BURNING HOUSE PRESS

Run-off Sugar

Crystal Lake

\\\

The hunger makes me lightheaded. We fuck through holes in our unitards. A smile carved in your cheeks. Your cat makeup. Dripping.

Teeth like candy corns.

My wig is red synthetic fibers. It’s on fire. I scream at the TV in the dressing room mirror. I lick the security camera. I sing the national theme song:

Bargain prices.

Fire in the drug den.

Fire in the migrant van.

Fire in the Amazon.

My urethra is loose and spills urine abundantly. It could use a tightening. A torque-it.

In the paradigm where production becomes the sole unit of appraisal for one’s life, Art becomes the twin of Death.

The health insurance rep eats my shriveled foreskins. Fork. Masque. Cotillion.

\\\\

Sun scream. No filter. Lake bake. Face full of beetles. Scales.

I think the drugs are kicking in.

A moonscape where the lake completely dried. Piano wire. Cow pies. Tootsie roll lumps seethe on your skin.

Stalk the campsite. Nothing under my mascot suit. I’m the Forest Fire Bear! Pinch my udders red. Fear. Athlete’s foot.

Gasoline.

Hash inhaled through a hollowed pelvis. Ramshackle hut in the woods in which I store my trophies. Jerseys. Clipboards.

Lore ended when everything became the news. My face plastered all over handbags at Fashion Week.

\\\\\

Crayon paste in commissary Smucker’s®. Snickers in intercoms

all night long.

Bodies torn through like toilet paper.

Teeth gyres. Pig parades.

In one sense, everyone should aspire to be president. In another, nobody should.

Everyone should strive to write the country’s tome. To sing its song & carve it into its tomb.

When I was a kid the pinnacle sexual experience I could imagine would be to be devoured whole.

Nothing’s really changed. I’m just a little older.

America.

Logan Berry is Artistic Director of the Runaways Lab, a Chicago-based experimental theater troupe, and on the leadership team of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their typewriters who compose poetry on demand. He works the graveyard shift at a residential treatment facility for at-risk youth. His libretto, NASIM BLEEDS GREEN, is forthcoming from Plays Inverse.

Photograph of performance by Leif Holmstrand.

Untitled II

specifically the raw meat stage

of the first few days together

train that runs over a dog

train that is the only way to orgasm, killing an animal

you love, one you know

or even a stranger, killing a stranger dog

like every time you orgasm, the animal is skinned

if the objection is to the binary choice

we are missing the point of the dilemma

let’s eat cupcakes at each other

with no pants on

lick frosting deep in each other’s eyes

buy gold chains off the internet without breaking gaze

I’ll get what I want

Untitled V

a house, cursed, is a distraction

open weeping can appear to be

in all things

all things

I know enough theory

to recognize falsehood:

even a virus gone systemic

should be denied agency

every day the loop of isolation grows tighter

love

I haven’t bothered to crack that one yet

with a bit of leather between my teeth

hold me under

Untitled X

when I say no one is talking about the grief

of fucking someone

I mean it’s everywhere all the time

this murderous anonymity

the relief of uncoupling too obvious

an embarrassment of riches

for the moment between when the fist lands

and the bloom of knowledge that follows

I wanted to grieve the way I wanted to fuck him

the truth is, the truth is too simple for what happened

I needed to lie and to grieve the lie as well

to suckle the child—to feel my body multiply

as if I could feed a waiting crowd

Amie Zimmerman lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published in Sixth Finch, DIAGRAM, West Branch, Salt Hill, and BathHouse Journal, among others. She has two chapbooks, Oyster (REALITY BEACH) and Compliance (Essay Press), and is an editor for YesYes Books. 

Photograph is from a performance by Leif Holmstrand.

Three poems from Nomos, chapter “Rimsmedsvägen 36B, Kalmar”.

THE KITCHEN. Mother’s sister’s scissors, in a plastic case. Blood pudding with bacon and lingonberries to pancakes with home-stirred chocolate sauce. With Arabia in sepia. The images faded, yellow, maybe hardened or with the memory. As you shaved your beard and terrified me. Like coffee in a small cup, with both cow’s milk and sugars. A small blue cup, I gave it to my son. Jeans and glasses all. On hooks — boards. Happiness has always propagated itself amongst macaroni; amongst heavy fir tables, with mannered and well-crocheted and joyous tablecloths. All things in plastic. It was cloths, circled; plastic. The honey-sweet milk of Sugar Puffs — a heaven compared to Christ-our-saviour/Pale-incompetence-hanging-on-a-cross. Plastic surrounded everything I learned. Even the sun. I squinted towards the sun, even cut into, as at the hospital.

