I’m sitting at the nurse’s station cleaning my glasses with an alcohol prep pad. Looking though the newly cleaned lenses, I’m dismayed to find that not only are my scrubs wrinkled but there’s a brown smudge on my pant leg. What is that—betadine? Peanut butter from when my kids hugged me goodbye this morning? 

PARIS — The most uncomfortable thing about being naked in a museum, it turns out, is the temperature. A half-hour into the first nudist tour of the Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art museum in Paris, I had gotten used to the feeling of exposure, but I hadn’t acclimatized to the cold air circulating through the cavernous galleries.

It was 4:15 – fifteen minutes after I said I’d be there to pick her up, and I wasn’t even in my car yet. Geez! The phone rang.  It was my sister. “Can’t talk now, I’ll need to call you back. Mom’s waiting and…”  

“Uh, yeah! She’s called me three times wondering if you’d forgotten her at the church,” she said tersely.

“Gotta go.”  The only reason I was stuck with this job was because my sister, Laura, was at home taking care of two sick kids. As I approached the intersection, a block from the church, I noticed an elderly woman in front of me. She was perfectly still. 

          Randee Silv’s new chapbook, Farnessity (dancing girl press 2018) introduces us to a classification-eluding language event that she calls wordslabs.  A first read-through can feel both seductive and disorienting.  The content and rhythm of the first sentence or two might seem, often enough, to signal narrative, perhaps even fiction, but very soon afterwards, the threads start shifting so much that one has to wonder just what this writer’s up to. 

I’m sitting inside a storage closet. There is no office chatter coming from the hallway. Its Good Friday. This room houses a surplus of desk chairs piled high and paper products for the pantry kitchen around the corner that I have to restock.