from The Cunt

1

“Sir, it is simple,” I said. When I told people it was simple their ears perked up — we loved solutions that were simple.
“Son, I don’t understand what you are saying to me.” Ah, I knew I would have to practice patience with this man. It was important that he understand me — it was important that everyone understand me.
I restarted, “You know how the world is so overwhelming,” he nodded with vigor, such vigor, I knew he was listening. I had his attention at last and you could never have enough attention. “Well, what if we could close ourselves off? And, by our own hand.
“It wouldn’t cost a dime, just a bit of string and a needle.” He nodded, and not just polite, he sincerely wanted my simple solution. A kind, good, God-fearing man, he had seen enough to know that whatever it was I was about to say might in fact be worth trusting — a good man, yes sir good sir — he was willing to try anything once.
“I will close myself off from the world, one part of my body at a time. Now, we have noses, but all those bad odors; I know to start there. I have a perfectly good mouth that will do all my breathing for me.” He didn’t mind this very much — okay, sure — the nose, whatever about the nose — it was ugly, it jutted, no one had a nice one.
I had him and I was sure I should continue, “Well the nose has two compartments, left nostril and right nostril. God has put them there for us to close them tight.
“I know how much we dislike mouth breathers — all the noise — but, yes sir good sir, I am above the noise.”
“Okay, son,” expressing impatience, “You have my attention. Stop beating around the bush.” It was true. Attention was nice but getting to the point — necessary. I apologized to the man, as the food arrived. He’d got a burger, and I’d got the same burger, medium rare, just how I liked it. Liked it as much as a clear blue sky. We sat at the counter looking out at the clear blue sky.
I wrapped up, “Well, I’ll do a nostril a day. “Then, I’ll do the eyes.
“Then, I’ll do the ears.
“Then, the mouth.
“That’s seven good, God-willing days. At that point, my face will be useless, but I will still have the mind. And, you know — I’m sure I won’t mind.” This got a chuckle. The man was scarfing his burger but still willing to chuckle — grease running down his face God bless him.
“Without the face, the guts stop doing their thing. Well, I’ll have one last good piss. One nice shit too I’m sure.” The man did not like this. His nose crinkled at the word shit, which was natural, but nature was only custom; and all after all, I was tailor-made. “After that last good piss, I’ll take the needle and the string and close up my foreskin. The next day I’ll take the needle and close up my ass too. It will take nine days for me to close all my cunts.
“What do you think?”
This man was extremely kind, a very willing participant in conversation, a truly good man yes sir good sir, he said, “Well, what happens after?”
“After?”

*

I had no string and I had no needle so I went to the appliance store on the other side of town.
I walked under that brightest blue sky I had ever seen.
See, I was stubborn, stubborner than a fighter — or a mule — though I had never seen one of those in real life, but I had seen a fight in real life. And also, if I didn’t have my stubbornness, then I didn’t have a very important part of myself, and I refused to not have all the most important parts of myself. Emotion, grit, assuredness of belief — this was what made a man.
I was saying as much to the cashier, “See this string is for my nose.” My enthusiasm was unkempt but as I was attractive she listened of course. The cashier was also attractive which made me want to talk to her. She had her own piercings, many piercings, septum and nose and ears.
She asked me what I meant.
I went on and on the way that I went on and on with the man with the burger; rather, I would have liked to have gone on and on the way that I went on and on with the man with the burger, but a big man in sweaty clothes arrived just then. Ah, ’twas her responsibility to treat us as equals, so please, she insisted. So please, and rushed me along.

*

When I talked to my friends — that is, when I used to talk to my friends — I would try to infuse them with my energy. That’s what I’d exclaim as they’d yawn, “I’m trying to infuse you with my energy!” They’d laugh, then they’d say, You’re funny, though they never said what was so funny. Didn’t say a thing after they laughed. But anyways then I knew I was funny, and I liked to be funny. This was how it went with my friends.
I had so many. For a while I had lots! I talked until they yawned. I’d always tell them, “I am infusing you with my energy!”
Ah, but I tried to never ever say the same thing. With so much to say, it was easy to do, but I tried not to, well that’s not totally true. I couldn’t help but tell them all about thunder. That there were ions on the grounds and ions in the clouds. That when ions needed a balance there were these tiny parts that went racing to meet each other, maybe billions of these ions of the skies and ions of the grounds. That they had this need that they were made with.
And when they met that need they went boom!
And that was thunder!
I could hardly believe it, I told my friend, every friend in fact, because I didn’t see those small parts, no one could see them, and I didn’t hear those small parts, no one could hear them, I just felt them when they met, a massive hug at the particulate level. I’d tell them I really liked that word, particulate, and they’d suck their face like a fish, then they’d slink and wait for me to stop — I’d take a breath and in that breath they’d say that they just had to get going — okay, yeah, that’s fine, I’d say.
But one more thing — just let me tell you one more thing! I couldn’t know if my friend was listening to me or to their insides, where they had slunk, which I didn’t mind. No, but I did think it was maybe their loss.
What I was saying was so full of life. And friends wouldn’t go to a place that was less full of life. That’d be dumb.
My friends were always doing things that I was no good at, like tossing and catching and flirting. So maybe what’d I know? So it must have been that I and all my talking were not a thing compared to that place inside. This was a big, big part of why I wanted to slink inside. But when I did it, it wouldn’t be a slink. I was so proud to finally do a thing that all my friends liked to do with me, slink. When I got to doing my cunt closing, I couldn’t find a friend to tell.

*

I had always had this lovable quality and I wouldn’t have known it was such a lovable quality if people hadn’t told me all the time how lovable a quality it was — I liked to talk to strangers. It was, apparently, not common. Well, people tried to explain, it was common; but, but it was a bit too complex to explain over dinner.
If only it was as simple as a smile.
Smiling, I simply couldn’t help but talk to everyone on the street who smiled. We all smiled in the same language — I heard that in a song once. Plus, once we got to smiling, people never told me to go away; they adored how supple my skin was and how lush my hair. My teeth were straight, my cheeks sharp and dimpled too. Plus, all these ideas! Ah, I had everyone’s eye.
It was important to have everyone’s eye.
Where we looked was where we went, and I wanted to go inside.
“That is why I will shut my first eye on the third day,” I exclaimed at the woman on the street with a beautiful dress. She had her child close and her child also had on a beautiful dress and she brought her child closer. The child was enchanted by my presence, so the mother brought her closer to warm her ears.
But, “The ears and the eyes I will do in sync. First the left eye, then the left ear. Second the right eye, second the right ear.” The mother, so so polite. She inched away. This frustrated me: conversation’s a single odd dash away from turning to ash.
She inched further — and further, nodding bye-bye — she just had to get on with her day. I waved sweetly goodbye! The child who smelled of a lavender field waved sweetly goodbye in return.

*

I looked in the mirror, and I promised myself I would, I needed, to complete my mission. I had run into money, and people with money came up with the craziest needs. I shooed away the thought that I was crazy. If I was crazy, I would know!
It was time to close my first cunt.
I looked at myself in the mirror — the sky blue string in one hand, the needle in the other, and my phone on the counter — my phone on the counter showed me how to put the string through the needle. It took being nimble but was in fact very simple, like all good things. Just fold the string into two then pull it through. Ah, that felt the same as folding my nose.
Slid the string together; slid the side of the nose together. A bit of pain then eternal bliss. I wanted to begin. I took a deep breath. I looked at myself in the mirror — the blood in my brain beat and the blood in my heart beat — and quickly I slashed the string through. There was no dripping yet. Without a single breath more, I slashed the string the other way through. Great satisfaction! I saw that the cusp of the nose was sealed. Then red slipped toward my mouth and I huffed it away. I pushed my lips like pff.
Pff, ignoring pain like the good monk preached, pff. Pff, I kept going.

2

I said to my dad, “It’s my new look.”
“Looks bad,” my dad said. And it did look bad. Infected, I thought. But infections went away, and — anyways anyways — what did it matter? I was learning.
All my teachers liked to say, learning is infectious. They’d point at the board and droll dully along, no one a’listening at all. So I learned learning was not infectious, no but truth was infectious. And I was living my truth.
Truth was like looks. We all had looks. Looks mattered.
And anyone saying otherwise probably wasn’t too raggedy. Anyone saying otherwise had probably been beaten in too many fights, which would make them right — looks didn’t matter in a fight.
Well I didn’t want to fight with my dad, yes sir good sir, so we stayed silent for the rest of our food. I’d assumed he’d want to hear the next bits of my plan. But when you assume, supposedly, you made an ass out of you and me. But see, I didn’t believe anything could make an ass out of — both — you and me.
My mom stayed silent too. She just looked at her plate and flicked at her food, but I wanted her to look at my face. I wanted her to gleam for me like the crunchy yellow goo on my nose. But to gleam with pride! Her boy, no, her sir yes sir good sir, was doing what he set out to do. And wasn’t that what a mom always wanted? I didn’t want my mom to worry. Worrying got her warts, worrying got her ulcers. To keep the worries away, she learned to plan ahead.
Still, she couldn’t help but worry for me. I have no idea why. She never really said. All of her worrying lied deep, deep in her head. Ah, and what good was that?

*

When I’d closed my first cunt, I thought I’d chosen the color of the string at random — I loved random — “Random, random, random,” I would sometimes say. But, no, no, no. ’Twas not random.
That clear blue sky was what I’d chose. That clear blue sky was above. Then, that clear blue sky was within. Then, I couldn’t stitch any other color whatsoever. I had to stitch the sky which was deep deep deep inside.
I returned to the store, whooshing through the doors automatic as fate, to locate more colors. The girl with the piercings, septum and nose and ears, found me grabbing handfuls and handfuls of string.
I turned to her. Her eyes went big and her shoulders went back.
One eye, I couldn’t track. It buzzed about like a fly.
The other eye slack, “Ahem,” she asked in the form of a say, “This must be your new look.” She understood! Forever rare and forever good to have a person who understood!
I was hooked, “I’m a man on a mission and my mission is clear. A cunt every day for nine days. There’s nothing to fear.”
She nodded polite.
“I’d thought I’d chosen this sky blue at random. Random, random, random, I like to say, yet it wasn’t, yes yes yes, there was a why.
“But you can’t say why the way I say random — why, why, why — sounds like a bug in your ear.
“See, the sky was up over my head. Now, the sky’s here plum through my nose. I have to get every color today to be ready. Ah, after the nose, it’s the eyes and the ears and the ass.
“Then who nose,” I winked and pointed at my nose to show her that I knew that she knew that I knew that my joke was bleh.
She flicked her finger. She motioned me to follow a few aisles down. “Disinfectant for the pus. Finer needles for the sutures. And a book on how to knit.”
“I don’t know,” I moaned, “What good is a book?”
“You can knit blind,” she said.
Real supportive, “And you’ll be blind for three days or so.”
“Ah,” I said in the form of an ask, “So it’s something to do?”
At the register, ding, ding, ding. I continued, “I do what I do to keep away, away my blues. Speaking of which — left nostril, sky blue; right nostril, who knows — maybe the color of your eyeshadow or maybe the color of your nails or maybe the color of your blush?
“Or — maybe, maybe, maybe — the color of your chandelier heart.” She smiled, “Toodaloo.”

*

A smart man said, so my dad liked to say, though he wasn’t the smart man, he just really liked to say — if it cannot be said in three words or less it must not be said!
Always waxing wisdom — spoke like this — my dad did. He said once — purpose is special.
He added — this his trick for speaking in bigger than threes — appreciate what’s special.
So no sir he simply wouldn’t have my long long tale but if he had had my long long tale I think things might have ended differently. Anyway about that!
I was looking hard in the mirror — not to reflect — but to clean up my leaky, creamy nostril. It hurt to the touch. My friend-girl from the store had advised me to only proceed once I had looked up some tips. So wise. She provided me websites where I learned about surgeons stabbing ladies up through the nose till their brains went to slush.
Interrupted! My phone’s ringtone — me sing’a’linging ’a’linging along — sang-a-lang-a-lang a’ring-a-ding-a-ding, a’ring-a-ding-a-dong, until I answered the phone the way I always answered the phone, “Hello hello hello hello hello helloooo.”
The phone person asked if this was me. “Yes,” I said, “This is he.”
They were the local news and asked if I agreed to an interview. They called me a ‘human interest story.’ Ah, not only was I human, but of course, I was also interesting.
“Yee,” I said nicely, “How’s three?”

*

∩

Emiliano Gomez attends the MFA for Poetry at the University of Notre Dame, is a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, and has received support from the California Arts Council. A chapbook of Townies was a finalist for the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook contest. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from Acentos Review, ballast, Barzakh, Breakbread, Broadkill Review, Indolent Books, and mercuryfirs.

Seven Poems

[If dog is precipitate]

Of so-called princess shell, dog takes the carbon and shits
Dog believes history; shit before princess
and visa verso.

This is purpose, this
will not reduce:

dog
history
carbon princess shell purpose shit.

This is extraction—

Dog accepts “ball”
of shell-frag (digested)
that is, de-purposed (i.e., shit).

Here is the full on purpose shit-frag historic
princess lyric-shell gastronomy cycle
while dog, a poem, shits.



[If dog is a star]

Add dog to princess make star
Subtract dog from star get dog-star

Unfortunately. The bangdeed is already supernovas



[If dog is dog]

Nothing, seven times.



[Look]

I just — my body and lowercase
briefcase just go together! It’s just — my bodycase
goes and lowers briefcase together. It’s just my
body lows, brief and go-getter. I love mechanical cranes!
Meaning, I don’t — live inside that case anymore
Meaning, I haven’t — in that case anymore
will not — anymore
had not — more

Now look away — case closed!
I love mechanical cranes!



[In the box]

In the box I am a little boy. All the little girls
are speaking up. I am a little
box with the glow of a boy and all the little
girls are speaking up all around. Little
do they, boy, know — for now!
Boy boy — for now!
Bye bye — death comes later!



[Hazmat suit]

Never did I ever wear a corporate hazmat suit and get it off me — I put it on — in my belligerent posture — the way I send an email — it gets belligerenter — the little girls arrive and wait for me — to start the meeting — I have to write inside of this hazmat suit — it takes a long time — to pretend to get it off of me — the little girls stand at the coffee machine — to watch me — am I little girls — inside this hazmat suit — watching me — the imaginary carafe — of all outfits — are little girls girls —

Once I wore a hazmat suit — and never did I ever get it off of me —



[Quantum steps]

What’s the date, time-button?
Ours laughs the sky off its witness
stand in mirrors. There it is again

The blind mirror. Each of us is surveilled
behind the vanity of flat technologies. I need to forget
so I super-merge with “me” between 12 and 3. Time
ovulates, obfuscates, new body’s derived
from the copy of a photon devilish I have
created meaning with it. Sutures. To the future.
Not meaning ion is to forget, meaning
I on the only way to make meaning
is forgetting itself. Like surfaces, instructions
I forgot them. That’s how. And when I get this soul,
forget it. It could be so easy

∩

Zoe Darsee was born around noon on a Tuesday. They are the author of BELL LOGIC (Spiral Editions, 2022) and Anzündkind (Creative Writing Department, 2023). Their collaboration with Elise Houcek, a lysergic neo-noir poet’s novel, is forthcoming. Together with Nadia Marcus, they run TABLOID Press. This work continues.

Four Poems

вряд ли ты сможешь
(я бы удивился если б ты смог)
объяснить все наречия тумана
но
по крайней мере
вода налитая тобой
долго хранит прохладу


it is unlikely that you would be able to
(I would be surprised if you were able)
to explain all the adverbs for fog
but
at least
the water you poured
extensively stores cold

---

с такой простудой можно достичь
глубочайшей неуверенности окунуться
в неё как в озеро полное зыбких теней
увидеть шаткую телевышку
и уже на пределе подводного зрения
оттаявшее серебряное веко


with such a head cold it is possible to reach
the deepest insecurity dip
into her like into a lake full of unsteady shades
to see a rickety broadcasting tower
and already in underwater sight’s range
a thawed silver eyelid

---

угаданное имя
и та изначальная лёгкость
которую сменит плотность
и тяжесть

простёганное подозрение
и где-то на краю
бесцельный волос

а если наоброт: тишина
усыплённых туч и между ними
холёное солнце?

радоваться ли последнему первенцу
или первому последышу
нотным деревьям
филологическим поездам –
всем тайным сотрудникам
не оформленной в ветер надежды?

знаешь
как плоть двоится
и знаешь что боль
неизбежна
и обратима

видишь: такое сирое место
где любовь – двенадцатый присяжный


an identified name
and that incipient lightness
will be replaced by mass
and a weight

a quilted suspicion
and somewhere on the margin
an aimless hair

and if on the contrary: silence
of slumbering clouds and between them
a slick sun?

should we rejoice over the ultimate firstborn
or the first final
over rhythm trees
philological trains —
over all secret associates
hope unratified in the wind?

you know
how breadth doubles
and you know pain is
inevitable
and reversible

you see: such a damp place
where love — a twelfth juror

---

Наши тела образовали иероглиф,
непрерывно меняющий значение:
речная слепота,
колокольная ночь,
взятое на поруки забвение.