THE STANDPIPE WATER TOWER WAS VISIBLE FROM ALL OVER THE QUARTER. It stood there like a mushroom, its view was the whole world; the world was not great, it kept at home. We — the church — the fall. Where the shadow was at most sharp. Leafs thread over the feet against the ground, lost — I was often lost. High slopes, trees. I was alone after closing time, I was always last. At last you were there. I recognise tables, mattresses, plaster-dogs; kindergarten games, which became weeks of utopia against the school yard. You were strange, a stranger. I ran. I ran away. With salt dough, towards colourful desolate zones; lines lined the floor — frames like those framing the pedagogy, I was also framed, inbound, but much later.

THE MALL AND THE SECOND FREEDOM. The dreams shifted shape, became fantasies shared with others, became bulk and searching, compromising. Down in nooks, into salinity — sweetness, a carbon based life form. One of us fractured his foot through the glass door, within and without; the loading docks and the rosaries beyond recognition: someone else’s older sister, phones ringing, vhs, Berga Centre, I could not always hold it in. Why should I. Other’s feet, mine, beat upon the parquet cement, over covered boulevards, rested around the one-fuse posts, at times there were no stopping; no protection against intrusion, just another man in the staircase about. With his shadow lose, made simple.

Freke Räihä (1978) is a poet, writing teacher, translator, critic, essayist, publisher and graphic designer. Also a parent and book hoarder and probably smokes too much.

Photo is from a Leif Holmstrand performance.

from I, Caustic

by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine

hey such whatsoever-so-much ricocheting from I the martyrized stranglulationist  along with the mongrel dog-faced Father caustically forced out of its immune insect. We gorge ourselves tossing and turning men and tables Go Fuck You in Your Face Here in this restaurant I strap on some culottes and spectacles to reinforce my portrayal of lousy exuberance. We lost no step. We saw so well through the luminosity…The city is gutboil. Laughter and tears release a tiny bit more crocodile smiling inside a coffee cup it promises anyone coming across it a new form of teething or quite simply put the repeal of the articles of law conceived by His Adroit Majesty Awaits us patiently in the stables where our counterfeit money deploys itself against the agrarians’ gold virtually a show-off And he? Speaking to… Taunting who? Squashing. Soiling. Poisoning. Aggravating the other. I’ve killed him Gentlemen do you realize what That so and so wanted to do? No more no less make a mockery of me. So I took him by the throat. The work was done under-ground-elsewhere Not here Under the insurmountable umbral collusion with a ritualistically purifying jet-stream But I’m not forgetting I owe you my situation: What a nice little runabout this was.

Take me, Causticity. Crown my skull, Ink. I guzzle your quills. Circle the Madonna. Pfft-scape! The glory of the Father the untraceable gibberish-spitting Father. His speeches hammered to the point of my reign’s putrefaction. My move, Cyclops! Everyone into the chamber. No, let’s meet inside the operating theatre. Inside the other trance Oh what succulence! Take faith in my rifles and patrolmen. Don’t dismiss them: Take warning get out of my sight The harshness of termites attacking the exposed beams without even unscrewing my view without a second thought of my immanence however jovial Jubilant pink upon the never-ending whiteness Not even the rainy season! Not one seedling of corn! Not one diplomatic accord! Not one foreign exchange! Not one holding their feet to the fire! Men without a lyre you are forgiven! Enough suggestions Take my gold my shadow my harems and get the hell out! I am become the king transformed into a socialist. Now, enough!

*          *          *

The inked one does not concern us here. Only compost. Sprawling outward with neither constraint nor root. The type to die along the stairs of his publisher. Has neither woman nor good sense in sight stomping into the ground and frequently sawing right through. Yet another tongue trying his Atlas. Breaks slings and arrows yet smiles and casts his shadow. The inked one is snuffed out. Those who never made any headway outside his giant matchbox have been massacred. They’ve never established order outside a script struck out from the start, outside any communal sense save an associations of old scorpions But it was working its way gently through his boxspring. A sort of worm had already ascended the parquet flooring, climbed up the wall where the photo of his spitting-image was working out his deserted obsolescence.

