Astroturf
Astroturf eats sun like a late meal. The heat greets my left cheek, right cheek rushes with soiled roadway breeze, I reconcile two or more feelings. The astroturf at the Women’s World Cup in 2015 was reportedly 120 degrees at kickoff. Hot surface for the hot […]
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Matter might be called imagination turned war, puzzling scenes in the bombardment during “that ongoing,vast but somehow boring destruction. The landscape growsincreasingly perplexed. “Little conceived more American than the “cryptographic” since it can reorient sense, helping to account for turbulence that follows, therefore begins. Instance:color aspects of American democracy, or terror here and over There. Or even: in […]
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RICHARD JACOBSONMARGARET JAKOBSONMURRAY JANOFSKYCONRAD JANOWITZJEFFREY KAGELKATHERINE KALINSKYBERNICE KAMIATMELVIN KAMINSKY Afraid of danglingA participle: A readerWho knows the folksWho are running things Who value clarity and concisionYou might never get overHow to make thingsMatter— perceptions of research Frames that are neededTo understand the outcomesWhat goes without sayingA premise about talking about What a nation might doTo […]
The Coppices of Pleasure
As the summer days get longer, the leaf canopy fills out and the woods darken. In the silence, purple flowers nod. I can’t recall the sensation of pleasure, only the context, which I would have to tell as a story. Would it turn you on? Here’s a story. Antoine Saint-Just rises before the Assembly and […]
Two Poems
No Echo I thought you just got off talking about my cum, but you’re stretching me out with my spot in your hand when it comes to me, clear and slick—I see. It’s because I said I wished I could shoot. I said so a few times. It’s true— I only know how much so […]
the stories (that) aren’t told
he said there’s nothing about us a psalm without us, dissolution as in: stagnation, intransigence in black life, pure force undiluted by reparation, an unfamilial beauty indebted to pale reflections whose possibility for neutral remains undiagnosed: it’s too easy to say white is neutral, splintered i: dentities and emergent modes re: defining oppression as a […]
Two Poems
a petrel . . . nada nada importa nothing matters evil has won the worst did happen but we survived and hide happily trying to find the others find a way to peace and life for future generations out of sheer love find the others web a web against the forces of the violent and […]
Mouths, Filled with Cinnamon (selected for the Summer Literary Seminars Prize)
The girls returned to us are not girls. They were taken at eleven and returned at seventeen. Forty-six were taken and fourteen returned. Had they then expired, were they no longer of use to them who had done the taking? In the morning, we woke and they were here, in the center of the village. […]
You Disappoint Me
By noon it was hot enough in my studio apartment that the Madrid sun shooting down through the attic skylight bullied me into waking. I thought about lying there with my eyes closed for the rest of the afternoon, even if it was too hot to sleep, even if getting up required finding effort collected […]
