You Came Back / 回来了
i. (Read by the author) From the outside looking in, the way I look is the most obvious thing about being foreign; that I am most obviously foreign to others here in China. Some people will stare at me when I walk down the street, ride the bus, or walk around the grocery. Some will […]
BUT ALSO THIS — Correspondences for Etel (excerpts)
Untitled – Etel Adnan, 2014, oil on canvas, 35 x 27 cm. One image is always more than one image – Gerald Murnane Things don’t connect, they correspond – Jack Spicer PART THREE And then came the arrests. Came the tear gas, the percussion grenades, the pepper spray, the wooden bullets, the LRAD declaration of […]
Other places we learned religion
To listen to Afton read her work as below, click on the play button in the black bar above. To see a pdf preserving the horizontal layout and original lineation of the work, please click HERE. OTHER PLACES WE LEARNED RELIGION The color blue LinkedIn suggests that Criminal Cousin One is a kitchen designer, skilled […]
The Escombros Bug
It was November 1999, 78 degrees, and dust clung to each drop of sweat that seeped from Gloria’s forehead as she forced a shovel into stubborn earth. She felt like Pete’s lackey, digging for the bomb shelter. The site reeked of ammonia-her husband had softened the caliche with buckets of his own piss before taking […]
The Representation of Light Penetrating Mud
Absence gives form to all shapes-Theodora Blüht Sand and mountains in the center. The future rises before the fjord. Mercilessly. Stones in the cemetery-the expectation. Shadows, swifter than life. Genuflection. Skin in a symbolic state. The brow performing in a muscular cavity. Bird song […]
Kingdom of the Wounded
Melody and Erica found the purple castle the night before, hidden in some cedar trees, while they were on acid. Melody’s ex-boyfriend Amos was in there, they said. Amos had been dead over a year. His blood still stained the beige carpet in Dario’s house, where we bought our drugs. We told each other that […]
Recent Titles from Fence Books and Fence Digital
Mopes: A Book of Poems in Three Acts by Kenneth Reveiz Straddling the wreckage of late capitalist America, the poems in Kenneth Reveiz’s MOPES arc urgently toward utopia-or at least they do their best. The intimate eros of liberated queerness is interrupted, undermined by a flood of dystopian American violence. The choice to fight for love and […]
Fence magazine issue #40
Fence Issue #40 Winter 2023 Poetry. Fiction. Translation. &. Other. Super-contemporary literary incitements since 1998. Shipping Mid-March 2023 To Libraries, stores, Subscribers, and Members ◊ ◊ ◊ F E A T U R I N G ◊ ◊ ◊ ♦ An Editor’s Note from Issue 40-41 Visiting Editor Edgar Garcia. […]
The 2023 Rae Armantrout Fence T-shirt
The 2023 Rae Armantrout Fence t-shirt, designed by Fence intern Cath Cai, features an excerpt from Armantrout’s poem “Falling (1)” as printed in the first issue of Fence in 1998. Receive yours with a $20 donation or higher. This link will take you to PayPal, where if you click “+Add special instructions to the seller,” […]