*          *          *

This is his text:

black on grey alucite fungus moth the grammatical fist I won’t commune with My Father didn’t do much else than augment you inside his halos and his grease Your leopard latching on the double by the toe But I’ll endeavor to get out of my own way It will release such sunlight that neither bomb nor telegraphy will omit constraining the array I rattle my teeth out with. Over drinks he would sometimes come to hazard harsh retorts and commit petty crimes. It quickly became clear who’d maim who for a vodka! Without the least bit of shame. His typewriter did the work while he was sleeping. A thousand ants settled up his nodule. He hollowed out all of time in one single gesture. No longer daydreamed of screaming sands or the few harvesters who’d settle down a stud after having completely had it out—there were no clothes aside from a sack of hemp carefully sewn together then burned in place by the ends of cigars. In those times politics ran smoothly. Draping a caparison over all those who opened fire on a standing guard or an emaciated dog. Politics reeked of its sperm. The Moroccan Goumiers and Senegalese were scattered along the sidewalks, held their arms out to the passers-by as if to signify that their death wasn’t the same as those! But it was a trap, an indescribable lesson directed by the army whose duty it was to surround the city by ever-broader means. The cesspools also reeked of the passion of a god accused of high treason. There were winged sharks coming out every ten minutes. These monsters would reward me with revolver or rifle bullets whenever I wandered about in search of the paradise promised me on a bench at school. After each lesson, the instructor would draw the sovereign’s head out on the board. This was always his way of instructing us, but the only thing he did was sustain a pitiful myth in our immemorial blood, which he secretly knew, sooner or later, would be ejected. Near the school, a conspirator had been shot. The noise of the gunfire seemed nothing short of applause to me. Only later did I come to understand that it had been about the liberation of an entire world and not of a single people rolled around in its secular complexes, wrists tied, twisted, more and more strenuously bewildered, and offering its backside to police batons, woven chicote whips, switches, and other means of persuasion! There was no room left in this eye of mine which, as if into a vat of sulfuric acid, had melted like a body without skeleton. Love was unknown to me! But necessary to find a new skeleton for this costly populace.

*          *          *

At the end of the workday, I’d go home. I’d plop myself down in front of an old typewriter that I called The Hurricane and start typing. I composed my texts without thinking; I was of the understanding that plans, notes, and other criteria necessary to the development of a novel were of no use to me. I was writing my way through the dark. Yet I have to say that the books first took form in my brain before being thrown onto paper. I wrote with such speed that my own hand, having hold of the pen, was incapable of keeping up with me. More often than not, I would spin out an epic poem that would do it. One day, however, I must have struck a good vein. I found myself totally bereft of productivity. I wouldn’t put my mind to anything, much less myself. Perhaps that’s where the true creation begins. I had left crybaby sentimentalism behind me along with reminiscences of all sorts. Mallarmé had found himself in need of fording something all too similar. And yet how he droned on! But throwing the dice rescued him. At that time, I had already rejected all form, broken the normal metric, including that of vers libre. I listened only to the jerky rhythm of things. A creaky door could inspire me all the same as a man emerging from a particularly dangerous venture. But I loved only the noise of The Hurricane. It seemed to me that each of its flailings deformed the word over the course of its impression as if it were the result of igneous fusion. I no longer had anything to say. I listened. But the day came when I spit out a true vein of gold: I’d ejaculated a text different than anything I had written up to then: a racket of machine-gun fire followed by a rise of stifled howls. It was by way of this text I understood that I would have to commit myself once and for all to the path of the guerrilla linguistic! But I became completely closed off to others. I didn’t even go into the office anymore. I had sent a three-month medical certificate to my supervisor: an extraordinary sort of man. Go take a stroll through the neighborhood, he’d tell me whenever I was feeling down and out. To tell the truth, I must still be a sort of friend to him, but we can’t see each other ever again. He had understood from very early on that my sole employment would be to write without stopping, You should be fastened to a table with a typewriter and paper. You’re an author! He knew perfectly well that my book would be endless, that I would be consumed from the outset, Manure for desolate consciences, there’s your book. No way you’re gonna leave the stable before the manure reeks its way through. He took my blood for a vast, inexhaustible stable, forever condemned to be filled for as long as I was willing to empty it. I’d often tear myself apart. I loathed my origin, my parents, the world. I would settle under the sun, in front of the window in my room, sometimes even undressing myself, spreading out across the sill like a lizard lapping at the sunlight. I had come to reject my relatives, my friends. The landlady would bring them to my door to no avail.

*          *          *

The Amazigh feel a kinship with madmen and genies. They suffer the world and its twists and turns, but they admit any sort of life, any alteration, and they adapt themselves to it with ease. They have the truth affixed to their foreheads and they modify their lifestyles according to their taste, handing it over to the printer and waiting around for its publication. They’re never interpreted right, save the disgust some of them incite, so inevitably they reject what comes back because it twists their ankles and takes them nowhere in their ridiculous journey! But they never revel in defeat…

