Snide

adj.

1. It latches onto nouns like butter latches tinily onto the pitted face of toast.

As in, “Television is snide, because it better hides the difficulties of living.” As in, “I was sincere, but my cheeks got too red to control that other person’s head with the palms of my hands—the fur on their ears fell out, and became too much like me.” As in, “The snideness is an easier transition when the camera is there, asking for noise that doesn’t beg for attention—it wants us to pretend we have it begging, or something.”

n.
1. It’s a book that has sold well to boys who read to preserve a sense of themselves as readers. Or to make the fantasy of literacy, of currency passable.
As in, “The snide feels good in my fingers—it’s like thousands of layers of latex house-paint.”
2. the élan vital, superabundant with black suits, and it pays, just this once, to imagine a subway car as disgorging phallus, the hurry of fiduciary spores, a livid-going-on-lurid motility that won’t be postponed, subterranean this much, much longer.
As in, “The snide, vegetal and animal alike, brings about, and in engendering, yields.”

adv.
1. Obliquely. In-order-to-obscure-by-choosing-a-somewhat-more-honest-but-less-direct-answer.
As in, “I talk snide when you ask me how I am, because I’ve been away from home, working in the middle of a pyramid in the city. I tell you I want to end it—which is true—when I really just need a different job.”

v. 
1. Deflect.
As in, “I can snide the bullet that would kill me. Put the gun to my warm chest.”
2. Make-safe
As in, “I can snide us to a bigger home, where no one can reach us.”
3. To cause to waggle, undulate or waver in such a way that an otherwise potentially injurious phenomenon’s (e.g., an arrow’s) linear capacities turn particulate, granular, available to plucking or pinching(-off), the purchase of fingertips, esp. at their daintiest, cherries sprout to sunder the sclerosis of this shaft, this rod, this cudgel now efflorescing if not recrudescent

As in telegrams, or “…”

Joe Milazzo is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie, two volumes of poetry — The Habiliments and Of All Places In This Place Of All Places — and several chapbooks (most recently, @p_roblem_s). His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Prelude, Tammy, Texas Review and elsewhere. He is an Associate Editor for Southwest Review and the Founder/Editor-In-Chief of Surveyor Books. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.joe-milazzo.com. Here in these definitions in danger are what these words now mean, or might mean, or must mean if they wish to escape the new world incommensurate with the perceptions they’re accustomed to inhabiting.

Eric Lindley is a musician, writer, and artist living in the bay area. His writing has appeared in Fence, Joyland, Tammy, and elsewhere, and other work at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Machine Project, Telic Arts Exchange, The Knitting Factory, and The Smell. With Janice Lee and Joe Milazzo, he co-edited the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing] from 2009 to 2015. You can find Eric’s work online at https://likeoverflowing.com/