First Proof
The internet does a better job of documenting / the way we feel when something soft, especially / a mammal, is very cute, than poetry does.
yours in torchlight / we audit our equipment / note how few genuine distractions / present as distraction first
Winner of BOMB’s 2018 Poetry Contest, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin.
Yavush dressed like a girl who didn’t really love herself—in short, strappy dresses that flashed meaty upper thigh, with a clip-on swoop bang and acrylic fingernails that curved into the future, dripping rhinestones, gold hearts, and glitter.
You are a color-blind social worker in a small town and your secret is you stopped giving a fuck. A man you loved more than you knew was possible has left you, but so what, right?
In 2010, Mexican artist Alejandro Luperca Morales began rubber-erasing human remains out of the frequent crime-scene reports published by P.M., his local Juarez newspaper. Often behind police barricade tape, these ghostly voids resemble eddies of dust, bald patches of earth, or gauzy shrouds illuminated from within. Over the past eight years, Morales has collected a significant archive, performing this gesture on more than 500 images.
The fish survive all that radiation, whatever is a go-pass beyond poison. / Snow falling off at a slant from the scientific station / ice adaptations that lead to the new normal. / An owner’s manual under a concrete donut, in its hole someone has planted a baby cactus.
blink twice, because you’re in / love. It is springtime, the merry / etcetera, look ahead, where we’re going / there’s a clearing and in the clearing / stands a boxer who must have slipped / his collar on the path running through / the field. He is panting, drooling, is all white / except for the pink of his exceptions– /
All monuments commemorate the same / falsehood The gilt is genuine and we feel it right / at the surface of our discontent / Anger like so many lustrous mounts softens / in the rain And stallions and generals must periodically be / re-gilded recommitted to as if / as an abiding law of man / Though if we are honest it is the law that fails us / along with what we can abide
An embarrassing incident at the Kremlin (from 2015? was it 2016?): in which women invited to an International Woman’s Day photo with Mr. Vladimir Putin arrive in high heels, much to the fear of Mr. Putin’s staff who are there to witness several tall women towering over the Russian Federation president.
on up the mirroring woodpath that is mirroring from / the glaring lake to the right as towards us 1 beautiful wanderer / and over the roots of the mighty trees I strayed / while the clanging sun that is the high midday light / dusted through the vaulted treetops that time in Altaussee
Yunes were human once. / They nursed babies and baked bread and made love beneath the shade of the willow tree. / Then they were drowned in the bog on the edge of town. / The marshlands kept them flawless. / Their skin tanned tight as a drum skin, sealing their spirits inside like caged dogs.
Devon Marinac is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, drawing, collage, and zine making, often in combination. Devon was born in British Columbia, raised in Mississauga, and currently resides in Toronto.
for a fee I guess / my sovereign entity / muckrake / frowning sun and yet it is a storyteller
These poems are excerpted from Annelyse Gelman’s Heck Land: The Resorted Text, a lyrical reworking of the definitive edition of William S. Burroughs’s seminal anti-novel Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. There are twenty-five in all—one for each chapter of Naked Lunch—each a scalpeled, reappropriated cut-up tape-mounted to projector transparency, then photographed recto and verso, along with dust, fingerprints, squashed bugs, and other process artifacts.
Under a boat are a pod of Orcas, but before they are under a boat they are breaching some distance away from The White Boys in their small rowboat.
He came in search of clues for an article about the disappearances that happened months before he arrived.
We lived in the constrictive belt of bible-thumpers, but I always wanted my life to unfurl like a beach read, the kind of life that conjures a certain ephemeral pleasure, baked between sand and sun, crashing waves far enough away so their fatal danger only registers as ambiance.
Dr. Nelson wanted me to feel something. In the palm of his hand was a pale yellow mound of powder.
With severed gills and heads, the sea bream—lives spent / in a lacquered wooden bowl, waiting / on the sullied hands of men—in example / of The Resurrection of Christ, wake from death.