Unlike much post-avant writing, the individual sentences in “Another Artifact” integrate unimpeded into narrative frames, enabling Character to very rapidly accumulate amid referential schema once Baby is introduced by name. Indeed, the work insists on it, recycling words & phrases over multiple sentences: plug, lips, wasp wasted, shirt, sucking, pout. At the same time, the text is remarkably clear about its aural palette: Hands pried Baby’s digits, not fingers. With so many s, p, t, b & d sounds, the text all but hisses & spits. Baby’s orality is amply figured.

 

More mysterious, indeed just the opposite of Baby in this text, is the nature of the object pried from Baby’s digits. This object is wasp wasted & has a plug that “isn’t supposed to open.” It can sit on a shelf & is “the physical manifestation of the inside of a song bound up methodically around the middle with twine.” If required to do so, could you draw it? Of what material is it made?