Kyle Minor

by Kyle Minor

Special language from within the story, the King James Version, the taunts of small children, Shakespeare, place names, anger, Fleetwood Mac songs (an editor complained), college football bowl games, character names, hospital talk, quotations from my mother, descriptions of physical objects, emotions, Broadway musicals, Flannery O’Connor, Yeats, John Madden color commentary, Lenny Bruce jokes, cliches, cliches inverted, cliches ironicized, cliches used unironically, combinations of letters and numbers, years and other dates, puns, synecdoche, the mimetic fallacy and the intentional fallacy and other fallacies, newspaper clippings, New Yorker articles, anything by Lawrence Weschler or Wislawa Szymborska or Frank Stanford, overheard conversation near the railroad tracks, transcripts from murder trials, 19th century advertisements found in Lexis Nexis searches, outdated jargon, the Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia, famous plagiarists, trucker talk, cop talk, astronomer talk, sideways syntax, gerunding nouns, nouning verbs, anything with the words Sweet, Sour, Syrup, or Syringe, diagrams of dental procedures, anything with D-11 Root Extractors, anything flapper, flipper, flamer, or phalangical, the Southern Baptist Hymnal, issues of the Gospel Trumpet from 1921-1923, father-in-lawly utterances, Latin, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hungarian, slurs of all varieties, and any variety of harsh or hateful speech, memos from secretaries, misheard Michael Stipe lyrics, distillations of ideas stolen from Elliott Smith or the band Smog (such as paraphrases of “The kind of memories / That turn your bones to glass”), varieties of grass, varieties of dirt, bodies of water, land masses of all kinds, cheap and easy deployments of metaphors such as the Grand Canyon as a vast sunken emptiness, diseases, tombstone inscriptions, archaeological terminologies, presidential pardons, law school entrance examination questions, the words of cuckolded lovers, descriptions of the violent vengeances of cuckolded lovers, Anglicized Yiddishisms stolen from Isaac Bashevis Singer.

(originally appeared in Puerto del Sol)