First Proof
From the book Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, to be published on February 11.
Goddamn it to motherfucking hell, she says. I think that ought to cover it, he says. He asks her why she feels the need to swear so much, so deliberately, what depends on it, why it’s so important to her. Why, after so long, she hasn’t grown tired. Worn out in the mouth.
Once there was a man who was tired of breathing. It’s just such a drag, he said. So he decided to stop, but found that he couldn’t—the air just kept going in and out.
A post-apocalyptic story about a sea captain who parents alongside a penguin at the arctic center.
I cannot feel my cat’s fur / with my left hand. / Of course / I also cannot feel / my children. with my left / hand. Their throats. I cannot / feel my own body, the soft / candle wax of it. I cannot go where / I used to.
My second job was waiting in a window / behind the window of the job I was on // the clock for. My third job was scheduled / for that evening, but not yet // confirmed. My fourth freelance job wasn’t active / per se, but I was actively // pursuing clients.
Maybe // There is // A genealogy of suffering // How // This morning // I read // Minimalism is the aesthetic code of gentrification // Really I want to say // Make less art
A public cafeteria, the ghost of my heart gorges herself on spent ammunition // The Orlando medical examiner processed each of the 49 Pulse victims apart from the gunman. / Even amid gravitational collapse, surviving atoms couldn’t reanimate with him.
The boy who is coming home with part of himself missing is the man’s nephew. The man, Silas, receives the news and hangs up the phone, numb. He wants a drink. He doesn’t want a drink. He wants time to move backward.
we consummated our marriage / on a bed littered with sour faces / of dead presidents, liberated livestock / sweating through the dollars.
She was coming out of the library when she saw him. Their paths had crossed a couple of times before. Three, to be exact. More or less under the same circumstances. He was riding an orange bicycle, and a little girl was standing behind him on the pannier rack.
The condition of most of our lives is that of continuous flight, in some manner or form—flight from faulty logic, from place of birth to the place we alight, from situations that no longer serve us, from political precarity—flight, as in rupture.
This is a story of? / a woman lying on her? / a back?—aback—with her? / a face hidden and a?
I disrupt the concupiscence of tube worms / where your snowy owl eye consults among white crusts / the venom of my gymnodactyl eye / which bribes the slag of trilobites
During his twelve years in New York City, Bosun, who went by Bo, got into some bad business with an import-export company in Queens. It turned out the company was dealing in stolen goods, and Bo, who drove a truck for them, was eventually caught one winter on the bridge between Manhattan and New Jersey.
“Let him sleep. He’ll be alright if he sleeps.”
Poets really think they’re doing the most with the least …
Her concerts, broadcast the first Thursday of each month at 9:30 PM Cairo time, brought life to a stop throughout the Arab world.
A collaboratively drawn comic.