Poetry

You are magnetic in the old way. / For Duchamp, the neutrality of objects / You stand in a room of your own design. / becomes a sort of anti-aesthetic

PREPARE no night creature accidental enemy / encounters return to us in witch cradles, monsters by a hairsbreadth / these our works melted no / accident these fires these crashes / capitulate to what is meant by the past as a whole / melt, fall back into accomplishment the grasp of who / prepares to give the message     

On more than one occasion I have been accused of disliking Langston Hughes. Untrue.

The poet on the politics of the gaze, the migratory act of reading, the anxiety of bilingualism, and the universality of shame.

It was a rough road—the roughness agreeably generic, not without art: good bumps and pneumatic fakeroots, little pools of gel. Into one of these last I let myself tumble, thinking, as I fell, how I would have liked to watch the pool crackle and blaze like the fire-in-fireplace I’d been sexting without response for years. 

Two poets and a photographer discuss the presence of absence, the power of the number three, and art as documentation and disruption.

In An Approach, the sentence gradually evolves: word choices change subtly; phrases are introduced, transposed, or deleted; punctuation shifts and changes form. Through these shifts and disruptions, the text begins to accede to a nonlinear logic, through which we can glimpse “the unspoken, which is its subject, between the words, through the words.”

Writer and vocalist Keckler performs impersonations of obscure larger-than-life personalities he meets. In her first novel, Laing impersonates Kathy Acker.

Broken, the madrilenial butterfly finally suckles / from the dime blood at the ankle of the tube sock.

if the conditions for learning aren’t humiliation  / then I must be alone in order to be a modern / kind of student one whose failures have not made them / so anxious they are unable to be a steady archer 

a helmut / made of kohl / end poem / right there / on the head / of a german / chancellor! no

the birdcage is gasproof I have an important message for you the birds are wired /
peace is blind as teargas love your lungs will not collapse but swell 

at dusk each day i like to think / of all my new friends in different parts / of the city jerking off / running baths / vaping weed    getting sober / running their mouths / & reading poetry aloud to one another.

We went into the garden to pick out a poison blocker / We saw fish mint / A lizard’s tail / A chameleon plant / Your heartleaf / My fishwort

On visits home I see gifts ripped open, and the confetti. / How much candy is in lil’ piñata? My niece asks. / So much candy he can fly.

One point: / it came from that way and goes this way / the lukewarm thought

What’s wrong / with “ratty” whose / expectations cut, whose / trust shall be a spider’s web, got / 
away

I just said I didn’t know / and now you are saying / you aren’t sure I’m cool / that’s cool

“The blood of the thing is the truth of the thing.”

humself, shamself, hymnself, shameself—. / lameself, lambself, numbself, unself—. / sing anger, goddess, of—. many devices—.