*          *          *

A whole people is annihilated in the drool of a king who blubbers about and opens fire, without drawing anyone else’s fire upon their brethren. The king shuts down their internal work and progress but he uses both to his and his benevolent defenders’ advantage. He doesn’t observe Ramadan yet he commands others to do so. Along with those who spend their days losing their voice, their strength and their power. They’re so afflicted by aphasia that they’re propelled into ecstasy before the pestilence of his throat’s pouring out its sporadic nonsense. He no longer exists for them because they’ve submitted themselves to a bitter and grotesque fear. The fear of embers transcribed and commented upon a thousand times by theologians who’ve long dismissed the Arab tongue. Yes, if the Arabs haven’t illuminated their prepared-or-plagiarized-but-nowhere-to-be-found-God in the vapors of an auriferous world they’ve directed for so long; if they’ve come to believe the religion they’ve been served like the remains of a bloody feast, no more than a literary and metaphysical miscellany, yes, the Arabs will have pardoned God the Non-Existent along with their anchorite-sword-of-a-beard! I was above all taught fear, I was transfixed by it. Fear everywhere. In the home, in any encounters; fear, disguised in the silhouette barreling down every angle of the street: the intersection of the abyss! The whatever fear. I made this fear my own after I became determined to dismember the god who’d dispersed it amongst infantile brains. Now I’m an unbounded rage. I say to myself, Strike out if you no longer have anything left to fear. That’s exactly what everyone who has nothing to look forward to or back upon but the image of a police baton raised against the world must do! I’ve put death in charge. Death who stumbles around and souses itself in the eye of fear. I whipped it up, swallowed it, spat it back out! It was no ordinary rot. It grew stagnant and remained fear in so far as it could’ve consisted of something more appalling than it was. My vomit, reddened by the torrid anguish and premeditated crimes of my digestion, transcribed the fear through my eye which hurtled toward them like a fly to shit.

FEAR ME, I AM YOUR FATHER!

FEAR GOD! In short,

FEAR!

That’s what made my life so difficult to grow accustomed to. I’m never free of it. This fear is the tissue of my nights. It creeps up my body and nestles into my cerebral membrane. It hammers its way into my skull and disappears through my hair, only to immediately spring back before my eyes, static, grotesque, and cruel.

THE KING, THAT’S WHAT YOU CALL THE FEAR OF REMAINING THROUGH THE CENTURIES WITHOUT BEING CONSCIOUS OF ONE ANOTHER, OF REJECTING THE NAMES OF SCALPED CHILDHOODS FOR A CLOUD OF DUST.

Jake Syersak is the author of Mantic Compost (Trembling Pillow Press, 2020) and Yield Architecture (Burnside Review Press, 2018). Two of his full-length translations of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s work are forthcoming in the coming year: the poetry collection Proximal Morocco— and the hybrid novel Agadir, co-translated with Pierre Joris. He edits Cloud Rodeo, an online poetry journal, and co-edits the micro-press Radioactive Cloud.

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine was born in 1941 in Tafraout, Morocco. Widely regarded as one of the most influential avant-garde intellectuals and writers of the Maghreb region of Northern Africa, he is especially renowned for his “guerrilla linguistic,” an incendiary, Surrealist-inspired literary style which critically and iconoclastically engages the cultural and political hegemony of postcolonial Moroccan society. A vocal critic of King Hassan II, Khaïr-Eddine was forced into exile in 1965 for his radical political views. Alongside Abdellatif Laâbi and Mostafa Nissabouri, he helped found the avant-garde journal of Francophone/Arab art and culture, Souffles-Anfas. He eventually returned to Morocco in 1979 and died in Rabat, the capital, in 1995. A prolific writer, he authored numerous novels, essays, and collections of poetry.

I, Caustic is one of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s earliest and most ambitious works. Part poetry, part ars poetica, part memoir, part fiction, part manifesto, and part political theatre, the book sees Khaïr-Eddine applying his trademark polyvocal Surrealism at full capacity. The narrator in I, Caustic is nothing less than the avant-garde itself, the linguistic guerrilla, relentlessly ambushing the various genres and voices at its disposal—donning the vocal cords of political sovereigns, the religious order, members of the bourgeois infrastructure, class conspirators, friends, family, and ancestors alike—demonstrating that the only authority is that of the tongue, the “king transformed into a socialist.”

Photo of performance by artist Leif Holmstrand.

The master has disappeared.  You see it in how these pages darken, in how the burned ones recompose, in the appearance of the king. The master and the eunuch, who are the same, with his stela, his killjoy, his scorn, flaccidity, they collapsed at the perfect moment. The mares don’t graze anymore. They’re lying around, with their jaws open, their haunches entangled in the mane of the threadbare orange bed, fragments of the departures, of the openings, of the orgasms of the woman who was singing in the opening moment. The one who said something like it’s been a month since I’ve fucked anyone or she could also have said I’m demolished, I look like broken pieces in this constellation or when she sang this bed has seen it all or feed me when I’m hungry, etcetera, etcetera. Now, this woman has taken a name: the loose one. And it has a homolog, which is herself, which is other, which is all of them, which follow the tantrums, and the selves she takes to get it on with whoever she’s into, so that she can then get rid of them: the pearl

                                                      Now, let’s move onto something else

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and then

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

Echo & the Bunnymen. “The Killing Moon.”

