Bird of One
1. My mother always told me that everything is scary the first time you do it. Sometimes, I have to remind myself: self it’s okay to be scared be scared then, get over it There are not so many givens anymore. 2. I just celebrated another Hannukah – […]
Editor-Note: Suede: Material Literacy; There Are Needs You Can’t Perceive
Fence 37 is filled with works by poets and prose writers ready and willing and able to name past and present conditions, problematize them formally, and propose complex futures. One condition we have is human over-production, over-consumption, and waste: a big problem which negatively impacts our viability as a species. I can identify myself and […]
PLEASE SCREAM INSIDE YOUR HEART PT. 2
Read part 1 here. 6. Now that it is safer to go outside I find myself driving alone to different towns to see friends I have only seen on the screen. In between these towns, I often find myself alone on dark roads lined with endless trees, literally driving through another void, uncertain how long […]
Please Scream Inside Your Heart Pt. 1
This is a silly regret, as they all mostly are, but I sometimes wish I kept some kind of archive of the media that held some significance for me in deep lockdown. One video that would have definitely made the top ten list is one that came out in the middle of the summer of 2020. […]
IN THE FLESH: an introduction to a portfolio
I am a rabid fan of “rotters,” or as more politely called on the BBC show In the Flesh, those with “Partially Deceased Syndrome.” In the Flesh is a show you must see, streaming everywhere—a deeply profound, witty, and ultimately deadly serious work of literary art and performance that takes on what life itself is […]
Metropolis: Scraps from Accra, Ghana
In Ghana, the air is thick with equatorial heat. Two seasons dominate the year: rainy and dry. I think of them as Wet Hot and Dust Hot. In Wet Hot, raindrops puncture the air so persistently that the holes they make in the grey sky seem permanent. Umbrellas are geometrically impractical, as the rain draws […]
from THE BETWEENS
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ In the early 90’s, at a massive flea market at the edge of Louisville, Kentucky, a woman from Jamaica looks over the wares. Someone says, Where are you from? She says, Dixie Highway and nothing else, doesn’t look up, just keeps checking out the antiques. She slides into that next […]
Badlands
Badlands is a 1973 American crime drama written, produced and directed by Terrence Malick, starring Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, and Warren Oates. The story is fictional, but inspired by the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1958. In the film, fifteen-year-old Holly Sargis lives in South Dakota with […]
FOUR PAINTINGS BY AGNES MARTIN
EIGHT FISH UNDER WATER A very tricky enemy. Pride is a foreground-background illusion. We swim in it, but its waves flatten perspective. To make the shape of fish I must know fish. To know water as home, I make that shape as well. Hint of wave, imagined against a line, fin, a bell, […]
A Last Day in Oakland
Achtung called it and that would be the last word referring to algae in Albany Bulb inclementing, exponential tenaments — also clams, barnacles, soft bodies that dents soma response to soma. Miles away a man known as my boss eats Louisiana Clams. Pounds of clams scattering light. Magnet filings, roving static, infinitesimal masses on a […]