Our bodies formed a hieroglyph 
uninterrupted change in meaning: 
a river blindness  
a bell tower night,
an oblivion in custody. 

∩

Stanislav Belsky (Станислав Бельский) is a Russian language Ukrainian poet born in 1976 in Dnipropetrovsk. He is also a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry to Russian and works as a programmer. He has published thirteen books of poetry in Russian, including most recently: Quarantine Times (2023), On Sunny Concrete (2023), and Friendly Conversations with Robots (2024). His poems have been translated into Italian, Polish, Hebrew and Czech, and published widely in journals nationally and internationally. Belsky is a curator of the poetry book series Тонкие линии [“Thin lines”] and is co-organizer of a Dnipro and Kyiv poetry festival Чернил и плакать [“Get ink and weep”].

olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Her debut chapbook cities as fathers is out with Tilted House, and “our monuments to Southern California,” she calls them is forthcoming with Ursus Americanus. Other works can be found in mercury firs, LitHub, Metatron Press, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere.

from Hella Down

The gingerbread kicks in around 25th. I’d scooped it from Bogey’s friend, the one with the sick swords mounted on his wall. Normally dealers will talk your ear off about their psycho interests, but this guy wasn’t a dealer. It was some kind of hobby for him, growing, and he didn’t talk at all. He can’t, Bogey explained weeks later. The guy’s voice is fine, but when he talks it sounds all backwards. Bogey is sitting on the kitchen island, munching on kimchi straight from the jar. I’d forgotten the gingerbread in the back of the freezer so now it’s encrusted with frost and smells like ruined ozone. Microwaving it would be too logical, so I shatter it under the butt of the only knife in the woodblock, making big ugly gems that are fun to crunch into snow but taste like potpourri and dogshit, so I give Bogey half. He sounds fucked up but he’s a genius, the sword guy. He invented a new kind of math when he was 14 and now he’s building robots in Sunnyvale and practices kenjutsu. It’s all on his blog. He says the singularity already happened, but we don’t have the neural connectivity to recognize it. He’s crossbreeding a special strain to help us close the gap. The edibles are just so his failed experiments don’t go to waste. 
So now the bus is almost to the laundromat on 34th, and, by my calculations, the experiment is a runaway success. The plastic of the seats is too orange. The advertisements for injury lawyers and online degrees and dental work are extremely compelling. Why are there so many smells? My only ally is the Asian lady with the giant green visor. At least one of us is ready for tax season. Her grocery cart is like a forcefield protecting us from the clique of skaters. I can tell they skate by their floppy beanies and BO, but also their skateboards. The artwork and stickers have scuffed off in all sorts of cool ways. One is of a radioactive skeleton grinding the lip of a UFO. The best trick I ever landed was an ollie unless you count Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Please don’t. The skaters already suspect I’m a major poser and the Asian lady’s grocery cart bangs into my knee and I look down and I’m wearing boat shoes, no socks. What am I a fucking cockswain? Thankfully, I’ve also got a Believer tote and a Hawaiian to hedge, but still. You can never be too careful.
The Asian lady is getting off so I do too. The bus pulls away to reveal the Egyptian restaurant with the crazy mural. Ten blocks to go, maybe more, but first I have to answer the riddle of why would the artist make the guy in the fez look so horny? Why are Sobek and Horus guarding the plaque with the Zagat score? I’m pretty sure they governed more consequential domains, but my knowledge of Egyptian mythology is mostly based on Stargate (1994) and I don’t want to argue. This is supposed to be Nicky’s no-thinking day. This is supposed to be fun. We’re having fun. We’re going to the beach. We’re almost there. Breathe.
The walk there does me some good, but by the time I get to the parking lot, I’m sweating through the polyester in blotches that stick to my back and chest. It’s not a particularly nice day, same as always, but the beach is mercifully empty, even more so with the tide out. Mostly wiry tan guys running in the surf and doomed first dates exploring the coves. A few dogs running off leash, their owners trying to get a bonfire started. They’re using the log cabin method so one of them is on his hands and knees, blowing, while his friend pretends to buttfuck him in long, passionate strokes. They’re all zipped up in the same Patagonia, but with different corporate logos on the breast, making them a formidable coalition of assholes, and one of them looks like my nemesis from AutoMagic, so I retreat to the dunes and find a divot between tufts of sharp grass, wiping away the cigarette butts before I plop down. From up here, I’ve got a good view of birdshit island and the surfers bobbing nearby, waiting for just the right wave. Maybe I should get into surfing. Learn patience and watchfulness. When to go with the flow and when to bail. Pick up some stoner koans and throw the shaka. Call beer cerveza. Teach at the community college. Live in a winnebago. Just live, man. The winnebago will have a woman’s name, something fittingly midcentury. Shirley. Betty. Janice. Midge. Okay, not that one. Is Peggy too obvious? What about Barbara? Barbara, Barbie, Babs. Beverley. Betty—no I did that one already…
When I wake up the fog is still holding the sun hostage, but everything is brighter somehow, the light diffracted, if that’s even the right word. An inventory of my tote reveals the wishful thinking of late morning. A few books to choose between, one too many to make a decision. A banana and a Nature Valley bar, most of which will crumble into the sand. The one vice is a sweating tallboy, some kind of imperial IPA with a reprehensible pun that tastes like an air freshener. It leaves me thirsty and I immediately want another, an idiot in a Greek myth. I am trapped in this labyrinth of a city, cursed to be so blessed. This makes me want to try out the Calvino, but the whitespace is too bright and my gas station sunglasses are back on the bus, I now realize. The sun peekaboos out from the fog, but never long enough to dry my sweat. There is always a but, but here I am. 
I squint back out over the beach. The Patagonia bros have given up on their fire, plenty warm with wine sloshing in their stomach and a game of two-hand touch that has devolved into tackle. The surfers have packed it in and the couples have retreated to the safety of their cars. All I want is to see a beautiful woman and briefly fall in love with the idea of her. She walks with unfashionable sandals looped in her fingers, a rascally dog circling her. She is wearing an oversized hoodie and cutoffs that show off her legs. The legs of an ex-athlete, still carrying that line down the outside of the thigh, coming into perfect definition when she pushes off of the loose pack of the sand. She doesn’t have any agenda in particular and this is the point, to flow.
Her dog is on a mission though. First to catch a seagull then smell the mermaid purse and then he’s sprinting towards me, climbing the dune, bathing me in psychotic licks. She jogs over to apologize and soon she’s sitting and I find a secret beer in my tote. We talk about what breed we’d be if we were dogs, how fucked the traffic is compared to when we were kids, essential YouTube videos, the weird thing washed up by the lifeguard tower. It’s probably just a bag of trash, but this can’t stop us from hypothesizing. The bladder of a humpback whale ripped apart by sharks. A Louis duffel full of heroin the traffickers had to dump before the coast guard showed. A mutant seal, escaped from a secret facility on the Farallons. She snorts when she laughs too hard, but this one makes her quiet and our eyes turn back to the gray postcard of the Pacific. The waves are endless. The sunset, theoretical. When it’s time for her to get her dog home, we don’t exchange numbers, that would break the spell. Maybe we’ll see each other around. For sure.
Instead the cosmos greets me with the travesty of a homeless guy jacking off beneath a tarp, though not out of any sense of modesty. He’s singing a song at the top of his lungs, a melody I can sing too, though I don’t know the lyrics. Neither does the guy it seems, but this doesn’t stop him from finding the right words. Words that mean nothing to us and everything to him. He is the one free man left in the entire world. All it cost him was his mind. He is staring directly at the sun, his googly eyes clouded with cataracts, the blue beneath murky. It roams in this soup like the answers of a Magic 8 Ball, demanding to be shaken. 
Hey, guy. Can you not? 
Without a doubt.
If I give you this banana will you go do your business somewhere else?
My sources say no.
And who might that be?
Better not tell you now.
Who are you then?
Try again.
So you’re just here to torture me?
Signs point to yes.
Is this punishment for something I did in a past life?
Most likely.
Then tell me one thing.
Very doubtful.
I’m going to be okay, right?
Outlook not so good.
Then when is it going to end?
Cannot predict now. 
So now what?
Concentrate and ask again. 
So now what?
Concentrate and ask again.

---

Denise is here from New York on business or traveling there, it’s tough to make out as she alternates between me and her bluetooth. Whoever it is on the line, she’s talking down to them in the usual ways. Asking obvious questions to make sure they’re listening. Repeating simple instructions. She asks if I take cards. When I say no she asks, what about Amex? No, Timothy, creative said sans serif. Am I going to have to sign a makegood? Alright, signing off now, the delivery guy is here. Buh-bye.
Denise rubs her temple as she looks around for her purse. Is this it?, I ask pointing to a leather bag hanging from the handle of an exercise bike. She makes a face like duh and fishes a checkbook from the bag. She makes it out to who, exactly? Ben’s Dry Ice? Even as she says this, she’s reeling it back, asking questions about temperature, how long it will last. What are the optimal storage conditions? She is sure to let me know she knows the word sublimate. I give her the usual caveat that it’s all online, but she’s relentless. It’s not for her, it’s for her newborn. In six days shy of three months. She read that even bottles made from plant cellulose retain chemicals from the production process that can leak over 24-72 hours, otherwise she’d be happy pumping before she flies and, besides, shipping overnight isn’t that expensive anymore. What about cash, is cash alright?
I fold the twenties into my breast pocket and go to work, lugging five 10-lb slabs to a travel cooler that fits them perfectly. When I’m done, I don’t say anything so she thinks I’m lingering for a tip and pretends she has another call coming through so I should just see myself out. She could feed her baby artisan organic freerange cruelty-free BPA-free whatever and he’s still going to turn out an ADHD terrorist. Her baby is going to grow up to hate her for raising him in a fearful bubble. Her baby is going to be gay in ways she will pretend to accept. Her baby will make mediocre art with his expensive degree. Her baby is going to panic his way into a coke problem. He will test her in ways she is convinced she is prepared for because she read the books. What else is there to say?

---

It seems unlikely we’re going to talk about writing in this month’s writing group. Manuscripts are conspicuously fresh, the lone mark the corner creases made on the stoop before ringing the doorbell. Fiona sells it best, rifling through her messenger bag to make it look like she’d left it at home. She can see exactly where it is, sitting on her breakfast table between her mug and a pouch of American Spirit. The turquoise one, obvi. So what if that makes her basic? You wanna know what’s really fuckin basic? Her phone buzzes. It’s Jake, texting to say something came up, but he’ll be there next time. Nobody bothers to check in with Raf. Instead we meditate on important topics like who’s going to see Wooden Shjips at Hemlock and where Jen got her tote. Sixpacks circulate, then a joint. For the record it’s from Afterlife, the tote, which is to say it’s wildly overpriced.
This group had set a new landspeed record, going from initial optimism to patient flexibility to slack and ennui in just a few sessions. Last time, Scott stormed out because we couldn’t recognize the genius of his ecosophical space opera, which, to be clear, is nothing like Dune. Aurora and Johnny are fucking. So are Aurora and Dani, at least that’s what Allie heard, whispering loud enough for Tosh to hear. She is still drunk from bottomless mimosas at Dear, Mom. Her sister is visiting from Portland and is a total bitch, but Allie loves her, don’t I believe her? She grabs my arm and doesn’t let go, looking down at the papers rolled in my hand. I feel like an asshole with my typed-out notes for Boone’s Twin Peaks knock-off. We get it, you wish you were blue-collar Americana because you grew up in Atherton. Hilary’s parents are loaded too, it’s not a big deal. 
The silence has legitimate mass. Jaws scrape the floor. Eyes dart around the room, wondering, what the fuck now? Even Allie, though no one will meet her gaze and then it dawns on her. Oh fuck, she said that out loud, didn’t she? How could she be so stupid. She’s such a stupid fucking cunt. She knows everyone hated her cicada story. We think we’re being all subtle and shit, but she sees right through us. Especially you, she points right at me and then pukes onto her shirt, just a little though. It pools over her breasts, clinging a little to her striped shirt. She stares at it, bemused by its modest, sudden presence and, finally recognizing what it is, begins to sob.
Dani is hosting so she helps Allie to her room and when Dani’s back everyone starts to wheeze with laughter. A room of teakettles finally allowed to whistle, but not too loud. Don’t want to wake up the vomit laureate. Most everyone cringes at this one, but it does the trick and a few minutes later it’s like nothing had happened. It’s obvious we’ve had our last workshop and the mood is like a grad night, giddy and sentimental. We’re free from all the homework. Next up, more homework. Might as well get fucked up. Maybe someone will make out in a closet. Someone’s already puked. We list our grievances mostly to wave them off. What a joke, “workshop.” It was basically a monthly pity party. Allie’s free therapy.
Wait, Nick, weren’t you looking for a new guy? Fiona’s friend Taylor started seeing this burner chick who tells everyone they’re ADHD and prescribes hella Addys. I’m good, I tell her, but take her friend’s info anyway. Just in case, she says, winking. A big, drama-kid wink, but that’s just Fiona. Or is it? You tell me.

---

The cum trees are in bloom, bewildering all the transplants. Jackson used to be one of them, but it’s been over a decade, so we make a sport of it, drinking on stoops in nouveau neighborhoods so we can watch noses wrinkle. Guys of all ages doing double-takes, checking their clothing instinctively, unless they’re in a group and then they slug each other on the shoulders and pluck blossoms to shove in the most virginal face. Most girls wince, but a woman with straight, brown hair cut at the shoulders of her suit jacket gifts us a glimpse of a personal smile. 
Baris shows up as she’s passing by, his expression even more mischievous than hers. He’s coming straight from lab and looks the part, his backpack slung over one shoulder, bedhead starting to settle and matte with sweat. My mom likes to joke that he’s studying to save her life one day, imagining him with a scalpel when he’s mostly coding and when he’s not coding he’s surfing or flirting with baristas. He’s not here for the schadenfreude but the sundresses and so are we, at some level. Leaving the Whole Foods on Franklin with our six-pack we almost trampled a woman who could only be described as feline. The girls playing tennis at the park are on stilts. It’s a fraternal vocabulary, endangered the moment one of us spots a future ex. Someone who doesn’t have a type, though of course this is just another type. The exception to the rule. A shock of color on a black and white photo. 
Breaking her spell is one of Jackson’s club friends, a guy with Encino man hair and a full grill. He spots us on our perch and respects the format. He is so fried he looks like a lizard basking, eyes only ever half open, but any superiority I feel collapses the moment I realize this is how the normies see us, up on our stoop. He’s playing an afters this Friday if we wanna fuck with it. He hands us a poster that looks like it was made in Kid Pix. F I R E S T A R T E R, it says, child actress Drew Barrymore with spiky green hair and a studded choker drawn on. A speech bubble advertises the number to call for the location, but the guy tells us it’s at the Foundry, lowering his shades and looking around before whispering this sensitive intel and then he’s moving on.
That guy is a national treasure. He should be in a museum. No, Jackson says, patting down his breast pocket. That guy is faking the funk. When he moved here he told everyone his name was Mitch but it’s really something preposterous like Wellington or Xavier. Inside the breast pocket is Jackson’s lighter. Dude is from Connecticut and his dad is a banker. His older sister has an oxy problem and is always in and out of rehab so they’re glad he’s doing his art in San Francisco or whatever it is he tells them. Jackson flicks the lighter and the poster burns. His parents will bankroll anything. He dropped out of Tisch to follow Animal Collective around and they ditched him here. He crashed with Caleb for a while, that’s how Jackson knows him and it’s why the guy got into techno. His whole thing now with the stupid Photoshops and the tracksuit, he stole that from Primo and now he’s doing parties with Noah. He’s doing a week in Berlin in October. Jackson wants to hate the guy but respects the grift too much. He watches the paltry flame dance, but I’m watching the lighter. A white lighter. 
A birdfaced woman, too proper to tell us to get the fuck off her stoop, tiptoes between us up the steps. The smell of cum is fainter with the sun setting. It’s not too late to pop back into Whole Foods and figure out dinner, but a burrito is calling my name. Not the one I really want, but the one closest to my house. Tomorrow will be spent on the toilet. After that, I don’t know.