With a bacteria lodged in her throat, without talking, without the power to speak, without power: defenseless. An infection has overtaken different muscles, creases, parts. This time it’s the throat. That’s how it is, how it will be. Like a tongue turned into globs of drool that enter and exit. Without concern for the body, its desires or its mess. Cryptic. Cryptic. Cryptic. Without power, without the power to speak, without the power to say what hurts the most, what she most desires or what pisses her off, what she already knows, what she imagined when no one wanted to stop her anymore. Inevitably, some come, others will come. There was a fuck, there will be millions. But it’s always the same itch. The same boredom, the same suffocation. And nobody knows the loose one. 

Counting the days, the loose one strolls through the basic territory, humming a song. She looks at her orange bed, thinks of the days when sweat embroidered the sheets, and kisses, and purity and the piety. The same and the same. Drool. Harass. Come. Arrive. The bed. Filled with prayers. There are some keys under the pillow, clasps for a necklace with a gold heart, which the loose one looks at entranced, because she doesn’t have a heart. Beyond, in another space or under another influence, the king is sleeping deeply. And he doesn’t listen. And he doesn’t feel. And he doesn’t know that the loose one waits and waits for the perfect moment, to make a scene,  so as to escape. As she has always done, because she can’t, because she doesn’t know how to stay or because it simply annoys her, because she gets annoyed at anything that starts to get serious.

As she’s making calculations,the loose one observes herself again and again. She enters and exits the bathroom, looks out at the street. She goes over to the balcony. She begins to water the plants on the terrace, which now burn from the cold of these last days of autumn. Soon winter will be here. And these, the burnt ones, remember that sunny day when the loose one told him: they are like our love; they’ve been born again. But it was a total buzz kill. And the eunuch knew it and shut up, his phallus shrunken as always. The loose one reconsidered, for example, when she would go by the window naked, or clothed, or horny. And this was just one example of the traps she set for him. With the eunuch nothing ever happened anyway. Nothing. Or better yet: nothing had happened, because he was a closed container, and stubborn, a little clumsy, a little stupid, limp fucks buried in memory, a stela, a condition one could return to.

The loose one is like this. She thinks the imperfections and disguises make her unique. I love this asymmetry she says one night while cutting her bangs in the bathroom. And she looked at herself over and over again in the mirror.  Then, the trim became less precise when her eye would glance over at the orange bed.  No one’s home tonight, the loose one would say, just me and the crisis. Then she started to laugh. And then came the stomach pain and the itch in her belly was instantaneous. That same night she went to the window thinking: what’s going on with my eunuch, what exchange of secretions is he involved in. Will he be picturing the ring worm he left in my belly, the loose one mumbles, her throat raw from so much talking, saying so much in vain. Because even though she doesn’t love him, the word weighs on her. And what does she do now in the solitude of the word, in the cruel speech of the days: the loose one waits and waits. And when someone appears, she attacks. Because that’s how the loose one is. When something is put between her thighs she doesn’t stop until it’s taken out and put back in again. The way she likes it or the way they like it. And afterwards nobody stops her. Once the loose one gets going, no one stops her.

And the pearl had thought that she would never again cry for him, for the master, for the eunuch. There’s no way to singularize it, the loose one says, wiping a teary eye, the wound has many forms, names and twisted, listless memories. The loose one haunts herself all day. Exactly all day long. And at night she gets worse. And the pearl acts like it’s nothing but she can’t take it anymore. Meanwhile the loose one takes great pains to please everyone, but it’s not enough. They always suffocate her. Straightening her corset, she repeats herself for them: I’m not that one, why can’t you understand?

It’s like this: the two of them get together and act like it’s nothing, but it’s something. The loose one breathes melancholically while she comes down with diarrhea; the pearl acts like it’s nothing, as if nothing is wrong with her. As if nothing were running through her, like that, just so, as self-confident as ever; then they look at each other and swap roles, swap conditions and souls. And inevitably one of them doesn’t care. Doesn’t care. She comes or finishes, coiling, and closes her eyes apathetically. Now, let something else come, the pearl says, with the ring worm boiling in her belly, her neck bent back, her eyes dried up from so much crying. And in that moment, in another temporality, the king moves, scratches his head, tries to wake up, but remains lethargic and beautiful, anesthetized, in the furor of a clear and silent night.  

