First Proof
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.
He used a specific verb, which I forgot to write down: screw. With the bottles screwed into your breasts… It all started with screwing, what does he make of that.
Unseasonably exposed to fuchsia, / I left that Southern town / knotted to why-what / secrecy. # Like my / first time on a Ferris wheel.
If you can’t stand the first person, / get out of the kitchen. / Similar but escalating sleights of hand: / he wants to eat both the girl and the food in her basket. / She is past specialness, / doubling the likelihood. In such young women, / traumas curl / till Christmas ribbon. The greatest predictor of red / is oxygen.
These drawings are from a series of 210 on view at the Graham Foundation in Chicago as part of Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells School through July 28, 2018.
I get a part in a movie. I act every once in a while, small bits in small films whenever I know the producer or the director. This time it’s the director.
I planned to write a book about / the color blue. Now I’m suddenly surrounded / by green, green gagging me / pleasurably, green holding onto my hips / from behind, digging into / the cleft, the cleft // that can be made.
This piece consists entirely of first sentences from 268 short stories published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2017.
A print project glitched by digital media.
I should say a few things / Before I begin. Hell is easy, / We brought us here / And not for the first time.
Jimmy, it’s your girl. The one at the desk whom you pay a living wage. This is what could be known as a wake-up call if we were the sort of people who relied upon others to remind us of our tasks.
Overcast cobalt, tile unbolted, pictures / On loan require empty space / Like an expletive. Grisaille pigeons, / Endemic to our swamp of / Commission.