---

How was the powermom?, Ben asks, not really asking. This time he’s got another fun one. The woman lives above Molotov’s. She wants to donate her dead dog to a veterinary school, but they won’t accept it unless she gets the thing on ice within 24 hours. Do I accept this mission? I mean, I guess. Car insurance doesn’t pay itself.
The woman who answers the door is not Jess. Neither is the one lighting tea candles. There is another woman in the same flannel + undershirt combo tending a pot of lentils, also not Jess. Eventually she finds me politely declining a cup of whiskey. She is dressed in a variation on theme, her own flair, the cuffed jeans and horn rim glasses. It’s her derby team, she explains. The Butch Bombers, I read off a patch. They’re trying to get her to sit shiva, but she is all business. She shows me to the cooler Davis specified. We have only fifteen minutes to get this puppy on ice, no pun intended, she slugs me in the ribs.
The veneer starts to crack when we unroll the quilt. There is Rita, a sixty-pound bulldog with a monstrous underbite, all four legs like those of a chair, the old girl’s so rigored. The Bombers take turns patting her on the back and the tears come. I’ve already broken up the ice, so it’s just a matter of shoehorning the dog into the cooler, really a glorified styrofoam takeout box. It’s like notching a bow, getting the joints bent into place. Something snaps, not just a feeling inside the animal but a sound audible throughout the room. More tears, more conciliation. The horn rims fall to the carpet. The cooler groans, unhappy to be working overtime, so I wrap it with duct tape to make sure it all stays together. God I’m glad I didn’t blaze before this one, but I still have the brief delusion that the sublimation at the edges of the cooler is the dog’s soul, escaping into the axiom of air.
I write this down later, at Waziema, mouth chalky with cheap wine. In the movie version, I do the right thing and tear up the page. Throw it in the trash, light it on fire, something dramatic. In real life, I order another drink, this one a blotch in my memory, and click the nib of my pen in and out. In and out. Out and in. The truth is, I don’t have much to offer. I don’t know where this is all going. What is more potent than another person’s pain? If you know the answer, text me.

---

It’s been six months since I left Swerv and I never bothered to switch my prescription to a closer Walgreens and Herr Doktor is off the clock on Sundays so I have to take the 31 downtown while my skin is crawling with bugs, though I guess this should help me fit in. Recently the TL has been a warzone, more than usual, and when I text this to Max, he tells me there’s no heroin so the junkies are smoking crack and corner store salvia and synthetic weed and it’s turning them into Tasmanian devils. Like straight Looney Tunes shit, dudes spinning into blurry tornadoes. Last week he saw a guy run out into the street, get flattened by a truck, and bounce back to his feet, whistling like nothing had happened. 
Today, the bus is quiet, too quiet, and sure enough the second we cross Van Ness, it disentangles from its line and the driver can’t lance it back on, leaving me to weather the elements. I stop in at L&G to fortify myself with mystery meat before braving the minefield of shit and needles, but the reality is I enjoy the entropy. Hotel neons, dead during the day. Bootleg copies of most if not all of the Jason Statham oeuvre. A woman leaving Cadillac Grocery swipes at me. Calls me a tall glass of milk, gives me a big slurp, and carries on with her day. The usual. Reagan’s legacy, thinks high school Nick, righteous with patch-jacket punk. Data analyst Nick wants to believe it’ll go away if he listens to enough NPR. Medicated Nick doesn’t believe in much of anything. My current incarnation is a bewildering ordeal, but if I stick it out I will be reborn as something unthinking and noble, a tree or boulder maybe. I’ll settle for a newt or a centipede if they’re out of flora. As if bardo is a Jack in the Box, a confusing glut of choice.
This is where I am now, sitting with my Dr. Pepper. I ordered a small but the cup dwarfs the pill bottle. The guy next to me is eyeing it, wondering if it’s worth the trouble of a grab and dash. He squints to make out the text. Paroxetine Tablets, USP. 20mg. I twist the cap and offer it to him, giving the pills a tempting rattle that has the opposite effect. Horrified, he collects his bags and heads out, crossing Mason back towards Union Square, not where he panhandles but where he’s staying. The bags had been from Lacoste and Burberry and he’d left his tray of food in disgust. Another tourist mistaking the Jumbo Jack for a good old-fashioned all-American hamburger. I can only imagine what that makes me.
I take the pill, as calmed by the ritual as the flattening that will come. Not a sensation so much as a realization weeks from now that things have been okay for a stretch I can’t bookend. This time it’s a woman and her two young boys, the mother exhausted by their hyperactivity, their special needs, the mess, but smiling still. She reminds them to stop and look both ways before crossing the street and they do, snapping into an earnestness I know all too well. If I could cry I would, but the welling inside me is modest and respectable, so I return this smile that isn’t for me and the light turns green. Green means go. Some things are that simple.

---

The city is approximately seven by seven miles, a neat fact notable to people who still buy magazines. Seven by seven is forty-nine, the name of our football team that will soon be relocated to landfill over the salt marshes of the South Bay. Far from the murals of Kaepernick kissing his biceps painted on liquor store shutters. The 49ers, so named for the year suckers first bumrushed the town hoping to strike gold. As legend has it, it wasn’t the prospectors who made off, but the locals who sold picks and shovels, a moral so beloved the Sand Hill crowd made it into jargon. On Thursdays they head up to the Rosewood for what’s come to be known as Cougar Night, though the crowd is a mix of divorcées and escorts, usually Ukrainian or Russian, and all the bridge-and-tunnel types looking to bag a seven-figure buck, though this is on the low end. We’re all entrepreneurs, each in our own way. In a past life I was a premium outlet, but now I’m a junk shop in a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying. If people notice me, it’s to wonder when I’m even open. How I haven’t been pushed out yet. To press their faces to the glass, shielding their eyes, and squint into the permanent twilight at the old maps and banjos and broken pachinko machines. Sitting atop of a stack of vintage nudie mags is a cat, staring back. Is it alive or is it stuffed or does it even matter? Soon you’ll be on your way. A new beer garden just opened and the sun is rumored to make an appearance this afternoon. Enjoy it, whether it does or not. There are only so many days, though they’re working on an app for that.

∩

Nick Greer is a writer from Berkeley. Current projects include essays on trend and postmodernity, a collaborative erotic comic, and a novel inspired by giallo, the conspiracy thriller, and other ’70s Eurosleaze.

Two Stories

ICEBREAKER

Not until I began using it as a test did I come to enjoy the story. Before that, whenever I told it—whenever I so much as thought about it—my whole body would contract, as if in an involuntary, full-scale scowl. But then I realized I could add it to my arsenal of icebreaking questions: What skill would keep you from being kicked off a desert island? When the apocalypse comes, would you prefer to survive or die first? Do you crumple or fold? Prefer bolo or bow?

The story went like this. I was teaching a writing workshop for adults through a local nonprofit. Most of the people were new to writing, but there were a couple who had published poems here and there online. And then there was Gerald. Mid-forties, blond and boyish, softspoken, a little stooped. He was a doctor, did two semesters at the Sorbonne studying Sassoon, volunteered every other year with Doctors Without Borders in sub-Saharan Africa. “Have you ever read The Constant Gardener?” he asked the woman who asked him what it was like treating the malnourished children in South Sudan his poems described in tender, if somewhat mawkish, terms. “A lot like that.” His stint started before the workshop ended, so he didn’t make it to the last three meetings. We gave him a simple goodbye, two-bite brownies and sparkling cider. People were quiet, solemn even, in the breakroom, commenting on the volume of the fridge compressor. Not that he was going off to die but that he was going to try to keep so many people from dying. What could we say that wouldn’t betray our total inability to fathom what he was going off to see and hear and do?

Some months later, I came across Gerald’s profile on a professional networking site. It said he was an oil and gas lawyer, and some cursory digging confirmed it. And this is where I find the eyes of my audience to ask how they’d react. Request to connect? Send a message asking how his stint went and when he’d be back? Would you pay the $16 processing fee to receive info on his criminal background, home address, phone number? Would you borrow a car and drive out there, slowing beneath the centenarian live oaks, their sweeping low-slung branches festooned with mossy epiphytes and holiday lights put up and removed by hired crews, some of the branches propped up by wooden beams? Would you say you were birding now, when your soon-to-be-ex asked what was up with the binoculars? That the dry-treated half rope was for securing yourself when scaling trees for a better look at migrating cranes? Would you, as night burns off to reveal the pump jacks nodding out of sync along the speed-blurred floodplain, tell him from the driver’s seat that you pitied him? Didn’t he know that lies bind, that they coil around the future and twist it into something comically small or painfully bent? While the truth, you say, catching his unblindfolded eye—even when it’s dull as a butter knife, it can always, with enough effort, cut.

CHANGING THE SHEETS

It had probably been a month. At least a few weeks beyond the recommended one-week-per-set, but he rationalized this delay by remembering a friend’s unverified advice that it was better to leave one’s bed unmade each morning, as he did, since the exposure to light and air made it a less desirable habitat for whatever would otherwise fester or bloom in the tight darkness of the tucked-in sheets.

He folded the duvet down to the foot of the bed, piling it on itself like an intestine or an oxbowed river, so only a thin section of it actually lay on the rug. Then he pulled the top sheet free, balling it loosely onto the floor before unhooking the fitted sheet from the nearest corners. He shimmied between the wall and the bed to free the opposite corners then shuck the cases from the thin pillows then shove them against the headboard.

There was nothing in his mind but the task itself as he shuffled his fists inside the clean fitted sheet, searching for the puckered corners and then hooking and pulling and smoothing it around the mattress, but as he unfolded the top sheet and lofted it over the bed, tugging it this way and that to settle it evenly, he thought of what his father had said about bed corners, as he did every time he made the bed, the way an argument about a friend’s doomed relationship entered his mind whenever he mowed around the scraggly lilac by the fenceline, or how the final image of another friend’s poem surfaced whenever he was testing the bathwater for his son.

The thought was involuntary. Consistent as a comet. Pulling the triangular fold up and tucking the lower fold under the mattress, there was his father, saying dismissively “of course she’d call it a hospital corner. She was a nurse for thirty years.” Why had she—his grandmother, his father’s mother-in-law—told him this? He couldn’t remember the circumstances, but he remembers understanding now that what you call something says more about you than about the thing itself.

“In the Marines,” his father went on, “we called them…” and here the memory slams shut. It wasn’t intentional. He just couldn’t remember what his father had called them. This meant something, but he wasn’t thinking about it as he stuffed the pillows into their fresh casings. He was finished, but he was stuck, standing in the middle of the room as the sun slipped its polygon of light off the bed. What was it like when he lofted the sheet over the bed? Not a sail, because what boat sails on its side. It was like the colorful parachute elementary kids played with in gym. Or a flag being draped over a coffin, its sharp triangular corners smoothed out into a final attempt to assert that the person within had belonged to an idea. Not their true nation, the earth. The soil and the dirt.

∩

Conor Bracken is a poet and translator based in Cleveland. His most recent book is The Enemy of My Enemy is Me (Diode Editions, 2021), and his most recent translation is of Jean D’Amérique’s Workshop of Silence (Vanderbilt University Press, 2025). He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Two Poems from Oily Doily

Commercial break

disposed intent
handly may

breakthru
up to

scrim fill in the
________

assent
locus clean | ed

wide net
happy mid

purchase takes
just this

tomorrow’s
tomorrow

tomorrows
a focal

group salvo
five-in-one play

amen seaside
femoral ache

happy fathers day
plastic waterway

from Pool

When it happened when I saw it we were driving in a
red rock desert. JC saw it too we saw it then not and
that was what surprised us. Maybe people often saw
flying objects disappear there but for several years I
didn’t tell anyone it was afternoon late spring high
visibility sound mind and so on route 24. 

That morning we’d departed the park named for an
allocated heaven crossing into open range snow on
the plain around one stopped for some minutes as
steers walked up the asphalt’s exposed strips. Their
looks bore in a bad old dream or it could be they
were staring out the windscreen at themselves the
cloudbanks low and crawled up the road.

It rained
on the road

between reef
and grove

then in
the clear

air advanced
a wedge

a contoured
wedge

a gunmetal
pentagonal

it loomed
overhead

then wasn’t
not wasn’t

the image
slammed shut

A thermal inversion occurs when air is hotter higher

warm air rises trapping cold pollution in Missouri

try it on a research farm with a red smoke bomb

pastel fog puddles on the bean crop the hot hot lens

ungrounds lifts and disperses forms up on horizon

angelic Herefords for instance inverted or some form 

of curved polyhedron location is no indicator of actual

object location no more illusion than mirror but distorted

may elicit a scene its observer misinterprets is it moving

have you found a mirage to settle itself directly around

I have copied out the proceedings in which the ex-pilot
addresses the commission, and will fail to convince
now the radiant present
the last extractive shortwave rays
bombard the oceanic
play back again his recorded statement
the cockpit video that shows it seems no living
proof but clouds you filmed clouds
why did you I saw traces
of two men
the physicist father farther lost in dark and distant
undulations of the waves quickly lost him

in the undulations of the oceanic brain
in the folds the undulations
that alien in the folded
pulse of imitation
it holds him in anyone that would be
destroyer, son abandoned
a wife and
it molds his closest secret a surface he can touch as
the would-be was-and
pervades him

now the present bombardment, now and then

Looked at
looked past

a crack
in the wind

shield broken
in sister’s

HS parking acc
the accord

somehowed
the garage

I didn’t ask
received

a potential
dad’s later

warning
if an acc

the edge
of glass

eventually
he said

decap

So replaced
the glass

the break
came back

replaced
the glass

again it
cracked

replacing
its breaking

so break from
replacing

let be

a warp in
the chassis

I was being drawn along the road the sky a round open

window didn’t hear it approach but saw the surface flow

don’t know if it was a jet could be inaccurate whatever

it was an overhead F- the shining F-s we watched

like the elect and as we watched surprise it vanished

sleight of paint mirror temperature to look and not to see

what form accelerated its post-facto vision a neutral mask

the featureless look the console glass robotic cockpit

aerial drill reflective tint placid surfactant it scrubs away

it appliques the timeless craters to a nowhere place

are we meant to see we are not meant to see is not

to see it seems to portend a future of endless vision 

stretched no horizon but the locked coordinates

∩

Alyssa Perry is a writer, editor, and teacher from Iowa. She is the author of Oily Doily (Bench Editions, 2024). Her writing appears with Annulet, The Canary, Coma, Fence, Mercury Firs, River Styx, the Experimental Sound Studio, and other venues. Perry is poetry editor at the Cleveland Review of Books and an editor at the small press publisher Rescue Press. She lives in Ohio and teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Two Poems

LATTICE AFTER YOUR ADVICE

Extant sedge either
Its either like two clocks

Creature or speech “out from arrières
of persons and scenes”
            but slightly more remote
Reducibility is only apparent
What are the straws of which this time is composed?
Inlets necks and mesh-like expansion
Thanks
Planes
Mostly land
This still a fulcrum
like

The vocatives in the sentence “expectation dazzles
the absence time scattered in the desire
for momentary relief”
The remove of the word “extent”
Some anarchic object to ground us
            in our heterochronic situation
What could there be more purely overdone?

There are as many arms of a tree line
            as love’s infinite causes
Here you have a

Body which only exists in addition to
and body following its own curve
Torn apart by fullness
If they join it
is still and sacred
That if a sleight of glade

First close the windows
Just the forest is burning

If only the hors-texte acted in furtherance of its relief
In Honfleur on the foreshore
Marsh hay heavens’
“n.d.” by extension
and the “my dear”
on their backs (not shown)
it closes
in on
“Hey”
 
Each slat in the blind multiplies the present
It’s how they observe
close or early motions
            in their intolerable fragility
When they want the impossibly portioned fact of the future
            all they have to do is refuse it

Do the lashes wriggle when you love your owner?
No light’s all it needs

It’s late today
At a remove
The state slight
Lashed likeness
Provisional total
A little yellower
plum
            you want to mingle with you
            born in the forest case

There are as many of you as
Each sat in the blind multiples
until now seems to have subsided
It’s how they observe

Families starve in the barbs
            which is good news
Their fullness also begins with
“not even once”
They’re incandescent
They’re born older

They say
the thorn wone
exes souse
The cliffs of why
Give
sank

Scatter where in on meets now
a rig of both lashes
torn apart by both
It’s part of the landscape

The beginning just keeps on beginning
But that isn’t the problem

The momentous is slate
There is no relief

LATTICE AFTER YOUR ADVICE

The history “had” betrays
            had not post-temporalized
            was not tired did not feel tired
            crops up
            yon

You can wade in its wed sands
As the twoness of doubt
As world waist
Hide

There are no states
Just winding

Of forgetting
You can accept more body

The eyes wound
rend
In cortège and retinue
            they have packed enough grains
            to get us to another green ray
They are the legs you can see through the table
His right leg you can see through his left leg
            crossed over it
The star M saw above behind him
            in the reflection of the nearly frozen water
            caused him to feel an axe falling on his neck

“We also need to feel that axe”
Pre emanate space

When you touch the horizon for example
you are in fact already below it

D’y
            car
            et
“Quite as fire”

This is my only urgency
It freezes at perimeter
Where state changes
at its the
limits

Sept
            parce que
            puisque
            parsec

So what if the angle of repose is vertical?
Axes are forms of access
Their quills are open hands
            also a kind of “cutting off
            from everything which would
            constantly require a no”

Dire
at the bottom of the eye
            wood
Before its wild debut
            the ire that is not irenic
We roll in that quite
and expect

When the mineral densities spring back
            a higher “are”
            unconstituent
            and redoubtable
            the totality of line
            where a knowledge points
            will change doubling

i.e., the “if” extents are wild here but could be wilder
Vastness is a twinned vanity
To waste without exception when
you would say “this began”

Not even the interior of scenes among almonds
Not a misstate
            of the palm state
            as ledgeless
            as separate histories collapse
            by mesh
            on coordinated locality
            and the arrows giving birth to the animals

A stance of overstep
            that oversteps its expression
Repos
the color
that’s most curved is blue

∩

Maxwell Gontarek has poems out or forthcoming in αntiphony, Lana Turner, Volt, Noir Sauna, Works & Days, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Co-translations with Léa Fougerolle into/from French can be found in verseant. His chapbook, H Is the Letter of the Door, is forthcoming from above/ground press and his pamphlet, A Perfect Donkey, is forthcoming from Creative Writing Department. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.