Suspiciously, hunger comes after sadness, the loose one thinks, as she fucks her way through the city. I’m so hungry. So. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry. And she says it so many times that it’s becomes like a prayer, a command, a new way of begging.  It’s at that moment when the king begins to slowly open his eyes. And gives her the look. Then the loose one murmurs: hopefully he’ll go down. And soon. It’s the only thing I’m missing. The only thing. And the pearl acts like it’s something, but she knows it’s impossible. Impossible to keep begging. Impossible to think that something is wrong. But the loose one tells her to wait, to keep very still and with all her senses wide open. With everything wide open.

Originally published by Editorial Cuarto Propio, Santiago, Chile, 2009, in 2010, La perla suelta (The Loose Pearl) won the Premio de la Critica (The Critics Prize) in Chile.

Paula Ilabaca Núñez (Santiago de Chile, 1979) is a writer, editor and teacher. She received the 2015 Pablo Neruda Prize, the 2014 Juegos Florales Prize for her novel La regla de los nueve and the Premio de la Critica de Prensa Literaria en Chile (The Chilean Literary Critics Prize) in 2010 for La perla suelta, which these poems are excerpted from.

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of Lake Michigan, finalist for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize; The Performance of Becoming Human, National Book Award Winner, 2016. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011). His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the 2017 ALTA National Translation Award. He has translated books by other Chilean poets, including Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The art is a photo of Leif Holmstrand in performance.

Notes on Events ((Lamentation))

“The language of tragedy for the Greeks is lethally factive, because the body it seizes hold of does really kill” — Friedrich Hölderlin

Without a doubt this is the most repulsive of repulsive moments :: it’s no longer

enough to say :: the goal is the abolition of capitalist realism or to hammer

verses on the door of a cell the way you drive a nail into a wall / when disinhibition

is rampant among the elite / they engineer new humiliations daily/ & the crumbs left

Pages: 1 2

My Assassin’s Body

My assassin’s body sits in the sun— pity be on the daffodil’s head— like thick harlots riding a dragon— plummeting from the sky— dogs sniff them and lick them by the pool— I leave them there and wade in— a sporadic abasement that keeps me in good spirits— that is to say the lyric is also toxic— the pool is named after the river it sits by— the Guataquia— river in all my dreams— I dreamt my father swam the whole night and threw his body on the shore for all to see— my father’s body was a prism that let others peer into the darkness— let us see the many shades of color there— his body was blue all over on account of death— body covered in soft teeth from the dogs— baby teeth from us little white kids— the punctured lungs of my assassin— us little white kids pee in the pool but no one notices— I stoop to drink and find blood  in the drain— flakes of skin floating like lily pads— on the shore are empty beer cans caught in the weeds like lice in hair— us little white kids peel back the face of my assassin and stuff it with spinach—  stuff Popeye with spinach— Popeye who is Escobar’s assassin— green like spring and well muscled— my father’s body right after his execution— displayed in a morgue— displayed across the nation on TVs— on Good Morning America— beamed into my living room right before school— beamed into the homes of countless watchers— and entering the room I watched, too—

Pages: 1 2

Queer Wing-ed excerpt

A morning ripe with consequences flies circle fleas in the carpet images of the bridge collapsing over and over I beg the Animal Gods for sleep today but I have placed mirrors in its armpits I have changed everything I need to grieve for this peculiar loss the psychic horde of faces who will forget me one week after my last day at this job covered in light pink ash a smoky bulk a network of vague there is no sacrifice only feral and the sound of an arm or leg breaking that inner crack I am not ready to embrace the spiral a way of being here and not being here the secret club the code eye level with lions and their ways of goodbye

Pages: 1 2

hello hello this is coDer xYz yess

(i)

i reach the assigned body socius

in a bid to code a new node

for the brahminical incorporated

but then wide-eyed i wince

at a thought and pull back

from my task instead

and inadvertently inject

the chip jadughar

in the parasitic

body brahminical

when I wasn’t hoping

at all to stir up

and individuate

the nonindividuated

brahminical

Pages: 1 2

make me an instrument

when is my nadir i am lamb bait

a baited lamb a lamented

bam the past a lollipop

i suck & suck the marrow epiphyte-clinging

as i write that i am aether

for a second on the subway i loose

the meaning of the word yoga yoo-gah

yo-guh

i haven’t prayed for years yet as i am blowing you prayers

interrupt my thoughts please watch over

& protect X noon moon moan koan loan lean

mean meal meat meet met wet

let lit it i — i don’t remember how this poem

is born i wear modesty like a kink

mariology

i wear modesty like a kink

i find a list on wikipedia maria of the moon

i repeat them daily a cascade of every maria 

i have ever been might be 

not yet the maria that has become known

maria of small crises

moisture, showers, clouds, cleverness

waves, vapors, foaming, maria of a parallel world

i pause to pray to the patron saint of the perfect lucite heel

for a pair of margiela tabi boots to appear on ebay in my size

fuck maria of fecundity i am cold, tranquil, serene, maria of the edge 

i am serpent’s nectar raw orange blossom honey bought

on the florida georgia border unknown maria

of desire no longer recognized

weep hole

desire no longer recognized i want to eat every daisy & dandelion

i see i want to swallow the rain as if it were your come
or drink the rain like piss if pee tasted

