Featuring:
Note:
We received these pieces all around the same time, unexpectedly, and together they surface questions of love and vulnerability, inherited structures and openness, in startling and alarming ways. These poems are simultaneously reflexive, critical, and genuine, finding and skirting the edges of cynicism. Robert Fernandez layers speakers—who are sometimes remembered, sometimes speaking for themselves, always negotiating erotic entanglement—in the stanzas’ abbreviated dialogues with each other. Emily Bark Brown inhabits the apostrophizing self of the social media user, or the poet addressing the moon, filling the celebrity vessel with fantasies and projections, “i get that vibe from you / like you’d be real cool,” as the solipsism of the Instagram feed becomes its own unfulfillable eros. The kinetic, self-styled poète maudit in Valerie Hsiung’s to Love an Artist considers how if “even true vulnerability has something ultimately to do with power,” this play of vulnerability and power runs through relation, and what that might have to do with, for example, “the clock hole.” Hsiung’s poem and the others seem to ask, what kinds of love are possible now? And if so, what are they? If not, what are they? How are they mediated through received images, forms, and stories? What is the remainder that exceeds or leaks around mediation’s familiar ironic distance? We’ll leave it to you and the poems to sort it out—we hope you enjoy reading them together as much as we did.
– The Editors
HELLO MOON
hey half-moon above me
i picked today to be worse
yesterday was plain awful
happy yom kippur y’all
repeating in my head a scene from state of grace (2001) with alia shawkat and mae whitman
alia shawkat do you wish you weren’t famous?
i get that vibe from you
like you’d be real cool
like a bay area instagram hairstylist
alia shawkat i can hear the neighbor downstairs chasing his six-year-old daughter around
her squealing laughter
do you love your dad?
alia shawkat do you ever wish your parents didn’t let you act?
i think all children secretly want to be famous
i know i did
life without someone watching you
it’s like being dead
from To love an artist
If one has set out to say one thing, to say one thing and then you will have said it and to say so you will mean it finally
Then I despise you fully properly then I will have set out to destroy you with utmost willing
Then I melt all the pots and pans for failed efforts towards collective national industrialization
Then I will clap all the pots and pans together until sparrows shake dead from the trees and all ecologies could go away like this together and such
My love!
My love!
Seeing you here today just once has made me so happy it gives me a happiness enough to continue living in my own hell the little box
So, a life must be phenomenologically hard work
So, I must thank you awfully for giving me the time alone to fulfill these hours and hours—nay, a lifetime!—of hard hard investigatory work
So my hands are a little dirty and guilty today so they are dirty with the pleasure of knowing what the skin on my hands has absorbed so much of a residue of _____ that’s correct my hands are dirty today though what they are dirty with is between me and my God alone and nobody else
Me and my God alone and nobody else can say if I have acted justly towards you my dear for me and my God alone know that I have much worse crimes for which to pay
Besides, to have a heart like mine is a curse it is to have the heart of a whore a true home-wrecker palpably it is to live the life of an incharitable poet maudite
The life of a poet maudite is a life hanging from chandeliers not at all is a life permeated so it is a life I might take after all
To live the life of a poet maudite is to live the life of a saint a nun a nun who was born a whore and to publish all your poems under your dead whore mother’s name
Such riches await us in the after life, dear!
In the after life dear I have a feeling no person will be brought back alive so it is important dear that I am allowed to reconfigure myself a dog or as some other beast that’s been domesticated properly
I’ve been domesticated properly by prayer books but never before I first opened a single prayer book before I first opened up one eye to pray I wrote down my prayer book inside a notebook of composition
In the most precious of all prayer books people commit the most atrocious of crimes the innocent shall not remain innocent in receiving experience
If we could no longer outsource the executioners of our pleasures then we would have a different relationship perhaps to pleasure altogether then we would perhaps find what was once so pleasurable to us to be utterly
Repulsive
Repulsive as an animal who shits and pisses and fucks out of the same hole shitting and pissing and fucking to an animal who shits and pisses and fucks out of separate holes
Yeah repulsive as evolutionary biology repulsive as all that
They say at least one hundred crimes of the century take place each century they say that an untrained mouth craves to put things in it that it “oughtn’t”
Such vulgar words tell us mystical things about the soul, such vulgarity tells us who we really are
This one’s called a clock hole it can be bought by the affluent only but you taught me well and I have wiretapped now into the system
This is called one’s clock hole
When the taskmaker meets you on escape day they will want to make sure you are good to go that you’re in the pre-set mode and that the wire’s going to go through without a single hitch
When the CEOs of Forbes 100 are unveiled to be undercover Earthstrike operatives two decades in the making
Even true vulnerability has something ultimately to do with power in fact it may all be about power in the end
It’s kind of like a moodring
It’s kind of like a moodring, depending on who is touching it, and who is taking the persona on, the mask could become something completely different in one moment to the next
I think of each mask making session as an embalming session and though I feel guilty about it because my body is capital I feel a little radical when I pause to feel the cicatrizing on my skin from each mask making moment
When I thinks of these travelers I thinks of a lost and found acrobat the nerves of the performance of the crime in the unconscious of the century
When I think of these nomads nimble-bodied bladders like a mustard seed
Now I must finish what I have in a fantasy never hoped to have begun