“waste is a form of devotion”: A Closer Sniff at Joe Hall’s “Fugue and Strike”

Joe Hall, Fugue and Strike, Black Ocean, April 2023, 126 Pages

the garbage man in the morning
knows        his own reality
garbagemen never get shot during riots

perhaps they are the real holymen
with an aura of protection
their reality -- the shit in yr
bedroom wastebasket

            — d.a.levy, SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM

Published in April, 2023, Fugue and Strike is Joe Hall’s fourth book with Black Ocean, following Pigafetta Is My Wife (2010), The Devotional Poems (2013), and Someone’s Utopia (2018)—the latter two of which I’ve had the pleasure of receiving in book exchanges in the last few years. Hall has also co-authored two books of poetry: The Container Store (Vols I & II) (SpringGun, 2012) with Chad Harwick and May I Softly Walk (Poetry Crush, 2014) with his partner Cheryl Quimba. Additionally, since writing this review, People Finder, Buffalo has been released (Cloak, 2024).

A poet, bookmaker/editor of Hostile Books, teacher at St. Bonaventure University, and co-host with his partner of the Film podcast “Two For Space Jam, Please,” Joe Hall lives, or survives, in Buffalo, New York. In a conversation with Marty Cain, Hall discusses his work history in further depth:

I tried to leave academia twice. I worked at a bookstore and cannabis farm and did landscaping and furiously applied for better-paying, nonacademic jobs that provided health insurance. Nothing. But as I approached forty, with twenty years behind me making less than a living wage almost all of the time, I got an increasingly rare full-time (but not tenure-track and year-by-year) position teaching.

In 2018, he completed a dissertation on the “liquid commons” in eighteenth century literature at the University at Buffalo SUNY.

Though I haven’t read Hall’s academic work, it appears to be a persistent force in Fugue and Strike; it occurs to me that his poetry could be considered an academic endeavor or that his academic work may find its most potent expression in his verse, joining research and communicative exploration into an integrated whole. This approach gains clarity in Hall’s lifelong mission to investigate “the intersections of labor, ecology, imagination, and structures of violence.” In another interview, Hall discusses his approach as a “research-based poetics” in a “devotional mode,” combining the concreteness of historical and journalistic investigation with the search of a spiritual life. As he writes in the collection: “Accuracy without ambition / is all I can ask for / from a poem.”

Introducing Fugue and Strike, Black Ocean emphasizes how the book “unearth[s] histories in which people refuse the systems that designate them as waste” and “takes a long view of solidarity in struggle.” This focus and perspective is evident in not only Hall’s attention to local Buffalo infrastructure and labor, but also in the collection’s lengthy bibliography—an uncommon sight in poetry—covering contemporary journalism and academic articles as well as archival materials.

Without a doubt Fugue and Strike merits more engagement than this review can offer, and it has. Since I began reading and preparing a review, Hall’s book has been admiringly covered in brief commentary, short articles, and, more comprehensively, in a review by Alex Skopic with the Cleveland Review of Books.

In a blurb, Marty Cain notes how the collection interrogates “the infrastructures of the capitalist machine.” In Heavy Feather Review, Zach Savich argues for its importance to “our moment of ecological catastrophe, which makes waste of both specific memory—the history of labor, the tactics we’ve had for survival—and the knot of wrinkles we can feel ourselves lost among.” In a blog post, Matthew Klane plays off the title, writing “Pick a scab, strike a match, write your shit, see what sticks.” Skopic discusses the poetics of Fugue and Strike in critical detail: the musical meaning of the term ‘Fugue’ and how this is transfigured; Hall’s mapping-out and submergence within Buffalo, “the real and unreal city;” the collection’s shift between contemporary and historical perspectives in politics; and, considering its place in literature, how the book may be part of a resurgence in “proletarian poetry.”

So what more is there to say? Well, at the time I first read Fugue and Strike, I had nothing to say, beyond that I felt the collection to be an unrelenting, deliberate stare at the alienation of our labor and infrastructure—a focus often absent or under-articulated in poetry. Until this past Winter I’ve felt unable to fully express what I find significant about Hall’s latest collection, or at least why it has left such a dominant impression on me.

Since reading Hall’s book and failing to find the language or experience to comment in a substantive way, a few constellations have come to pass that have allowed and pushed me to press beyond my initial cloudiness. In addition to the ability to respond to existing reviews, I returned to Northeast Ohio and became a service worker for my hometown. There, I performed sanitation work, including garbage collection, recycling, and hydrant and road maintenance. I also had the pleasure of meeting Hall over dinner as I traveled between Rochester and Cleveland, where I now live and have taken up work at a union printshop. Only growing my personal interest in the themes and aspirations of Fugue and Strike, my own father participates in what could be described as the “waste economy” of the Midwest, reselling antique tools leftover from Northeast Ohio’s prominent manufacturing industry at the turn of the century.

Now, here—having thrown my fair share of trash into the truck packer, crushing all couches into a singularity with deer carcasses, diapers, plastic crucifixes, and smart TVs—here, beneath the silver cesspool of Lake Erie, I will attempt to articulate my thoughts on Fugue and Strike, beginning with a discussion of how Hall’s collection has been covered, transitioning via digression on the epigraph, and resting with my own reading of the collection. But first, can you tell me…

How many proletarian poets does it take to start a revolution?

While I do not have specific issues with the responses to Fugue and Strike, I cannot help but feel a general resignation from them, a resignation to capitalist relations or to the ecological crises they birth. I see this surrender tucked within a larger acceptance of our inability to not only change the circumstances of our own lives dominated by work, but also the privatized environments we live within. What the late Marc Fisher explains in Capitalist Realism through film criticism, we could explore as well in poetry. In literary criticism, this takes the form of admiration of how we are able to aesthetically express the decay of environments and ecosystems in relation to humanity’s own striking imbalances of poverty and opulence. If this literature does not condemn economic or social structures, it may sneer at humanity itself as the impetus of its own destruction.

Still, though Hall’s collection may capture the rust of the Midwest’s industrial decline—and it is difficult to find any cities more devastated by owners displacing production than Buffalo, or its Great Lakes neighbors Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit—I do not admire Fugue and Strike for how it captures the indifference of the city razed for the automobile. I do not admire it even for how it expresses the exhaustion in the long durée of worker exploitation, disinvestment, and privatization. If this was all the collection accomplished, Fugue and Strike would be nothing more or less than a mirror: a fragmented piece of journalism, an echo of the material and social needs we may lack or, at worst, an artful whisper, calling after you to purchase an illustration of the daily cruelties of our own and others’ lives.

While I can understand impulses to rally around terms like “proletarian poetry” as Alex Skopic does in writing of Hall, ‘proletarian’ is a class term, not a descriptive term for literature, and I’m doubly uncertain of the use in categorizing Hall’s work or enshrining works of literature or their authors in a pantheon of revolutionary writers. Rather, I want to take up Hall’s poetry as an act of reaching out to hold another’s hand in firm understanding and solidarity because, for me, collections like Fugue and Strike are tethers: lifelong commitments and deep-sea cables connecting our disparate lives. What the collection impresses is that writing can stem from simply a poetics of place or working-class identity, fanning out as a literature that recognizes, explores, and engages with the material realities of making and publishing books, the social or often anti-social relations of daily life—a literature that realizes itself to be a part of the struggle for a classless society and more harmonious relationships with the land. Not only a piece of political education, Hall’s work is a rallying cry for the substance of living as a constitutive element of history, a history not resigned to destruction, though conscious of decay, aimed at its own abandonment and transformation.

Yet, to what history or tradition does Hall’s work belong? Skopic places Hall’s collection alongside contemporary “proletarian poets,” such as Wendy Travino, Darius Simpson, Kyle Lorenzo, Noor Hindi, and Brendan Joyce of Cleveland’s own Grieveland. Without disputing his account of these poets, his review only illustrates Hall and these authors as the distant children of early twentieth century labor writers like Max Eastman and Kenneth Fearing. To comment on Eastman alone, Eric Arnesen in his essay “The Passions of Max Eastman” argues that, while he early on gave life to the journal The Masses, Eastman would later define himself as a “libertarian conservative” and participate in the Red Scare, writing rationalizations for McCarthyism in William F. Buckley’s National Review and providing information on Communist Party activity to authorities. If this is the best labor writing poets have to offer, it may be more skillful for there to be none at all. Additionally, Skopic references Langston Hughes, much of whose revolutionary writings are collected in Good Morning Revolution. However, even Hughes proves to be a less than central example of labor-focused or otherwise revolutionary writing. Though Skopic notes how Hughes’ explicitly revolutionary poems were largely barred by publishers from anthologies, editor Faith Berry in the preface to Good Morning Revolution discusses Hughes’ own self-censorship, which he exercised to preserve his livelihood as an author, not to mention his safety in the country during the Red Scare when he was called to hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Even last year, Congress passed a resolution to condemn the “horrors” of socialism.)

Alongside Eastman and Hughes’ relevance to Hall, we should expand the context of the “proletarian poetry” that preceeds us. In his reevaluation of the principles and goals of literary history, scholar Cary Nelson recalls labor poets, such as  Joe Hill,[1] Anna Louise Strong, Robinson Jeffers, and Edwin Rolfe. Keen to the publishing spheres these poets operated within, Nelson discusses journals of the time, including Solidarity (IWW), The Little Review, The Left, The Rebel Poet, The Anvil, New Anvil, Blast, Il Proletario, The Masses, The New Masses, Liberator, Dynamo, The Latin Quarterly, Challenge, Morada, Midwest, and the many “John Reed Clubs” of the CPUSA, before they were dissolved by leadership at the outset of the ‘Comintern’ in 1935: Cauldron (Grand Rapids), Hammer (Hartford), Left Front (Chicago), Leftward (Boston), The New Force (Detroit), Partisan (Hollywood), Partisan Review (NYC), Red Pen/Left Review (Philadelphia), Midland Left (Indianapolis).[2]

---

[1] Hill is infamous for his “Little Red Songbook” published by the International Workers of the World, which continues to be printed to this day. I also can’t help but note the resemblance between Joe Hill and Joe Hall…

[2] Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry & Politics Of Cultural Memory. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)

---

To put it bluntly, I find this history of “proletarian poetry” in which Hall’s Fugue and Strike has been contextualized thus far to be disjointed, not just chronologically but geographically—especially since Buffalo itself and nearby Great Lakes cities have such vibrant histories of small press publishing. This isn’t to disregard New York, North Carolina, or San Francisco as literary wells, but only to set them aside as one would a worn down pencil and, thereby, begin to bring these geographies of poetry into balance.[3] For example, during the latter half of the twentieth century, there were writers and publishers such as Russell Atkins of Free Lance (Cleveland), d.a.levy of Renegade Press, Seven Flowers, and his periodicals The Silver Cesspool, Marrahwanna Quarterly, and the Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle (Cleveland), Douglas Blazek of Ole & Open Skull (Chicago), Dudley Randall and Naomi Long Madgett of Broadside Lotus (Detroit), Fredy Perlman’s Black & Red (Detroit), James Sorcic and Ed Burton of Gunrunner (Milwaukee), Judith Kerman and Judith Treible of Earth Daughters (Buffalo), and Allen De Loach of INTREPID (Buffalo). Beyond the U.S. Great Lakes, one could include bpNichol of Ganglia et al. (Toronto), Will Inman of Kauri (Washington D.C.), Ian Hamilton Finlay of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse (UK) and many, many others working in what we could call an extended “proletarian” tradition of small press publishing.[4] From there, we could add to this group writers dedicated to revolution—some more biting than others—such as Chernyshevsky, Chekov, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Federico García Lorca, George Orwell, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Octavio Paz, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Patchen, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Diane DiPrima, Audre Lorde, Jackson MacLow, Leslie Scalapino, and many more.

We gather writers and writing close to us that aids in confirming and challenging our own commitments, but let us always remember that this is an effort to make intelligible our own paths of understanding. No, we cannot simply return to the “proletarian poetry” of the early twentieth century, but we should not let it rot and go to waste. We can return to their urgency and principles, but we cannot repeat their demands. There is no Soviet Union and there are no Communist or Socialist parties as there were in the early twentieth century. Collaboration with unions remains a possible through-line. As Cary Nelson asserts, although “proletarian poetry” passed away, “what did not come to an end, despite the virtually canonical claims to the contrary by literary academics, was the whole range of traditions of social and political poetry in America.”[5] However, even if there were no principles we could draw from the editors and writers of the period, we can still learn from their activity as publishers who pursued their own values and operated on their own terms: small press publishers.

Skopic and others even fail to mention Hall’s own efforts as a bookmaker and publisher through Hostile Books. Within the contemporary publishing landscape, it isn’t difficult to recognize Hostile Books as a part of a network of imprints working toward a revolutionary or more human publishing ecosystem, including, among many: RE/SEARCH, Bottom Dog Press, Temporary Services,[6] Barba De Abejas, Above / Ground, Action Books, Ethel Zine & Micro Press, Dead Mall Press,[7] No Press / House Press, Further Reading, Inside the Castle, Issue Press, NONMACHINABLE, Prolit, Aaron Cohick of NewLights Press,[8] and, the publisher of Fugue and Strike itself, Black Ocean. This scattered list is only the surface of contemporary publishers who publish radical material and interrogate press practices.[9]

---

[3] Skopic also notes Carl Sandburg as a figure of working-class poetry in Chicago, but I’m more concerned here with regional literatures as they form through the efforts of local publishing.

[4] To this limited list, we could scavenge the pages of Dustbooks editor Len Fulton’s Small Press Review or more closely investigate the publishers of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP). k.a.wisniewski, “A Tribute to Len Fulton” (2015)

[5] Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 165.

[6] Half Letter Press, an imprint of Temporary Services, published Artist Publishers Reflect on Book Waste, otherwise known as the “Book Waste Book” because it includes two overprinted RISO sheets. Half Letter press itself is named for the utility of making books from letter stock and without any cutting. “Book Waste Book” features artists sharing methods and resources for limiting and using book waste across printing processes. For further Half Letter publications on press practices, see “How to Prepare for the Collapse of the Industrial Publishing System,” “What Problems Can Artist Publishers Solve?” & “Towards A Self-Sustaining Publishing Model.”

[7] DEAD MALL PRESS Founded by R.M. Haines, Dead Mall Press is a part of the largely defunct Poets Union, which organized a boycott of Small Press Distribution in solidarity with Damaged Book Worker’s efforts to expose abuse and exploitation at SPD. Although I plan to write further on the boycott and its dissolution, I will have to leave that for another time.

[8] Join Aaron’s Artist Book Conversations, where publishers and bookmakers across the world hold monthly discussions on topics voted on by all members.

[9] Much of this list is gathered from my ongoing project to form an encompassing directory of publishers.

---

Omission of small publishers or bookmakers should not be surprising given how artists are often dependent on academic institutions, private and public, for support or a livelihood. Though crowdfunding, social media, and enduring local scenes have provided conditions for the maintenance and perhaps resurgence of small publishers and bookmaker communities in the past decade, economic conditions are constraining; artistic elders cannot remain social pillars of fire and cloud forever; new methods of patronage and “community” such as crowdfunding and social media are tenuous. This is a topic I’ve broached with Hall and many editors, yet there is often little alternative. Legacy institutions that have historically provided some material support for revolutionary and subversive literatures such as Small Press Distribution, PEN America, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and Poetry Foundation continue to face increasing criticism and fall into disfunction. Even confronted by the beginnings of organized opposition, as in the case of the Poet’s Union boycott against SPD, non-profit boards change face and remain structurally the same. Recognizing this, I look to truly independent arts organizing—or as Aaron Cohick puts it: interdependent organizing—as a more hopeful front, with examples like the late Daniel Thompson’s Junkstock[10] and Hall’s own reading and interview series green_space.