like memaw’s sweet tea which i pretend it does

women’s bane, wolf’s bane, queen of all poisons

so many ways of saying flower power

i am attempting telekinetic connections to clouds

but i just end up in THE CLOUD adblock

all the art bros of the anthropocene

that are having emotional responses

to the end of nature my body falls apart with the moon

but this isn’t a period poem it’s a poem period

or maybe it’s a weep hole — i’m just a weep hole helping lessen

the spiritstatic load on the masonry of whatever

Mai Ivfjäll is a bilingual poet based in Stockholm (by way of Atlanta) She is a member of the experimental Danish writing group Hekseskolen and author of the chapbook INTO LONGING VAST ROSE (If A Leaf Falls Press 2019). 

Her poems have appeared in American Chordata, hotdog, Fanzine, Odiseo, Ordkonst, Pralin Magasin, Tidskriften Provins, Vakxikon’s Anthology of Young Swedish Writers, and elsewhere.

The photograph is from Swedish artist Leif Holmstrand’s series “Asami Kannon / Whore” (2017, performed at Uppsala Art Museum). Photo: Grzegorz Fitał.

The Worshipping God

I’m a god in my town and my valley

It’s not because they worship me   But because I do

Because I bow down before anyone who offers up

some passion fruits or a smile from their own garden

Or because I head down to the bad side of town

to beg for money or a shirt and I get it

Because I keep a close watch on the sky with my sparrow hawk eyes

and then talk about it in my poems   Because I’m lonesome

Because I slept seven months in a rocking chair

and another five on some city sidewalk

Because I give wealth the side eye

but I’m not vicious about it   Because I love anybody who loves

Because I know how to grow orange trees and vegetables

even in the dog days of summer   Because I have a compadre

whose children I baptized and whose marriage I blessed

Because I’m not good in a way people can get

Because when I was a lawyer I didn’t defend capital

Because I love birds and rain and its wide-open

washing my soul   Because I was born in May

Because I know how to sucker punch my sticky-fingered friend

Because my mother left me right when

I needed her most   Because if I’m sick

I go to the free clinic   Because basically

I only respect those who respect me   The ones who work

every day for their bread bitter and lonely and wrangled

like these poems of mine that I steal from death

Navel Moon

I sketch your outline from the lighthouse down to the city walls

Your iron eyes are glow hallucinated

Sea skips over stones and my soul’s got it wrong

Sun sinks into water and water is pure fire

You’re almost like a dream   Almost a stone in time’s swaying

A tender archetype solid in these dim days

your way of soothing my tears

Letting loose your body against mine   Mad

like a foal in prairie fire

Spilling your words on my knowledge 

like a poison to heal absence

Recalling things used and forgotten

with a bright wondrous flight

It’s getting late my love   Sea brings storms

A pale moon recalls your naval

And a few clouds light and slow like your hands

drink thirstily   Like when I die up against your mouth

El Dios que adora

Soy un dios en mi pueblo y mi valle

No porque me adoren   Sino porque yo lo hago

Porque me inclino ante quien me regala

unas granadillas o una sonrisa de su heredad

O porque voy donde sus habitantes recios

a mendigar una moneda o una camisa y me la dan

Porque vigilo el cielo con ojos de gavilán

y lo nombro en mis versos   Porque soy solo

Porque dormí siete meses en una mecedora

y cinco en las aceras de una ciudad

Porque a la riqueza miro de perfil

mas no con odio   Porque amo a quien ama

Porque sé cultivar naranjos y vegetales

aún en la canícula   Porque tengo un compadre

a quien le bauticé todos los hijos y el matrimonio

Porque no soy bueno de una manera conocida

Porque no defendí al capital siendo abogado

Porque amo los pájaros y la lluvia y su intemperie

que me lava el alma   Porque nací en mayo

Porque sé dar una trompada al amigo ladrón

Porque mi madre me abandonó cuando precisamente

más la necesitaba   Porque cuando estoy enfermo

voy al hospital de caridad   Porque sobre todo

respeto sólo al que lo hace conmigo   Al que trabaja

cada día un pan amargo y solitario y disputado

como estos versos míos que le robo a la muerte

Ombligo de luna

Dibujo tu perfil del faro a las murallas

Luz de alucinación son tus ojos de hierro

El mar salta en las piedras y mi alma se equivoca

El sol se hunde en el agua y el agua es puro fuego

Eres casi de sueño   Eres casi de piedra en el vaivén del tiempo

Arquetipo amoroso firme en la turbia edad

esa manera tuya de calmarme las lágrimas

De desbocar tu cuerpo contra el mío   Enloquecido

como un potro en una llanura incendiada

De verter tus palabras en mi entendimiento

cual veneno que cura la ausencia

