THE REMIX: ERASURE Before the letter, this funeral. Always a funeral with clowns , always a clown show with mutes in white face and polka dots, with men banished beneath the ruffles and the soundless gestures of mimes . Now this gaggle of Pierrots emerged from a single station wagon, pink tongues extended and lace…

with English to French Translation by Christiane Ehrenreich THE REMIX: COLUMBINE AND HARLEQUIN Un enterrement. Twenty-five years ago… in the beaten air of a Georgia mortuary one hundred fans circulate the rancid vapors of formal-hydrate. The dance of faces creeps across the closed façade of a casket, creeps across the black polymer of a casket.…

CHARLES DODD WHITE’S REMIX: THE TAXONOMY OF GRIEVING BEASTS BY PIERROT, THE CLOWN, A MAN OF CIRCUMSPECT BEARING AMID MANY TRAGIC CIRCUMSTANCES ASSOCIATED WITH A LIFE UNDER THE BIG TOP HEREBY MAKING PENITENT REMEMBRANCES AT THE MOMENT OF HIS DEATH Long nights now camped in clearings, long nights recollecting the company of animals, the snores…

THE REMIX: ARIA FOR THE CLOWN’S WIFE She is not well. She is not well at all, the singer, as she watches the clown in baggy pants frowning and flopping about on the stage. The hat, the acrobatics, all so strangely solemn and so familiar and so depressing, no wonder she shrinks at night under…

THE REMIX: PIERROT, UNDER THE BIG TOP The lashing of Pierrot’s whip. The animals that thrilled everybody. The station wagon with one hundred Pierrots. Long red shoes and polka dots. Pink tongues and lace collars. White face paint dripping from chins and lips, beaded on noses. Fingers deformed into brown bears. Pierrot locked inside invisible…

THE REMIX: IN THE LOST The absence of lines and words, now those forests where mounds of bones lay bleached, within the air curled into his words, ah, if I could but once smell the air spoke with vibrations, how she said the air, and this man, the animals of Pierrot’s minds, now no howling…

THE REMIX: LONG DAYS October 23rd, 1942 This is the journal of Detective Mitch Caldwell. Still no sign of the clown. I have spent long days along the roads, back roads and highways, roads of dust and concrete, roads bent and vibrating in the heat. I have watched many long days in the station wagon,…

THE REMIX: THE FINAL ROOM A CITY “our nights until she was gone, my mother never—” A city of flatbed trucks brimming with the skins and skulls of alligators, with the black and green and brown figures of leather and flies. A city of flat-bed trucks rusted and a city of speakers, towered and humming.…

ROBERT KLOSS’ ORIGINAL: Robert Kloss’ “The Clown Show” will be posted at the conclusion of the Remix Project. + THE REMIX: A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR RUNAWAYS OR: HANSEL GOES FIRST Before the letter, this funeral. Always a clown show: mutes in white face and polka dots, men banished beneath the ruffles, mothers and grandmothers gone…

BLAKE BUTLER’S ORIGINAL: PORTRAITS OF THE DOOR I WASHED OFF OF THE HOUSE Portraits of the door I washed off of the house would appear for minutes at the dinner table in the peas no one was listening above the rummage of the magnets in the television reordering the fonts of where we shopped and…

DAVID OHLE’S ORIGINAL: FROM: THE OLD REACTOR In the liberated city of Altobello, a jellyhead woman entered the Saposcat’s Deli on Arden Boulevard last night with five severed heads in a suitcase, those of husband, Barry; Muffy and Dale, the twin 10-year olds; Earnest, the blind and deaf son, and George D. Bennett, an uncle…

LAURA VAN DEN BERG’S ORIGINAL: ACROBAT The day my husband left me, I followed a trio of acrobats around the city of Paris. The whole time my husband had been talking—telling me, presumably, why he was leaving—I was watching these acrobats do backflips and handstands in synchrony, an open violin case at their feet. They…