Still, the dominance of academic and cultural institutions for poetry can be felt in most major cities. While colleges, universities, and non-profit centers may allow for otherwise impossible interchanges between artists as well as opportunities for resources and public spaces, these institutions must be considered historically as ones that displace local artistic traditions and communities, drawing from them parasitically and regulating them into their recognizable forms. Here, poetry is professionalized, and once-social relationships become commercial, sheltered behind admissions, tuition, and residency, which often means uprooting. In my experience, writing programs also dislocate writing from bookmaking and publishing, though there are certainly exceptions such as editor of Bull City Press Ross White’s “Writer as Publisher” course at The University of North Carolina. This relationship between writing and bookmaking is fundamental, and, even in subtle expressions like the structure of Fugue and Strike itself—which would be illegible or at least unmarketable to many contemporary trade and non-profit publishers alike—Hall’s experience as an editor and reader of small press literature is a legible dimension of his poetics. Commenting on the development of his book projects in an interview with rob mclennan, Hall writes “The poem iterates from some energy that has a coherence beyond the poem and wants to animate and bind more poems—each poem a variegation of the larger distinct wave that is the book and the book itself an expression of the smaller patterns it contains.”

While the institutional reorganization of U.S. literature’s artistic traditions and practices may be primarily identified with the Iowa Writers Workshop, Universities and Colleges in the industrial cities of the Northeast quickly developed after World War II and through the vicissitudes of the Cold War. Highlighting Dr. Eric Bennet’s arguments in Workshops of Empire, Annie Levin in a Current Affairs article titled “How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction” discusses how the creative writing discipline sheltered writers from engaging in history and political theory, or, more overtly, Communism and Socialism. Still, whatever their origins and incentive structures, Levin concludes that writers who emerge from the stranglehold of these institutions can found new groups and publications aligned closer with labor and socialist principles. Beyond Iowa, other programs emerge at Cleveland State University, Columbia University, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and Boston University. Instituted in 1962, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center stands as a primary example of this institutional turn; succeeding from the Fenn College Poetry Center founded by Lewis Turco (a friend of Russell Atkins) the CSU Poetry Center was able to form from the same soil that bore a vibrant mimeograph scene in Cleveland at the time as well as predecessors like the Free Lance Poets and Prose Workshops started by Russell Atkins, Helen Collins, Casper L. Jordan, and later, with Atkins, a magazine co-edited with Adelaide Simon.[11] These gatherings developed into one of the most enduring literary magazines, named the Free Lance after the workshops, which were frequently attended by budding poets and publishers Kent Taylor and d.a.levy, which returns me to the epitaph I used to introduce this review…

---

[10] Daniel Thompson organized a poetry reading and performance series in the Cleveland area called “Junkstock.” Playing off of Woodstock, the series was held at Pearl Road Auto Wrecking junkyard.

[11] For more Russell Atkins, see World’d Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins, edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough. (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). Atkins’s only full-length poetry collection Here In The (CSU Poetry Center, 1976) is out of print, but a scanned digital copy can be accessed at Craig Dworkin and Danny Snelson’s Eclipse Archive.

---

garbagemen never get shot during riots

Giving this quote from Cleveland publisher and poet d.a.levy as a parting gift to my hometown Service Department, I realized the need to return to his SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM to see how it may shed light on Hall’s work. Written in 1968 during the Hough riots, levy’s long poem shares more with Fugue and Strike than a discussion of waste workers. Beyond championing garbage men as the saints of riots or condemning the violent police response (see CWRU’s brief account in the “Encyclopedia of Cleveland History”), levy uses the figure of the waste worker to comment on the structural position of academic poets in relation to labor and how that may affect the content and perspective of their writing.

Opening up the final section of the poem—“PART SIX – a small funeral”—levy insists, contrary to how they may be portrayed or portray themselves, poets do not flirt with madness: “the poet just eats & sleeps & pisses / & farts & shits & writes / poems.” Rather, he argues it is “the businessman, the salesman / who gambles with insanity.” Here, he also begins to interrogate the poets for how they use the luxury of time to question their existence, while many workers can only “put in day after day / in the same / meaningless / dance routine / without even time / to ask why.” Though patronized artists, commercial artists, and academic writers have or once had the time for reflection, levy stresses how they do not see, ignore, or wave away the undignified conditions of many people. As opposed to illuminating the insanity of our working lives—our lives of work—and their “hopelessly identical day[s],”  the role of poets is now to “beat their head against the wall” and help us dream. However, levy has a simple answer for poetry: garbage. In its own way, Hall’s Fugue and Strike also answers with garbage.

Rather than a poetry of “beauty in the garbage heap” or “emotional garbage,” levy compares his approach to poetry to how garbagemen know their reality: along their routes, the trash we bring to the curb; the rust of our city’s bridges; the asphalt cracking from ice and blooming with gasoline; the incessant traffic with its engine exhaust; and the familiar, sagging houses—encompassing realities unavailable or distant from many professions, such as the stocktrader—“the soulless men / bullfighters of insignificant stockrooms”—or the police officer, “playing war games” and “proud of their insanity.” levy places the “academic poets” alongside these livelihoods. However, similar to Hall, his poem doesn’t conclude with a condemnation, but rests with a sketch of his daily effort and some redemption in beauty and dreams:

& everyday i sit here
trying to become one of you
after another
trying on those highschool dreams
for size
it doesn't work
you don’t fit me

as a poet i try to learn
how to remain human
despite technology
& there is no one to learn from
i am still too young to
be quiet & contemplative

my wife & i
take an evening walk
around the block
                        (are we that old)
there is something beautiful
about her                    something
some dream thing in the cloudless sky

i know my dreams are unreal
but they are my dreams

sometimes
on hot summer nights
we hate each other
& it is beautiful

note:

peace & awareness are
like two small birds
trying to leave the planet
because they are tired of dying

i’m not advocating anything

Here, levy explicitly states his goal to inhabit and speak from the perspective of the whole community. Writing as a poet born in an industrial society, when production and manufacturing reached its apex and began declining in Cleveland, his poetry strives to express the entire labor of a city; and, unsatisfied with available work, levy sought the path of a publisher and poet to guard a more human existence. Though he rejects the things of beauty and dreams of the “academic poet” because they may obscure our daily realities and struggles, he himself returns to assert the beauty of passing hate and the persistence of his dreams. Languishing on levy’s final note, I’m reminded of Hall’s poems because, for me, they rise above condemnation and call out with unhindered endurance like levy’s departing birds of peace and awareness.

Hall says as much when he remarks how he could have concluded the collection with a fantasy of revenge against capitalists, instead describing them from the standpoint of a time where wealth ceases to prevail as “the mute and frustrated ghosts of a savage time.” On seeing a seedling bloom in the drain of his shower, he recalls how his own consumption and waste-making ultimately fails to result in destruction. Here, Hall records “if life didn’t last, what endured was its medium: soil”—the accepting ground that will bury the conflicts and personalities of history.

Got Fugue?

Although I didn’t grasp or appreciate the structure of Hall’s Fugue and Strike on my first read, the relationship between its two distinct sections is what keeps me returning. Though there exists a through-line on labor, the first section “Fugue” seems to accumulate from personal experience, while “Strike” is largely the fruit of expansive research. And yet, despite differences in approach, style, and form, it is the double motion between the restless “Fugue” poems and the historical, measured (Garbage) “Strike” essays that prolong my interest. Despite how Hall and his readers must trudge through the deep snows of Buffalo, political paralysis, our fatiguing fugue, we press on and, together, are able to guard our revolutionary commitments, strike up a light across this “garbage world,” and give witness to ordinary, necessary labor—to all ongoing struggles toward a time of solidarity where we are no longer simply workers or owners. After all, as Hall writes in the final poem, if we remain in the labor relations of capitalism and do not achieve “a revolutionary time (or maybe we should call it solidarity time),” our cities will continue to deteriorate into “geologies of human residue”—or what he later names, “our final purgatorial vessel.”

While Hall gives language to this potentiality, Fugue and Strike does not take it as impossible to resist or alter. No matter what fugue, what historical moment of defeat, what zones of demobilization “where our life devours our lives [from the] inside,” these poems insist on our ability to comprehend our situations within a larger historical context and act on this understanding. Without Hall’s explicit focus on labor, in his Tombstone as a Lonely Charm #3, levy speaks as derisively and definitively on the deteriorating conditions of our lives:

            if you want freedom
don’t mistake circles
for revolutions

think in terms of living
and know
you are dying
& wonder why                       

I often return to this poem when traveling to and from work. My morning and evening bike rides unsettle my routine and put me into contact with the world’s harshness—roadkill, Cleveland weather, unhoused people, indifferent or even hostile drivers. In these intermissions between work and study, I am able to question what devours my life from the inside. Recently, I’ve come to understand it is a lack of control and decision-making in our work that makes our labor a fugue zone; and not only our working hours, but also the travel to our workplaces, which also populate much of Hall’s poetry. As pedestrians, it isn’t any wonder that both levy and Hall’s work is suffused with the public spaces of streets and transit. Though there could be an essay devoted entirely to how Hall’s collection deals with transit infrastructure—BUFFALO FREE RAPID TRANSIT acting as a refrain, carrying us into and out of the alienation of work—I am particularly interested in how Hall drags poetry into these zones and performs the labor of a poet who attempts to see and share the whole of our daily experiences, our many small, stirring dreams and accompanying deaths.

“Fugue” is Hall’s way of sharing the language of his movement through Buffalo, a speech striving to overcome the city’s cruelty—blasting like the Angels’ trumpets on the day of Judgement—with merely his own soft-shelled phrases from “A LANGUAGE FOR EXHAUSTION.” Yet, Hall writes far beyond this exhaustion. As he maneuvers through “this work that…is all we have between us,” I begin to understand how encompassingly “Fugue” holds within itself the second section “Strike.” Just as levy writes about how the garbage man knows their reality, elucidating the poet’s mission to realize the concrete conditions of not only our own lives but those of our communities, Hall’s writing exemplifies how one’s life and work can inform their research and writing; and, in this dialogue between our daily lives and grasp of history, Fugue and Strike does not easily justify the poet’s occupation or practice. Perhaps recalling and turning over his former collections The Devotional Poems and Someone’s Utopia, Hall explains:  

if i have said I’ve wasted
my life in poems, I meant today . . .
waste is a form of devotion (49)

Instead of affirming poetry in the face of productivity, Hall relinquishes literature to capital and its ruin of abundance. In an economy governed by profit, writing is assigned little to no value because its substance is the social, particularly revolutionary writing. And why would large publishing houses or academic and literary institutions champion one of their most faithful adversaries, who speaks past a narrow view of history, moral character, and social ills? Rather, Hall’s poetry gives glimpses of an alternative contemporary poetry, which raises up common social values, grapples with a future without domination, and envisions the limitless relationships to pursue in this regained and yet untraveled freedom. So, in a bewildering manner contrary to Black Ocean’s own publicity for the book, Fugue and Strike actually models and brings about a poetry of devotion to waste, a literature of waste that reclaims the exhaustion and abandonment of our social, creative lives. Later, Hall aligns this vision with a statement by Mexican author Heriberto M. Yepez: “Art must be destroyed in order to not become merchandise or an institutional icon.”

Does this destruction not also entail the destruction of the poet? In “Fugue” Hall seems to abandon the occupation of the poet when he writes that “to become a poet / is to kill a poet, cling to a poet / in the last hour, before slipping into the drift”—an image that returns transformed in the poem “I HATE THAT YOU DIED:”

the angel of this waste dumper is not the an-
gel, I am the angel
sweeping
this plaza
by 7 am moonlight
sick w/ drowning angels

Deliberate or otherwise, this evokes a familiar scene from levy’s “PARA-CONCRETE MANIFESTO” where he discusses how poems take on the form of angels dredged from the polluted Cuyahoga River and how poems must act out these deaths, even the death of the poet. Where the abstracted role of the poet dissolves, the labor only begins for levy and Hall. As Ben Burgis concludes in his article “Even When Times are Tough, Keep Socialism as your North Star,” we may not be angels, so we need to be socialists. Yet, across the Fugue Zones, Hall suggests how even angels would need to form a union. In a conversation at a CVS, Hall strikes at the crux of worker alienation—the separation of our lives and labor—and the difficulty labor presents to poetry and literature in general:

you say who counts these hours and I do not know I do
not think anyone counts these hours, we all just know each other’s
lives are mostly lost to the fact that each day
they start over, down similar paths, we know this
that whatever we are can’t be counted, is inexplicable and strange

The Mutants Are Revolting[12]

In “Garbage Strike,” Hall gives language to our days lost to labor and the inexplicably strange, yet completely ordinary way work is measured and imposed on us, dividing our days, each other across varied tasks, and our own sense of self. Composed in contact with archival material at the Industrial and Labor Relations Library at Cornell University, this second half of Fugue and Strike focuses even more closely on labor, particularly waste or sanitation work.

Beginning with the statement “The United States war machine…murders even when idling its engine”—a truth felt intensely as ever during the ongoing displacement and decimation of the Palestinian people—Hall’s labor history uncovers inborn and continuously shifting issues in waste work, such as racial hierarchies and privatization. Here, he shares an early history of racialized waste work in New York City, which traces the development of wage structures to the maintenance of racial hierarchy in undesirable labor. Further, approaching the history of privatization in city services, Hall illustrates how, following the early victories of sanitation workers in forming unions, police forces created formidable unions of their own—the Fraternal Order of Police being one of the strongest to this day—and began to undermine not only the efforts of private workers, but also of their fellow public service workers. Unsurprisingly then, in response to these organizing victories, “Garbage Strike” emphasizes how significantly sanitation labor, and much of public work, has been and continues to be privatized. This is justified openly as an effort to cut government budgets, but silently remains a means to make labor militancy among public workers fragmented and, therefore, more difficult to organize for better work conditions, control, and compensation.

Illustrating another side of militancy in “waste relations,” Hall calls attention to a garbage strike by residents of Oaxaca, Mexico. Here, he draws out how their refusal to accept further waste into their community from surrounding, wealthier areas forced those more privileged residents to “live with their own waste” rather than to leave it at someone else’s doorstep. This example is fascinating for how it points to the potential for solidarity between community members and sanitation workers in coordinating waste strikes for particular residential areas or businesses. It would, however, require well-organized labor unions and their ability to communicate with not only membership but also the communities they serve. Still, the pressure exerted by these strikes would be immense, confronting owners with the detritus of their own system as well as halting both production and distribution.

As Hall notes, waste work is “the distribution chain’s double image: the disposal chain”—or, as he writes earlier, “a weak point in capitalism’s metabolism.” And so, if poets are to take on the role of the waste worker, the devotion of their poems and lives in their boundless waste must choke the disposal.

---

[12] The title of S6E12 of Futurama, where the mutants who maintain New New York’s sewers revolt against being forced to live underground with revolting tactics, such as flooding the streets with sewage. The mutants of Futurama satirize theories of “the underclass” with a literal underclass who gain consciousness and say “What comes down must back up!”

---

An Ode or an Elegy to the Waste of Our Lives?

Now, searching for a clean closing, I’d like to rest with an article that Fugue and Strike prompted me to read: Jacobin editor Meagan Day’s “An Ode to Sanitation Workers,” which could just as well serve as the title for Hall’s collection.

Following a one-day strike by Atlanta sanitation workers in August 2019, Day reflects on the significance of sanitation work and the workers, without whom “the factories would stop, the cities would empty, and civilization itself would collapse.” Though “the labor performed by sanitation workers is all but invisible to people going about their daily lives,”—just as Hall’s history in “Garbage Strike” demonstrates—she argues waste work is not only essential for residents, but also for public service departments themselves and all forms of business: offices, hospitals, and construction as well as agricultural and industrial production. Barring the collapse of civilization from food and water contamination, further ecological disaster, pandemics, and mass movements of people, sanitation work is integral to the functioning of our capitalist economic relations, and likely to any future social order.

However, despite this social and mortal significance, Day remarks on how sanitation workers and their labor is devalued, both in the public sphere through budgeting and in the private sphere through the suppression of wages as they seek to gain competitive profit margins at contractors such as Republic Rumpke and Waste Management. This is not a new development, and has been the case since the beginning of modern sanitation work. Following the deaths of garbage collectors Echol Cole and Robert Walker in the Spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in support of the Memphis sanitation workers striking against the inhuman conditions that led to Cole and Walker’s deaths in the back of a packer. This would be King’s final speech before his assassination a day later. Referencing the event in “Garbage Strike,” Hall’s history builds on Day’s analysis to form a vision of waste work which at once recognizes how capital considers everything waste and, in accepting this imposition, treats waste as a means to overcome our alienation. As Hall declares, there is “no place that waste does not eventually escape.”