De recordar cosas usadas y olvidadas

con un vuelo que ilumina y asombra

Es tarde amor   El mar trae tormenta

Hay una luna pálida que recuerda tu ombligo

Y unas nubes livianas y pesadas como tus manos

beben sedientas   Así cuando yo sobre tu boca muero

Raúl Gómez Jattin (Cartagena, 1945-1997) was one of Colombia’s most outstanding poets and the author of seven books of poetry. He spent most of his adult life between psychiatric hospitals and the streets, though he never stopped writing poetry. He led writing workshops at the University of Cartagena and the Modern Art Museum and his famous public readings drew hundreds of listeners. As a queer man of Syrian descent writing in a way that broke with his country’s tradition, his rightful place at the forefront of Colombian poetry has long been denied. In 1997, he was tragically killed by a bus.

Katherine M. Hedeen is a specialist in Latin American poetry and has both written extensively on and translated contemporary authors from the region. Her latest translations include In the Drying Shed of Souls: Poetry from Cuba’s Generation Zero (The Operating System) and Prepoems in PostSpanish (Eulalia Books), a chapbook by Ecuadorian neo-avant-garde poet Jorgenrique Adoum. She is an Associate Editor for Action Books, the Poetry in Translation Editor for the Kenyon Review and a two-time recipient of a NEA Translation Project Grant. She resides in Ohio where she is Professor of Spanish and Literary Translation at Kenyon College.

Olivia Lott’s translations of Latin American poetry have most recently appeared in or are forthcoming from ANMLY, Brooklyn Rail In Translation, The Kenyon Review, MAKE Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Waxwing, and World Literature Today. Sheis the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (Kenning Editions, 2018) and the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (Eulalia Books, 2020). She is a Ph.D. Student and Olin Fellow in Hispanic Studies and Translation Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is writing a dissertation on translation, revolution, and Latin American neo-avant-gardes.

The photograph is from Swedish artist Leif Holmstrand’s series “Asami Kannon / Whore” (2017, performed at Uppsala Art Museum). Photo: Grzegorz Fitał.

I’M SORRY

I want to apologize. I’m sorry that I have had to pull you down with me into this antechamber full of cold blood bags. It’s hard to believe such a room exists, that there is really a room where they just put bags of blood. But they stack up and stack up. When I got here, they didn’t cover the door, but they do now. I don’t think anyone ever comes for the blood bags again. No, really. It’s drafty. I’m so sorry.

Hold one of the bags, and feel the blood inside.

This is my mothering instinct talking.

I’m sorry for how this ends, in a chamber that used to lead somewhere.

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    Rapunzel

    I see once upon a time you were jaw bones.* The old woman at the dining table doesn’t speak, doesn’t cry. Her eyes disappear, her words—they begin to flow. It was the only rupture. Her face pebble-studded, having defeated every disease, she turned around to rest. When the anti-freeze flows from the lawnmower. The last drop of blood curdles at once. Now, if you could find someone to part with, wouldn’t that be nice? No one’s leaving, everyone’s on the floor. The white hair disappears, black hair grows. Why do you leave the door open all the time? In the opened hour she sticks her hand and gropes for her disappearing eyes. I’ll pour a little water on myself and take a look at my body. I’ll wash the panties, and I’ll pick up the towels too, I’ll put them in the basket. When the urine slowly dries where I’m squatting. I shed each layer of my skin under the sun. I see bones from long ago. Every ancestor became bats in the sky and monkeys on trees, owing to the capacity of solids. When she entered the ocean without a word and tried to grow into a whale. Not a day passed without pulling out the hair from the drain. Never have I failed to notice the crisscrossed bones in the hole. The black hair lumps in lumps. They say a mammal is a hole whose skull bones have fused completely. The day the old granddaughter reads a book. How to preserve the scene of rupture? The granddaughter’s white hair dances on the skull. The anti-freeze flows. Such tender palms, but they’ve never felt an alphabet. Child, why do you keep on leaving the door open? When on the floor wriggling, searching for the hour, the whole world must part ways. Touching the jaw bones. A ghost sits even at the tip of a needle. Though she wants to part with someone, she holds tightly in her hand the black hair. Doesn’t cry.

* Moriguchi Mitsuru, The Reason We Pick Up Corpses

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