“Rain:
Is it pearls or
Evening mist, or my tears?”
– Hakushū Kitahara
It’s raining in Queens, NY; sadly it is 2013, and I am still struggling to write about Kyle Bobby Dunn. Since failing to review A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn in 2010, and since having interviewed Dunn for some graduate work I abandoned earlier this year, I have written maybe four sentences about his work in total, all of which were placed within a parenthetical (where many words, caked in the author’s ego, should probably remain, if only for their subject’s sake): a mere aside to the one point ever unspoken —err, unspeakable.
(When I was 16 and living in the suburbs of Las Vegas, I worked in the dairy refrigerator of a Vons supermarket. I liked it because it was quiet and the work was simple. Plus, the process of freezing — going from wild stream to ice cube, from the playfully interrogative is it? to the dull solidity of it is — bothered me. Why I prefer a refrigerator to a freezer. Let milk be milk, I say, all questions about it. In the afternoon, from behind the chilled doors, I looked out at shopping families. Observant children sometimes waved somewhat absently, as if unsure I was really there, knocking over innumerable yogurts. I would smile at them from behind my milk-rack veil. If a coworker entered the refrigerator, my world, I invariably felt as though I had done something wrong. Smiling at children like that.)
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• Kyle Bobby Dunn: http://kbdunn.tumblr.com