Ours is openly an era of waste, a result of misuse and the structural inability in our economy to plan for excess. Literature or poetry may act as a point of escape for some, but Hall’s work demonstrates how accepting poetry as waste allows us to see its potential role in class struggle. It is this terrifying act that leaves open the potential for waste to either pile endlessly in the landfill and leach into the water, or for that waste to be redirected at its own dissolution, for our labor wasted within systems of exploitation to be put to social and environmental use. By focusing on waste work and waste itself as a critical part of the labor struggle as well as a critical point of conflict in the overall production and distribution cycle, Hall’s Fugue and Strike avoids seeing waste as a horror in itself or as the driver of economic crises. Afterall, as Day points out, in a social system sanitation workers, and all workers, would be more closely aligned with the public benefit and realized “as [the] guardians and sustainers of civilization. And for making the world run, they would receive the world in return.” We don’t need a “proletarian poetry” any more than we need to convince ourselves that we are workers.

Though Hall explains elsewhere how “we overestimate the political efficacy of most poetry in the United States because most circuits of distribution and reception are separate from those of meaningful political struggle,” his collection places poetry into intimate contact with labor history and enduring labor organizations; and devoting its poems to waste, workers, waste workers, and environments of waste, Fugue and Strike directs us to a confrontation of writing and publishing practices, municipal political action, and the rethinking of our transportation and production systems within a larger ecology.

After Hall’s “history of lurching waste flows and accumulation, the labor of carriage and decomposition, the production of intensified difference and hierarchy among workers, and the rebellions of those laborers,” I’m left with questions rotting like food in a restaurant dumpster. I’m left with a reinvigorated determination to apply labor history and ecology in my writing. I’m left with a fraying, dog-eared, scribbled-over book. I hand it to Joe Hall, so he can reply:

At the factory I put defective books into a crusher
I put this in the crusher

∩

From the Cuyahoga Valley, Alex Benedict nested in the Cleveland area. He operates offset printers for a living and publishes books on receipt paper through betweenthehighway press. Currently, he is writing a biography of Cleveland publisher and poet d.a.levy. Recently, he has published two short collections with Ethel Zine and forthcoming with Above / Ground Press.

Two Poems

Exposure

There’s a glitch in the matrix!
I am buying clothes that don’t fit me,
fucking myself            for a taped-up video camera, denying myself
such special pleasures: dinner, london, you. The peaches
we buy ripen too quickly and I’ve been writing about figs again.
Why won’t you tell me what the subway smells like?
Tell me what you know about extravagant indifference.
Can you tell me who this poem is for? Do you want it
for yourself? None of this is about you. You’re replying
to my texts again and I think your girlfriend is obsessed
with me, which means nothing except that a better world
is possible, though not like this. I am on the rooftop
and the skyline is glowing in dust. The basil,
its fungus; 2020, all one bad joke. It is autumn again
and we are all growing older; can’t we go to the party?

Sometimes I forget Jupiter is pulling us closer, slick
galaxy-stained fingers that named us. If it had eyes
we’d be so afraid: how mystical. How extraordinary.
Come here.    You can take my clothes off for me. I can pluck
new peaches for you,            feed them to you while we fuck.

Prestige

“Keats is dead so fuck me from behind”
                —Hera Lindsay Bird

I am begging you to let me peel an orange
for you
with my teeth
on video camera. I am begging you

to let me dance [for you] like a swan, you know,
the ballerina kind—

I used to be able to do a triple pirouette at the age
of 9 but no one was there to watch me

yet

.

I spent my late teens begging people to put screenshots
of my poems on their instagrams: I am begging you

to let me let you watch me while I undress. Algorithmic swthrt bby

I am so deliciously surveilled: I only like it     when someone is watching

I only like it     when it’s a machine. Will u b my little computer bitch boy.

Will you print my poem out and stick it on yr wall

& come to it

just for me?

∩

Umang Kalra is the founding EIC of VIBE and the author of fig (2022). She is a two-time BoTN finalist, and a Pushcart and Nina Riggs Award nominee. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Mizna, Protean, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere, and was featured on the podcast Close Readings.

One Story

Pascal and the Bonesetters

Her teacher lives in a stately two-story house on a street sheltered by trees. It has a sidewalk-level gate and stone steps that lead up through a garden. A weathered birdbath, a stone tablet incised with biblical verse. A flimsy, wire-footed sign expressing solidarity with certain groups, with science generally. (Occasionally, she wonders who they are, these implied opponents.) Over the door, there is a radial section of glass that is pebbled to opacity and gilt with its address: 728.

            Inside, she steps out of her shoes to leave them on cooled tile. She pads down a long hallway of deep carpet, past antique needlepoints framed behind glass. One is of a smiling boy in breeches and a tunic. He looks British, or perhaps French, his expression of mirth palled by the murky glass. At the end of the corridor there’s an abrupt geometry of light, thrown there by the sitting room’s bay windows.

            Magda sits in her armchair, her slight legs crossed slackly, her pale hands clutching a newspaper. She looks up when Rosemary enters and smiles, her face comprehensively wrinkled.

            “Hello Rose.”

            “Hey Magda.”

            The light astonishes Magda’s pale skin where it falls and gives her eyes a glassy quality.

            “How was school today?”

            “Fine.” She considers for a moment. “We had a test in chemistry, on stoichiometry.”

            Magda nods vaguely.

            “Charles is in a bit of a mood today.”

            Magda will say this sometimes. There is a warm pastry smell that reminds Rose of childhood.

            “Politics has him riled up. The election. I tell him not to start his day like that.”

            “Ah.”

            “Don’t let him take it out on you, dear.”

            “I won’t.…”

            “It’s your dollar after all.”

            Magda laughs, and so does Rose, mainly because Magda did. There are bookshelves full of books and topped with free-standing photos of grandchildren. She gives Rose a parting smile and then resumes her attention on the newspaper. Rose continues to the door of the study where they meet. She knocks and Charles says Yes? and she enters.

            Charles sits in one of two folding chairs. A wooden music stand is set up between himself and the empty chair, and his horn is upright on a stand that slots vertically up the bell. He wears reading glasses and is making notations in pencil on a piece of sheet music. He doesn’t look up.

            “Good day?”

            “Uh huh, yeah.”

            “Good…”

            Charles wears khakis and a white polo, and on his right hand is a mysterious patch of gauze. He keeps writing, so she gets ready. She opens her case to reveal a trumpet: a cool silver, its brilliant complexion marred here and there by natural-oil smudges, an insignificant ding in the bell. It rests in a lush purple fur, and when she removes it it leaves a curious fossil impression.

            Together, they warm up with only their mouthpieces, sounding a little like two Daffy Ducks. Then they do long-tones with their instruments, the tones not quite commensurate, hers less sure and full. Today, they are meant to work on what she will perform at the year-end festival, a difficult piece from the back of Arban’s methods book. The section in question is towards the end of the piece, a variation on the main melody that requires triple-tonguing and difficult intervals. 

            Charles holds his horn at ease so the bell’s mouth fits his knee. He indicates a passage with his off-hand.

            “So it still just uses the two consonants: ta and ka.” 

            “Like double tonguing.”

            “Right, but so here it’s: ta ta ka. Ta ta ka.”

            Charles’s index finger, now held aloft, goes low low high in the air, a visual approximation. She nods, looks at the sheet music, and then plays a measure slowly.

            “Exactly. But when you get that up to tempo it won’t sound so discrete.”

            “Right.”

            “So…”

            He puts his horn to his lips and plays the single triplet pattern slowly first, then again and again, increasing the tempo with each repetition. Eventually, it is as though there are two voices: one horn playing the ground notes, and another elusive and flighty horn that chimes in only to play every third. 

            “Mmm, yeah.”

            “You see?”

            “Yes.”

            Before they finish for the day, they do range exercises, gradually extending scales up to her highest note, and then trying to best it. She manages a strained, unsure E flat above high C. Charles nods, emptying his spit valve into the carpet.

            “That’s enough for today.”

            She packs up her horn. Charles is still seated, again marking up a piece of sheet music. 

            “Oh. I was going to ask you something.”

            She looks over.

            “We need a second trumpet to fill in at church in two weeks.” He circles a tempo directive in pencil. “The weekend after next. Brian won’t be in town for Easter service. I was hoping you might be able to do it. It’s dreadfully easy, the music. And there’ll be free food after.”

            “Oh, yeah, I can do that.”

            “Great, thank you. I’ll see you next week then. We can look at the material then too.” 

            Magda gives her a small bag of baked goods on her way out, little tarts with a gash of red berry in their middles. They are already fogging up the ziplock. 

            Her home is only a few blocks away, so she walks. The air is humid and close, and she can feel her own face as a kind of presence. Everything feels slightly awkward and intense and dissociated. Because she was so caught up in the lesson, it occurs to her. Gradually, as she walks, all the other aspects of her life—her family, her friends, the Algebra II homework due tomorrow, the jog she’ll go for after dinner—come back to clutter and normalize a mental landscape that had, without her entirely realizing it, become kind of abstract. 

            She passes a home with a sectioned ladder leaned up against its gutters. There are men on the roof hammering, a radio playing loudly. One says something, and the others laugh. Politics has him riled up. The election. There is an unpleasantness to this phrase, somehow like the patch of gauze on her teacher’s hand. And then there’s a slight breeze against her face, and it’s less humid, and it feels really nice to be walking. She feels light. Every now and then, she finds she is still privately articulating the triple-tongue pattern, so softly it’s almost nothing at all: Ta ta ka.

*

            She likes to run at night. She puts on high-cut shorts and a shirt worn soft. Colorful, ergonomic shoes and a bracelet that keeps track of certain biometrics. When she finally leaves her home she enters a world of dark vagaries. Street lamps cast lurid orange vales of light and the old, hunched women walking their dogs are like harmless gargoyles. She runs through parks made strange by new patterns of shadow, by homes where families are eating or watching television, sometimes framed by big, disclosing windows.

            Tonight, her route takes her past a big church, one that has a sign declaring itself a “lodge.” From its big, wooden doors, men are spilling out into the dark. Some lounge by the immediate lightpost. One says to another that that’s the thing about Democratic Socialism. She’s reminded of a book by Steinbeck they read in class last fall, where at the end a man was shot down in an apple grove. Her teacher quoted Steinbeck as saying the book was about more than political organizing, that it was about man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.

            When she gets back she showers, then gets ready to FaceTime with Molly. She inspects herself in the camera’s feed as she waits for the call to connect. She wears a too-big sweatshirt that swallows her hands. It is her brother’s and has “MIDDLEBURY” printed across the breast. She has her damp hair pinned up in a top knot.

            After an hour or so, it gets to where they’re basically talked out but haven’t closed the stream. Molly’s eyes are ignoring the webcam, attending to her screen. She squints to read something and then smiles.

            “Molly.”

            Molly’s pixels shift about responsively.

            “Mmmm…?”

            “What are you doing?”

            “Just…,” Molly clicks on something, her mouth slightly open. “Stalking this girl I sometimes stalk.”

            “Okay.”

            Molly doesn’t elaborate, so with a certain effort Rose asks.

            “Who?”

            “It’s this model I follow. She went to our school actually. She was, like, two years above us, I think?”

            “Uh huh.”

            “And now she’s a fitness influencer. Like, okay, here…”

            Molly clicks a few times, and then there is a sing-song pinging, a blued hyperlink appearing in the video chat’s embedded messenger box. Rose clicks it and is redirected through her browser to the woman’s Instagram profile. There are photos of the woman in very short shorts and what looks like just a bra, standing in front of a gym’s wall-mirror, a jungle of platinum-sheeny machinery behind her.

            “She’s very…orange.”

            “Yeah.” Molly laughs. “She looks sort of more normal in her off-season photos.”

            “Mmmm.”

            Molly doesn’t say anything for a moment or so. Then she leans back and her expression is one of someone coming out of a low-level trance.

            “Yeah. It’s nuts. She’s basically our age, and she just bought this huge house in San Francisco.”

            “Mmmm.”

            Molly bites at her lip, then her eyes move to the upper-right of her monitor.

            “Anyway…I should go. We have that test tomorrow in Algebra, right?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Yeah. I’d better go, uh, ‘study’ for that.”

            Molly throws a laggy peace sign to the webcam, and then it cuts out. 

            Rose gets up and goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She scrutinizes her face. She is a little flush and ruddy around the mouth—a few discrete points of red—but otherwise fine. She contrives a smile, lets it resolve, then smiles again. She imagines taking a video of herself, then posting it. She replaces her toothbrush in its cup and turns off the light.

            Later, ensconced in bed with the laptop balanced on her stomach, Rose navigates back to the fitness model’s page, then follows another link to her YouTube channel. She watches a video where she, Gabbi, describes her “morning routine,” her movements from room to room captured from various static angles. She relays in a calm, softly close voiceover what time she gets up, her preferred moisturizers, a recipe for a protein shake. The skincare company seems to be a sponsor; in the video’s description there is an all-caps phrase to be used for a fifteen percent discount “at checkout.” There are a lot of videos, some with fairly provocative thumbnails: montages of workout sessions, day-in-the-life vlogs. There is one video where Gabbi speaks credulously and at length—thirty-two minutes and thirteen seconds—on the subject of her mental health. Lastly, Rose watches part of a video tour of the woman's Bay Area home. The camera takes the viewer all around the house and then through sliding glass doors to the outside. There is an overwhelming flash of white and then the frame auto-adjusts to realize the full scope of a California vista, a hilly, moneyed declension.

*

            The roller blinds are pulled down against the afternoon, the classroom made unnaturally dark. A screen drapes against the chalkboard, the current slide of a powerpoint showing the three branches of the government. Off to the side, Mr. Hoffmann’s form keeps pulling away at the cling of a synthetic polo with little plucks. He generally teaches health class and coaches football, but was called in after Mrs. Ackerman had a “family crisis” and has now been covering for her for a few weeks. Occasionally, the display cuts out and he has to finesse the HDMI cable.

            Rose braces her feet against the metal legs of the desk in front of her, bearing gently into the unnatural angle and sending pins and needles up her calves. On the desk before her is a stapled handout, the powerpoint presentation reduced to three slides a page. There are lines beside each miniature slide for note-taking, but no real reason to take notes, because the quizzes are just whatever’s on the slides. Her right hand rests lightly on the foremost edge of the desk. With the pads of her fingers, she half-consciously proceeds through phantom scales: D# Major, then minor, then harmonic minor, etc. There is the subdued buzz of a cellphone in a pocket or backpack. Her fingers iterate, thoughtlessly almost.

            When she gets home her brother’s old Subaru is parked in the driveway. It looks full, bags and packs and rigging all pressing up against the windows. They aren’t expecting him, and it’s a Thursday, so he should be working. It occurs to her that perhaps something bad has happened, but she can’t quite reconcile that with all the junk in his car, the rigging. She can feel the sun on the back of her neck as she thinks about how it doesn’t really make sense, whatever she’s concluding: it’s not like he would have cleaned his car if something bad had happened.

            She heads upstairs. There is a thin line of light beneath the door at the end of the hallway. She walks past her mother’s study, past the bathroom, and knocks. From inside comes a Yeah? and she enters. The room is unchanged—still half storage space, half his old room—except Lucas is in there now, at his desk with his back to her. 

            He slowly turns in his desk chair, coming to face her with one long eyebrow cocked. He wears cut-off shorts and a white shirt advertising a climbing festival, a prominent hole just above the nipple displaying bronzed skin. His curly hair is all mussed up from raking it back the way he does, and there are the dark beginnings of a mustache above his smirk.

            “I should have known it was you. Come to unsettle my repose.”

            She just looks at him, feeling a little awkward there in the doorframe. She’s never quick enough for his banter. In the familial hierarchy, she is the behaved, studious, quiet one—an assignation she accepts not completely unreflectively, but nonetheless in a behaved, studious, quiet way. She thinks of witty things to say comfortably after the fact, which Lucas once explained to her is what the French call l’esprit d’escalier.

            “When’d you get here?”

            He leans back with the chair, spreading his knees and loosely swaying in place. “Couple hours ago. I hit up Louise on my way down. Don’t think she was very stoked to see me but…”

            He trails off. 

            “And how long are you here for?”

            “A few days. Then I’ll pack up and be on my way.”

            “Your car looks full.”

            “Yeah…”

            “Back to New York?”

            “No…”

            “Are you traveling again? For work?”

            Her brother adjusts into a slightly more upright position, his brows furrowed, his eyes cartoonishly searching the room’s nooks and crannies.

