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

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

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.

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