You take it into your body, and make it part of your body. The poverty of the animal.

20

Alone your schedule is formless; without outside your time is timeless. You wake the shadows low across the fields, something yips in the dark, you sleep at sunrise. You sleep fifteen hours at a stretch or not at all and wake when you can. The sky rolls toward winter.

21

The nearer yard as yellow under nightblue. The fields as two green curves.

delta

ordained each helot wear a dogskin cap and wrap himself in skins,

22

Holding it up is agonizing: your heart hammers and your knees are going numb. Still the rain mists gently into the open jaws.

23

You will now detail the things you did to yourself, and for which you take full responsibility until proven otherwise by research and science:

One: Rashes everywhere on your body

Two: Itchy scalp since age 13, but you think you tried convincing yourself it began at 11 just to tell yourself you didn’t cause it

Three: Hernia

Four: You used to get frequent constipation

Five: Heart palpitations

Six: After orgasm your body sometimes dysregulates its temperature, the which being too hot and unable to naturally cool

Seven: Gastritis

Eight: Reproductive system and genetail pain

Nine: Every year you experience new pains you never felt before

Ten: Chest pains

Eleven: Carpel tunnel

Twelve: Tendonitis

Thirteen: Dog person

Fourteen: Brain damage due to brain fog

Fifteen: Decreased memory and so on

Sixteen: Organ (not the genetail) damage due to mysterious pains

Seventeen:  Shortened lifespan

Eighteen: And extremely poor eyesight for your age, and also you’ve been cursed with unusual persistently harmful laziness.

There is no research into this subjective (and possibly objective with more research) experience.

24

Your body lives and yearns to live. You wish, how fervently you wish, you could escape your status as living creature. But while this house like all communities is a network of meaning, a state and a city, you are a pile of life, which others can include or expel with equal carelessness.

epsilon

was an inversion, as is the eating of wolves, animal symbolic of anti-culture.

M

You’re a good person. You’re a good person. If I met you on the street of course I’d grab a coffee with you, it’s just that 

at times 

your energy is off and I can’t relax if we occupy the same space. 

N

especially after you kept talking about “housing is a human right,” it seems like

But I’m not an activist at home.

zeta

When the Macedonian army under Alexander broke a taboo, this is how they purified themselves. They killed a dog and cut it in half at the ribs, then dragged the halves to two sides of a field and marched the whole army between them. They snapped the ribs with kitchen shears. The ribs were moist, you know they must have been luminously moist, in coats of antler velvet.

Lucian Staiano-Daniels has a PhD in military history from UCLA. His nonfiction is forthcoming from Cambridge. His fiction has appeared in The Fortnightly Review and his poetry has appeared in numerous haiku establishments.