            “Is Mom in here? I could swear I…”

            Rose stares again. He laughs softly and drops the bit, reaching behind himself to take a milky-white Nalgene from the desk. He takes a long drink and then adopts a flat affect.

            “Alright, you win. I sort of quit that job. And New York generally, for a little while at least.”

            “Oh.”

            “Yeah…,” He replaces the dangling lid and with excess deliberation screws it back on.

            “Where are you going then?”

            “Out west, for a bit. To visit some friends.”

            “Climbing?”

            “Uh huh.”

            Above her, over the mantle of the door, there is a climber’s pull-up block bolted in place, a lumpy, chalk-paled, purple and green shelf with various holds and knobs and cavities for strength and grip and conditioning exercises. There is a large computer monitor on the desk behind him, displaying an email client with flashing chat boxes.

            “Is that…good? Quitting?”

            “I mean, I wouldn’t say good.” He cocks his head to one side and then the other, equivocally. “Mom’ll have a fit, that’s for sure.”

            “Mom doesn’t really have fits though.”

            “I mean, she’ll have her equivalent of a fit. Which is worse. Though, to be fair, I have sort of been hinting I’d do something like this.” He pinches absently at his lower lip, pausing. “It’s good, I guess, for me, in the sense that…like, I’m not feeling like I want to blow my head off at the moment. Which I have been.”

            “Right.”

            Lucas gets up and stretches tall. He walks over to a bookshelf filled with his college texts. He runs a finger along them, then removes a small book with three bands of color across the cover. He opens to a page, leafs through further, stops, and then chuckles:

            “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer!”

            He closes the book and looks over at her.

            “Apropos, huh?” He asks.

            He rotates the book in his hands like it is any sort of object.

            “I don’t think Mom would approve.” 

            He laughs.

            “No…probably not what she advises her clients.”

            He replaces the book on the shelf, seems to inspect its neighbor’s spine.

            “How’s school then?”

            “Good.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Yeah. We took the PSATs recently, so we’ll be hearing back about that soon.”

            “Mmmm. Fascinating.”

            He cants a book half out with one finger, then lets it fall back into place.

            “You think I should drop out and head West?” She asks the back of his head.

            “Touché.…” 

            He nods slowly, as if corroborating a private thought, then sits back down in the desk chair. He slumps down and loosely swivels. She waits, thinking about what her mother would say if she were here. She is always pressuring Lucas to be more practical, to think about his 401K and to not date certain unserious types. One thing she likes is how her mother’s criticisms sort of bounce off her brother. She watches as he rakes his hair up and maintains his hand indeterminately in the air after. He looks over at her then, his travel-oily hair slowly resolving down.

            “You want to go for a walk or something?”

            Out the window, the light is bright. An excessive, after-school brightness.

            “Yeah, sure.”

*

            They’re idling at a red light, her brother’s black sunglasses giving him an adult aspect. He points at a building, a new apartment complex in a state of partial finish.

            “Is that new?”

            “Yeah, I think so.”

            “Huh…it’s horrible….”

            They park in a big dirt lot and then take the long bowed bridge over the river and towards the small island. The bridge casts a long, forensic shadow over the overexposed waters. She can’t really tell where Lucas is looking behind his glasses.

            “What’s that thing your teacher always says?”

            “Uh…”

            “About practice. One of his mottos.”

            A man jogs past, a Rorschach of sweat realizing itself on his shirt-back.

            “Oh… Practice doesn’t make perfect: perfect practice makes perfect.”

            “Yeah.” Her brother nods slowly. “I think that’s sort of how I’ve been feeling at work. The idea is that you can work hard for no reason, right?”

            She considers. Her teacher tells her this regarding certain best practices: maintaining a correct embouchure, taking full breaths deep into the diaphragm, not using too much pressure to hit high notes. His point is that one should avoid bad habits, so as not to reinforce them. She takes a stranded lock of hair back behind her right ear.

            “Yeah, I think so. He tells me that mostly so I don’t pick up bad habits, and then keep doing them.”

            “Oh, right…” They walk a few moments in silence. “I think what it was, at work, was that I realized I was practicing to get good at something—sort of—that I didn’t want to do. And the concept of doing it for five, ten more years suddenly became terrifying.”

            “Uh huh.”

            They reach the other side and take a concrete switchback down. This island was some kind of penal colony during the Civil War, and there are now scattered plaques set in the earth, displays with diagrams and embossed text. There is a diffuse sense that bad things happened here, once upon a time, but it’s almost inappreciable in the sun, the heat. A couple in athleisure are standing in the middle of the path talking about something, the man referring to his phone. They begin to walk the perimeter.

            “So you saw Louise then?”

            “Yeah. I just stayed one night though.”

            Louise is the oldest. When she calls home it’s about homeownership or fiscal things. Rose just hears her mom’s side of the conversation, things like: Well, have you talked to your financial advisor about it? Louise and Lucas butt heads a lot, while, to Rose, Louise is nice but sort of abstracted. She is tall and very pretty and dresses well, in creamy sweaters and dark jeans and caramel-colored boots. Her laughter sounds kind of fake, like it’s pre-recorded, and she has a long term boyfriend, Robert.

            “Was Robert there?”

            “Yeah. He’s on that work-from-home grind, I think. He’s doing UI design for some firm now. So less art.… Louise left super early for the lab, and Robert sort of disappeared into his study. So I just split.”

            “You could do something like that, couldn’t you?”

            “Design? Yeah, I guess I could.” A beat. “Mom.”

            He kicks a rock, and it rolls, skips, and then pops high at the end.

            “I just meant —“

            “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s not a bad idea. I mean, I did a little bit of design stuff for school, for that magazine…AI though.…” 

            Her brother reaches into his pocket, apprehending and then jingling his keys. He appears to consider something in a non-committal way. The sun is just above the horizon now, the day nearly spent, objects throwing long shadows.

            “Anyways…how’s the trumpet?”

            “Good, mostly. I’m working with Charles on my festival piece.”

            “Ah. You’re gonna kill it.”

            “Maybe. I mean, you know how I get.”

            “The nerves?”

            “Yeah.”

            Lucas rubs his septum between thumb and forefinger.

            “I think the thing is…you gotta just realize it’s nothing. The nerves, I mean.”

            “That’s easy for you to say.”

            “Right, well, yeah, fair enough. I guess it’s true I’ve never really had a problem with public speaking or stuff like that.”

            “I mean, I can give presentations just fine.”

            “Oh yeah? Huh…”

            “It’s just with the trumpet. I start shaking. It messes up the high notes, or, like, you can just tell that my tone is off and it doesn’t sound good.” 

            “Hmmm.” 

            “It’s frustrating.…”

            “You know Mom used to use beta blockers, for when she had to do those big conferences?“

            “‘Beta blockers’?”

            “Yeah. They’re these pills that calm your nerves. She swore by them.”

            “Oh.” There was something uncanny about her mother taking a pill like that. Almost like a drug. “I don’t know if those are allowed.”

            “Yeah. They’re probably considered PEDs,” Lucas laughs.

            They follow a short concrete walkway overhung with foliage and then take an embedded metal ladder down onto pale, lunar rocks. There is graffiti on some of them, a big oblong mushroom, faded now like a bad tattoo. An ill-proportioned pentagram, a phone number. They meander across the rocks in the falling light. Her leg muscles feel loose and capable and she takes a private, childish pleasure in scampering from rock to rock. Way off is a single, high-rise apartment that stands out arbitrarily against a horizon of trees. It’s surreal, like a still image from a dystopian film. 

            They reach an area where things level out to a scattering of shallow pools. She crouches and upon closer inspection they reveal a stagnant aspect: full of muck and slowly turning dreck, nameless dusky elements drifting and dispersing. Lucas looks over at her, makes a conqueror’s claw of his right hand.

            “Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer!”

            “Easy for you to say.”

            He laughs and stretches. She straightens and they stand together in silence. Her brother coughs.

            “Yeah, I guess it is. It’s the same as me trying to explain what work is like to Mom, or to you. There’s something lost, right? Something inadequate about the communicative act of my saying that I hate my job and Mom saying that I need to think clearly and maturely about it.” He pauses, looking out at the horizon, “It’s meaningless, the relationship between those statements and actual life. I think about that sometimes, with her consulting work—like, how do you really even talk about these things, or how do you know you’re even on the same page with the person…?”

            She’s not sure she follows. She feels an intimacy though, in his voice, and a curious, warm feeling in her joints. Because it feels like he’s being serious about something and taking her seriously in turn. Then he smirks.

            “You ever seen that meme, about fucking off and starting a noise rock band when you don’t know what to do with your life?”

            She shakes her head.

            “Well, I thought of a good band name the other day: ‘Pascal and the Bonesetters.’”

            She just looks at him.

            “Want to know what it means?”

            “No. But you can tell me anyway.”

            “It’s Pascal as in Blaise Pascal, the theologian and mathematician. Apparently, one winter his dad fell and broke his hip, and two doctors came to the house to tend to him.”

            “Right.”

            “And they both turned out to be Jansenists, and all their talk ended up converting Blaise, setting him on his search.”

            “Huh.”

            “I don’t really know too much about Pascal. Just that phrase of his: The terrifying silence of infinite spaces frightens me.”

            “That could be your first album.”

            He laughs, “Now you’re thinking with your head.”

            She smiles. She likes being with Lucas, because it clarifies her mind in the way the trumpet practice does—but differently too, in a way that also sort of troubles her thought. It’s a strange, floaty feeling she gets thinking about who’s right, Lucas or her Mom, like she’s brushing up against the contours of something alien and significant. Her brother exhaustively pops the joints of one hand.

            “I guess stuff like that doesn’t really happen anymore.”

            “Mom fell last spring, and sprained her wrist kind of badly.”

            “Oh right.” His expression anticipates a punchline. “And pray tell, sister: on what matters did her bonesetters discourse?”

            “Well, she just went to Liberty, and then came home with a cast that they said she had to wear for six weeks. She said this weird guy with an IV drip sort of hit on her in the waiting room.”

            Her brother laughs then, deeply and honestly. Her right hand goes to her left tricep, the cooled, faintly goose-fleshed surface. They are cast now in glooming light, both their forms made murky and intimate. It feels like they too are dusky elements, swirling in some kind of medium. She takes a deep breath, down into her diaphragm, appreciating its expansion. She looks at her brother.

            “Guess we should head back, right?”

            “Yeah. probably should.”

            He smiles at her, his expression palled. Granular and vague and like a bad video feed in the almost no light.

∩

Philip Harris is an editor at the Cleveland Review of Books. He studies oil painting in NH, and sometimes writes. Convivial missives, press inquiries, or vitriol can be sent to harrisphilipe@gmail.com.

One Poem

“Econometrics” is a poem that enacts the relationship between plant roots and bacteria. The root–bacteria dynamic is informed by interspecies labor, value-production, and power. The first part of the poem treats the process of root growth and response as a form of cognition—embodied in syntax, neologism, and variations on the metrical notation for iambic pentameter. The second part concerns the bacteria that exist in a cyclic and endosymbiotic relationship with plant roots called the rhizophagic cycle. The plants ‘farm’ bacteria for the nutrients they gather (such as nitrogen), drawing the bacteria into their roots, degrading the bacteria’s cell walls and absorbing their nutrients, then releasing the survivors through their root hairs. I want this poem to act as an almost mute encoding of the root–bacteria relationship, which the reader can then decode and play out in their own mind. It is an attempt at developing a kind of historical–evolutionary materialism in which poetry can represent ecological dynamics as contingent and up for revision, as ‘economic’ and ‘politicized’ in a new sense.

Econometrics

∩

Brandan Griffin currently lives in Kansas City, MO, where he co-runs the pop-up / online bookstore New Material Books. He is the author of Four Concretures (Theaphora, 2024) and Impastoral (Omnidawn, 2022).

Three Poems

THE SHADOW OF THE EAGLE

No one’s heart is in my ear.
I clock what works until the blur
begins to thud. WTF? The eagle
flies over us, but I’m the only one
who notices it, because I’m always looking up
when everyone else is a baby or a puppy
tethered to the big fat milk of the earth.
Some wear blue dresses. Others
wear bows. A few just have fur
growing out of their ears. I grab an apple
from the fridge, and I crunch it
with my teeth. I crunch it into sauce
with a ravenous invective. I run my hands
through the galaxy of my hair, and the air
feels soft as a bunny or a drunk.
You know the kind I mean
always getting snared
in the lawnmower’s blades.
I’ve never been sorrier than I am
when that happens, though
for the record it’s never happened
to me. So what I’m saying is
I’ve never been sorrier
no one’s heart is in my ear.
But someone is a throwback
to an earlier tradition,
which means they don’t have the right
relationship to history
in the present being now
and then later in a bubble of what was.
Here in this instant
I am rummaging the gauze,
but not in it. I am interested
in the ones who make
the wildest lunges at the sea
or into space. The wound
is too deep to go into
a poem. You should see
the look on your face
when you read that. What you’re feeling
can’t be particularly stated
in the didactic, but it has something
in common with a profusion
of doves. The shadow of the eagle
never fades, but it passes.
Eventually. The shadow of the eagle.
The shadow of the eagle.
The shadow of the eagle.

THE WINE DARK SEA 

Solving for the epithets,
I dissolve illuminati.
The Rimbaud manuscripts, the motion
picture calligraphy. And the heart-
worm medication for Bear
in the geraniums. He is tangled
in his leash again; I am tangled
in the dictionary, so large
that it hurts when it slams
into my battleship. I am
a rebellion against all official demands.
Here, add amplification. There, a force field
collapsible, carrots or a chair
across the room in a fit
straight into the gate of the audience.
Are you whistling the audience? I meant
“force feed” not “force field” back there,
but why change now in the midst
of this forbearance. The rabbits
are not John Keats. The rubber skulls
are not a march of death. But
everything important is insensible at first
so I am trying to be insensible
and maybe a little French
because all my superheroes detonate
the grassy tasting butter
naming their betters
in chains on a fiery lake,
which they got from Surrealism
and I got from Revelations,
which is where Surrealism begins
mystically with punk rock, and
where Joe Strummer first appears
as a Cadbury cream egg. And to think
even this is a poem. Then Taylor text messages
a puff pastry gobstopper, and Dean floats
the scrambled eggs to a zookeeper-baby,
obviously dreaming with stuffed animals
in her stroller. Meanwhile,
Sam and Chris collude
with clouds to include the clouds
in what is clearing already,
the light burning through it.
But the drawing board I go back to
is still only pages and pages
of ones mixed with zeroes,
so I have nothing to show
for my efforts at telling
ever and always
how to live and what to do,
which is improbable
and irrelevant to almost anyone
who isn’t a sea monster already
or curlicues of cursive
about to be a shipwreck.

PERSONAL POEM #13

“We must lose ourselves in the indecipherable”
—Noelle Kocot

Reading the wrong things
or reading things wrong. My head
feels baked in a cup of instant coffee.
We started drinking it in London
and now we can’t stop. How lucky
                                                to go
to the clouds with all my problems,
which are minor amazements for them
of cholesterol mildly elevated
and blood sugar a little whackadoodle.
How does anyone spell the unspoken
when it’s staring at them in the mirror?
I don’t know,
but I’m trying
too hard to stay an age I haven’t been
for more than twenty-five years. And
I’ve been selling off pedals and amps again
now that Black Plastic closed, and I lost
my record store job, which was extra cash
keeping me afloat and maintaining
the possibility of new sonic exploration.
In the meantime,
Agnes has finished her college applications,
and Melanie is a thousand CrossFit workouts
into beaming like a sunflower orbiting
Mars. I just keep walking the dog
                                                    in a circle
to pee on things. That is,
he’s peeing on things, not me. I do
all my mark-making in contexts
like this one, which is a problem
that’s better than drinking too much
or being a washed-up glam rocker, but
worse than having a regular haircut and a job
that pays a living wage. I don’t know
why I’m being so morose. There are rasp-
                                                                berries
in the refrigerator, not even
hyphenated, despite my best efforts.
And this year I officially officiated
Russell & Alex’s wedding without messing it up.
I managed to write some
super-warbly, pixelated, falling-apart songs—
and Jesus Christ,
I’m sitting on a thousand poems
that no one wants to publish, but
they keep appearing anyway, mostly
disguised as the poems of Dean Young
still raving from the grave. Also, Mike and I started
a new magazine called SOLID STATE,
which I photocopied at work without asking
anybody, other than the aforementioned
holy son of god, and thus
my prayers
were answered
by me and my copy machine credentials,
which are 30178 if anyone would like to use them.
I’m into sharing too much with everybody.
Or at least it seems that way
from this bewilderingly long distance, but
really we’re so much closer than the limitations here
indicate how
a wild, vast meadow sprawls out before us—
so many things we can be, say, and do.
So many chittering undulating dimensions,
creative ways to lie about the facts
to tell the Truth.

