First Proof
On the cannibalization of black pain and how we free ourselves from it.
On the cannibalization of black pain and how we free ourselves from it.
And in that dream I felt a warm bright light.
A snow lark hovers over the isolated Isle of the Dead A shadow on the beach is an echo of Venus who bestows upon me some ripened red fruit In this isolated moment waves produce a dream that seduces me
First I was Ren’s guest, a role that indicated only the short length of our acquaintance, rather than what it would become later: the strategic adherence to a balance of formality and intimacy designed to showcase only my most appealing qualities.
Alphabets are limited; it’s the arrangement of letters that produces meaning.
David Berman committed suicide, and I’m like a blackbird that has flown into a bay window and awoken in a flower box, dizzy in gardenia shade, trying to get un-stunned and back on the wing before the neighborhood cats come round.
it’s just writing on instagram: “best decision I ever made / marrying this one” / now no one is afraid to get drinks with “this one” / he’s “safe” because he married a nerd who thinks / she’s a 19th century aristocrat
I like when words fail. It shows we don’t believe / we totally know. Name a plant in a forest // and you think you know it. That name / to a bird or a dog, that sound is a squawk.
A short story from the collection The Dominant Animal.
I am a woman who wakes up hungry. Tom touched only coffee till noon. You do what you’re capable of at some point, so Tom and I left each other.
‘Now here’s one I like!’
Or—‘Stop me if you’ve heard this,’ but
this story’s the exception. It’s
vouched for by Science and actually
happened. You judge.
The cats were entering middle age and felt despair. They had come to realize that life was not a project one could complete successfully. Life was not a treat.
Elementary Poetry No. 1 is the first in a series of short artist books that the Russian poet, artist, and theorist Andrei Monastyrski (b. 1949) produced in quick succession in the spring of 1975 by drawing on typewritten pages with pen.
Girl C is supposed to be hard at work today but she keeps missing her stops, slipping. As the train falls out of view once again, she returns to her world of desire, instead of the world of transport and commuting and punctuality. She allows herself to float into the passenger car, and her pockets empty themselves and her clothing flies off-screen as per instructions provided one hundred years ago.
Of all my clients, I liked Wen Changbao because he never touched me. I just listened to him. For a while I thought of myself as his dog, simply because he was my first friend.
When she was twenty, the woman didn’t think much about skydiving at all. It was an exotic concept and felt far from her life as it was, though on her walks to class she passed plenty of women her age wrapped in rigging, practicing their barrel rolls on the soccer field.
Think high-rises, gated communities, all the places that give you a twitch of existential dread. The Amazon shipping facilities, the dying superstores, the prisons and detention centers, the pig farms, all the boxes that hold products and people and animals, the LeCorbusian landscape one skirts over or through, avoids.
An excerpt from Unferths’s novel Barn 8 (Graywolf).
“People talk about algorithms like they’re magic. It’s easy to see why. They govern how the internet is shown to us, conjured from spells. Their methods are opaque, and yet we put our trust in them.”
