15 January 2018, 9:05 am Midwood Later on, or in another book, there’ll be a video of me walking around the Musée d’Orsay & you can click play to roll the footage & you can watch & you can listen to the everyday sounds of a museum as you read this & in that way, […]
Contemporary Polish Poetry Vol. 1
Poems from WHERE HERE WERE WE
The Family Teeth
After our mother died, The Father began to go through his reporting papers and the heaps and hills of family documents kept in a large wooden chest from Mexico, locked with a giant iron lock and key. The chest, part of the spoils from their years abroad, smelled of candle wax and toasted wood. He […]
A Natural History of Cruising
* * An attractive figure rounds the corner. Is he? Yes, very. Your gaze locks in his. The moment dilates. Take in the hooded eyes, the aquiline nose. Zero the body. You feel a flush of arousal, a stirring below. Your pulse grows palpable. The mouth wets but you can’t swallow. * * […]
from True Confessions (and brief dreams) in a Time of Pandemic
Missionaries (1962) The doorbell would ring, and my mother and I would slink into the living room trying to muffle our giggles until, peeking out the kitchen window, we’d see the backs of their white short-sleeved shirts as they walked toward the street and their next stop. We’d been on their list my whole life, […]
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 […]
Conversation between Lesle Lewis & Emily Pettit
EP: You mentioned to me recently that you were thinking about circles and squares. I’m also thinking about circles. And I think I’d like to think about squares. Can you talk to me a little about what you’ve been thinking about circles and squares? LL: When I wrote to you about my thinking about […]
What the Butler Saw
John Lahr’s Prick Up Your Ears is a biography of the Northern English playwright Joe Orton that has been sitting at my bedside for years. As one of the most dramatic biographies I’ve ever read, it’s a pleasure to read. As a re-telling of one of the most horrifying true crime stories I’ve ever heard, […]