At One End

Ulrich Jesse K Baer

AT ONE END consists of excerpts from a longer science fiction epic where I primarily worked in a hybrid autofiction style borrowing from experimental poets like Ronald Johnson, the queer sci-fi of James Tiptree and Samuel Delany, astrophysics, and philosophy to attempt a mediation or recuperation of traumatic memory. I was inspired by the creative nonfiction work of writers such as Jenny Boully and Maggie Nelson as they attempt to navigate questions of identity and embodiedness through textual fragmentation and negative space.The conceptual basis for these stories resides in the trope of cosmic horror as cosmology horror. The formation of aggregational structures necessarily incorporates negative spaces which retain their irreducibility throughout the articulations of time. Memories decay back down within the joints, a rift without recourse that is summoning us to drown in a choreography of kinesthetic mnemonics. The trans body, here, my trans body represents an attempted topography, mouthing around shape-hood, which fails to resolve into any ideal epistemological dimensions but, instead, like the syntax, mutates within your looking at me. My body dashes away as what appeared to hold rigid boundaries reveals trapdoors, impossibly large and small annexes, contesting a notion of spatio-temporal fixity. Like a haunted house, you trespass through mirrors and revolving doors that open out into vast plains contained within miniature or microcosmic domesticities.

If you were born alone without a home world, if you had to reverse your own timeline to discover your origin point, crashlanding repeatedly within the illegible unregistered zones of human intimacy and interpersonal violence, you would make space craft music that never ends however it begins.

Ulrich Jesse K Baer received his MFA from Brown University in 2017. He was born in GA and grew up beneath southern power plants. He has a poetry chapbook with Magic Helicopter Press (Holodeck One, 2017), a science fiction chapbook with Essay Press (At One End, 2020), and a full-length with Apocalypse Party (Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, 2021). He has been included in journals such as Prelude, Pinwheel, Bathhouse, Baest, The Tiny, and Bone Bouquet. He loves horses.