FENCE

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Excerpt from Whorl

The headache is the limit, the circle, the disk. The black horizon. Sometimes it’s a dull, red glow, soft latitudes of pain. Or a field of searing, orange craters. They burst open through the dark. Or, with a gentler hurt: tall, blowing vanes of magnetized color. Sometimes it’s still. Maybe then, it sleeps. When it […]

27 Essays I’m Not Writing about Elizabeth Koch

1 In April everyone involved in, or touched by, independent publishing saw a flare go up: Small Press Distribution launched a GoFundMe. SPD is looking for $100,000 to help cover its losses during the covid-19 crisis. To state the obvious, the crisis has profoundly disrupted bookselling nationwide—even and especially by Amazon.com, which has suspended and/or […]

Sixty-six Dresses I Have Read

“It is not tiring to count dresses.” GERTRUDE STEIN 1 This dress I am wearing in this black-and-white photograph, taken when I was two years old, was a yellow dress made of cotton poplin (a fabric with a slightly unsmooth texture first manufactured in the French town of Avignon and brought to England by the […]

Excerpt from BIOCEREMONIALS

Oonseentia. I go out into the city and find a tulip tree, the tallest tree I can find, the tree called oonseentia by the peoples native to this land, the tree these native peoples use to build their canoes. I intend to build a canoe of my own. I wait for lightning to strike and […]

THE MOMENT I SAW THE SEA NOT THE LAND (AFTER ETEL ADNAN)

Daily, I remind myself: the future is not dependent on your inability to describe your undoing. 〇 In the red notebook I carry always: a blank twenty-five-cent postcard of Silver Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon; a small black-and-white photograph of a cattle crossing taken from behind the dashboard of a car facing the oncoming cattle caravan; […]