∩

Matt Hart is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently FAMILIAR (Pickpocket Books, 2022), Everything Breaking/for Good (YesYes Books, 2019), and The Obliterations (Pickpocket Books, 2019). Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including American Poetry Review, Big Bell, Conduit, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Lungfull!, among others. Currently, he lives in Cincinnati and plays in the post-punk/indie rock band NEVERNEW and edits, solders, and publishes the journal SOLID STATE.

Shame, Punishment, and the Creative Writing Workshop

It was close to dark when I arrived at the Juvenile Detention Center. I had been teaching creative writing workshops there once a week for the last five weeks. That day I drove carefully through the cool gloom, around the rural roads and farm houses to arrive at a facility tucked along the side of an isolated, low-traffic road in rural Northeast Ohio. That day, I prepared a lesson about odes.

C wrote a poem celebrating the bible he began to read. He waved me over to ask about the title. On his paper, he wrote “Ode to Jail.”

He asked if I liked it. “It’s really powerful,” I said, beginning to explain the surprise of it, how jail isn’t something we typically celebrate, how his poem isn’t really celebrating it, but rather explaining the pain of it, how that subversion would trouble the reader, trouble the poem that follows.

“So it’s good?” he asked again. He didn’t want my poetic waxing, he wanted my approval, a nod that he was on track.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s good.”

He came up with it independently, but he modeled it after the poem I introduced, “Ode to Joy,” by a local writer. I explained that “ode” often meant “in praise of” or “in celebration of,” but I was never sure the residents could hear me, were listening.

Writers in Residence, the organization for which I worked as a Teaching Artist, refers to the incarcerated youth of JDCs as “residents.” The word seeks to remove connotations from the kids’ identities, focusing on their status as living in a certain place rather than being imprisoned in a certain place. Other language used includes “justice-involved” or the person-forward “youth who are incarcerated.”

After the writing workshop each week, the residents enjoyed a snack and chat with the student volunteers from Hiram College who sat with them during each workshop. I was the Teaching Artist, which made me an authority in the room, the teacher whose directions everyone followed. I worked with the residents individually as much as possible, peering over their shoulders while they were writing, asking questions, stepping in when they were stuck. During snack time, though, I let the residents enjoy social time with the volunteers. They sometimes talked about the organization’s Reentry and Mentorship program. Sometimes they’d talk about college, the world outside. Chatting and snacking. Asking questions of kids not much older than themselves. I stood in the back of the room and listened without interrupting.

When C wrote “Ode to Jail,” I doubted he was thinking about the history of odes, the complexities they might hold. I’m not sure he understood that “Ode to Jail” could be read as “Celebration of Jail,” or “Direct Address of Jail,” and could invite the reader to consider the “you” the speaker spoke of as Jail itself, not the bible C told me about, the bible that was beginning to help him find clarity, or at least pass the time. But he was proud of his poem. Proud enough that he read it to me, to his table, and to the whole room.

C wanted to keep talking about the bible he began to read. He spoke with seriousness and intensity. Even when he was writing silly, playful poems, he demanded attention, his tone deliberate and commanding, each word, each syllable, each rhyme. In my individual conversations with him, if he thought I was misunderstanding him, he would look at me, brow furrowed, lips slightly pouted, and say, simply, “No.”

When he addressed his table, fingers covered in Cheeto dust, to tell them the story of Adam and Eve, he did so with the fervor of a priest. He spoke in his slow and careful way, eyes locking back and forth between his tablemates to be sure he had everyone’s attention.

Some things he misremembered, had to correct. He said God made Eve first, then remembered it was Adam. God made them both with free will, and they didn’t wear clothes, and the only rule was to never eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Important in teaching is watching. Being witness to. Offering up and stepping back. I bring the tools, the structure, the foundation. I say, “Here is a poem that might be different from what you think a poem is. How does it speak to you?” The participants talk about the poem as it talks to us. What’s familiar? What’s relatable? What is surprising or confusing? What jogs a memory? What kicks the cobwebs out of you? What leaps?

One week, I brought in Chen Chen’s poem “When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities.” To introduce the poem, I asked the residents what they wanted to be when they grew up. Answers included voice actor, construction worker, and athlete. When they wrote on their own, though, they didn’t write about voice acting or football. A wrote about an imagined life partner. D wrote about the pain of love. L wrote about wanting to be true to herself, but to be normal and without pain. What they wanted, each one of them, was to be loved.

The one rule God gave Adam and Eve was simple. But Eve couldn’t listen, C explained to the table, as though none of them had ever heard this story before. As though once they heard it, everything might click. Everything might join together and fall into its correct order.

I often talk about teaching poetry as providing tools. As a teaching artist, I travel independently to a variety of sites working with people of different demographics to generate poetry or expressive writing responses to a model text or idea. I don’t teach craft, per se, though it often comes up. I don’t teach vocabulary terms, though they often come up. I don’t teach literary history, though it often comes up. A colleague who has taught in an adult mental health support group for nearly six years has pointed out that his regular workshop participants would have completed an MFA by now. The context or rigor of a writing lesson isn’t its inherent value.

In JDCs, the tool of writing is invaluable. The residents are controlled every minute of every day. They can be punished for any small infraction, or anything the correction officers perceive as infraction. They are intentionally isolated from the outside world, and often intentionally isolated from each other. The realities they face are purposefully clouded from the general public. Though many on the outside might have a general sense of what goes on in a JDC, few truly know.

The tool of poetry then has multiple uses. Notably, to share information. No one will know what life in a JDC looks like unless they experience it themselves, or unless someone who has experienced that life shares it. Writing of any kind can spread this information, though poetry can hold the tension and emotional weight that might accompany the telling of this reality. Writers in Residence produces chapbooks at the end of each program session (usually 10-12 weeks of writing) that include the work of the residents, as well as information about incarceration in the state of Ohio.

Another function of the tool of poetry is to process or heal. The residents I worked with often shared traumatic experiences they survived. Some experienced mental illness. Those without trauma or mental illness still struggle under the conditions of supervision and isolation inherent in being incarcerated. The healing benefits of writing have long been discussed and understood. It’s often easier to write something than it is to speak it. Even easier when it stays private, when it’s a reflection of the self only for the self to see. Writers in Residence seeks to capture the healing benefit of poetry by aksing the residents to complete a pre- and post-workshop survey indicating their mental state before and after writing. The post-workshop surveys tend to show a trend of improved mental wellbeing after the workshop.

I want to believe that poetry and expressive writing can also reclaim agency. In a space where the residents are monitored, surveilled, ordered, tracked, and trapped, little freedom exists. The point is they are not free.

At a different facility, where I briefly taught through a different organization, A wrote about her experiences of being incarcerated:

They say stay calm and have hope but it slowly sounds like a joke.
The joke is this place is slowly starting to feel like home.
They use their power against us but they’re supposedly here to help.
They got our whole life in the palms of their hands and it’s starting to fold.

What happens when a life stops belonging to the person living it?

C explained that when Eve ate the apple—she couldn’t help herself—she realized that she was naked. She and Adam were embarrassed. For the first time, God’s creatures felt shame.

Snack time was almost over, and the corrections officers began walking around the room with a trash can. C was talking so much he had to rush to finish his cheetos. He tilted the bag over his mouth so the last of the crumbs filled his cheeks.

Sometimes I asked the residents how it felt for them to write their poems. Especially if the content felt emotionally charged, like it came from somewhere beyond the walls of the activity room, the walls of the model poem and prompt. They usually said “I don’t know,” or “Good”—maybe the answer they felt comfortable putting into the room, or the only answer they could register at the time of my asking. I asked them because I wanted them to think about the writing. Did they access something new? Did they discover something? Was the discovery beneficial? Was it harmful?

Writing helps me iron out the wrinkles of my memory. I can wade through a troubling realization, a loss, a gain, a pain, using lines and stanzas and voltas and metaphor. But I have accidentally retraumatized myself in writing what I was not ready to write. I have found myself dwelling in distressing waters for too long trying to dive for the appropriate image. It can be easy to end up there, flailing arms and kicking legs, the water overwhelming. And no matter what, when our hour ends, the residents return to their blocks without us, without pens and paper. If we lead them out to water, we risk leading them to drown.

Was my responsibility to explain to C that maybe “Ode to Jail” wasn’t what he meant? To recommend “Ode to the Bible” or “Anti-Ode to Jail?” Should I have interrupted the sermon, aksed C how he felt about that shame, that disobedience, if he saw himself in that story, if he saw himself turning his back to it?

For ten weeks, I taught a rotating group of children who were incarcerated. I called them “residents” so we could see, together, identities not defined by criminality. But I also wondered who else that language served. Once, at the second facility where I taught, I asked the residents what made a place feel welcoming to them. G asked me, smartly, if I felt welcome there, in that room, with them. No one is meant to feel welcome in prison.

Calling them residents over and over, to myself, to the people who will never see inside a Juvenile Detention Center, to the student volunteers, allowed me to distance myself from their experiences. “Residents” implying choice. “Residents” of an apartment complex. Of a dorm. Of a village, a community. While the language empowers the youth to see beyond the way systems see them, I wonder if it empowers those adjacent to (me) and complicit in the systems to get comfortable, kick up our legs, relax into the life where kids can be separated from the outside world for indefinite periods of time.

That week’s session was the last I interacted closely with C. He was gone two weeks later. When I left that night, it was not quite snowing, but it felt like it could. And if it did, every kid I left in the facility behind me would miss the first snowfall of the year. Mostly, I was sad for myself. None of them ever told me missing the first snowfall would be something that made them sad. I imagined it, inferred it. Thought kids ought to enjoy that sort of thing, be present for it.

A job of teaching is to become a mirror. I brought tools lent to me by others, and I could not dictate the best way for each resident to use them. Or if they should use them at all. That would have to be for them to discover. When L wrote about her mom’s death, when R puzzled over what he could ask future generations, when J refused over and over again to share anything he wrote, though he always wrote, I was there to affirm. To say yes, you’re on track, if it feels right, keep going. I asked questions and offered possibilities, other avenues for their writing, other ways of coming at it.

C got out, and maybe never finished reading the bible. He may never write another poem. He may end up back in the facility, as his recent time there was not his first, and recidivism is high when there’s no focus on rehabilitation, no support for reformation, no mechanism (generally) for the conditions on the outside to change when the resident is released. But once a week, for a few weeks, he wrote with his fellow residents, about things that comforted him, about loved ones he’d lost, about his favorite foods and songs and planets. And everyone produced something that had nothing to do with what we called them or where they were. Or, had everything to do with that. And maybe it was a light. A feeling like snow in October. A feeling like an alternative is possible. A bite of fruit that is just a bite of fruit.

∩

Carrie George is a poet and teacher living in Akron, OH. She is coeditor of Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry (Kent State University Press, 2024) and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.

from “Atlas”

…

against storms
or rebuild buffers. Marked losses
of the sea. Southern border

                       to reclaim the mutilated waterfront
                       to give shape to the city

along the shore westward
tilting. Shored
in concrete. Manhattan seawall

                                       on striped bass
                                               of the piers     for non-water
                        the middle layer was powder
                                      the rock salt
                                                           tar to fill the weight
            of a dump truck 
                                      day-night on fill

in this dense metropolis what we found
of the world

                       a lucid vision
                       muddied at every turn 

…

                                                       in no man’s land [sic]
                                                       a new way of life

                       how many lost neighborhoods
                       gave lungs to the city 

                                   of a freehold estate
Andrew Williams’ $125 for three lots

who had gardens and livestock
drank from Tanner’s Spring 

                       addenda and provisos of course

who was a laborer          a waiter          a shoemaker

who stood for baptisms
                                      and burials
                                                           Black history is American
                                                           history

upon whose hearts and hands
the expenses will fall
                                   upheld by the bludgeons 

                                                         —see Chavez Ravine

                                                         see Dawes

                                                         see Techwood: the maps!
                                                         the maps all bob-
                                                         tailed, cut off
                                                         at the bottom, Niskey Lake
                                                         erased, Cascade Heights

by neither accident nor consequence
who fled to Sandy Ground
                                             to Skunk Hollow

 without plates in what was called the Gothic pattern

without quite a few pieces
of porcelain          a comb          a roasting pan
a smoking pipe          a toothbrush

a leveled hill

---

Lopate, Phillip. Waterfront. Crown Publishers, 2004.
Drusus, Livius. “Seneca Village: When New York City Destroyed a Thriving Black Community To Make Way for Central Park.” Mental Floss, 15 April 2015.
Gustafson, Seth. “Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta 1990–1996.” Southeastern Geographer, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2013.
Lalwani, Mona, et al.  “The lost neighborhood under New York’s Central Park.” Vox Video <https://youtu.be/HdsWYOZ8iqM>, 2020.

---

∩

Originally from Southern California, Glenn Bach now lives in the Doan Brook watershed of Cleveland, Ohio. Glenn retired from a career in sound art and experimental music to focus exclusively on Atlas, a long poem about place and our (mis)understanding of the world. Excerpts have appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, jubilat, and Plumwood Mountain; sequence-length excerpts include cricket (eclipse) (Stone Corpse Press, 2024) and verdugos (Ghost City Press, 2024). Glenn documents his work at glennbach.com and @AtlasCorpus.

Three Poems

Transit

Night rabbits steal the scene,
a flurried effigy, a shadowed flight.

Each street absorbed into stealth,
into shapes that leak beneath trees:

Specificity is the thing.

It’s a Tuesday to walk off a little piece
of heartache. Not large. Not quiet,

either. Wind stirs clouds gone wispy,
gone egg white. The dog chases the rabbit.

The rabbit chases the mineral forms
swelling beneath the loamy surface.

In the yard, a black umbrella shocks open,
startles nothing into something.

On a good day, its opposite follows
—whatever is behind is almost there.

Heat Wave

Lapses of light and shadow go hotfoot
through the house

Bad gin at the roof of the mouth Dogs twitching
gone jogging Legs up in sleep

All August this sweet slippage airless like relief
Like going to bed every night with wet hair

and waking up dry Like the slow wrist work
of rinsing the trees of peaches

Like the rangy old man who snaked the path
toward us talking of overpopulation

I don’t remember earmarking those pages Nor
not sleeping all summer I don’t remember

setting out the dish of milk though in the viscous
blister, six-thirty, it is there This is the effort

of naming things Urging vowels to claim
their counterparts Not to solve but not to commit

to any particulars of suffering either To say
I saw this To say I know that it was there

Charlotte

Green warp of vines, hand over hand,
shadowed gulch, swallowed glare

All the houses with stairs and doors
that (seemed to) lead nowhere—

Imagine being this legible to one another,
imagine through
the bodily fog, a cellular twang: flinty non-rot

which moves through the system like vinegar,
like memories of rock and roll

And all that’s needed is a little night vision
—candled, tidal, able with new clarity
to be met & met & met again: hands

and feet swarming with moss, mouth
rapid to light as a moth
my moss my mouth moth mouth

∩

Sarah Edwards is a writer and editor in Durham, North Carolina. She has fiction and poetry published in Subtropics, The Stinging Fly, Ninth Letter, Annulet, Joyland, The Southern Humanities Review, and The Yale Review, among other places.

Three Poems

The Compiler is Contaminated

I became epoch in the distant multiplicity of mud. Guests sipped the coffin counterfeits of many vined brains. I languaged emergent control, attracted mime hands, beaks in their guts to sew the leaking handsome. The compiler is contaminated. My worldview is forever the terror that if barks, where stag are the wind of a going transition. Pardon the neck that I head, that treats screams as moving middles, for in that close and long lathe of the translator’s kink I have seen blue daffodils and snow begging from a colander. O, elder! For any promise you will need a gun! Hold firm in low wind scarce wings of little birds; block the comfort that requires hanging.

The Compiler is Contaminated

We promise scarcity the linguistic construction of belief. The real translation is a slow predation in red snow. Such strutting at meaning during wonder. And which neck of music? God amalgam. Conditioned elopement. The encyclopedic middle-to-moat of the combative original. I go small into aphrodisiac places, hedonic beneath swift treason. From whose horror exists an evening sketch of pines? Watch-chested horses slobber as does the leopard. You perform at the head of our principle: mutual and attentive as the beauty of birds in their passing of sores.

The Compiler is Contaminated

Somewhere, physicality is the point. Torn to dependence in tender morn, I turned them in where suture gives no alphabet for theory. Far monster, spider thing, script which they eat in mole purpled snow. No garden knocks from a peephole. Distance or no, objects are terror. You have brought wild sorrow o’er my text, a pause waking into its hole. The you is ephemerality shown where I slip wonderfully into comparative reset. The sentenced heart is clarity. What regret may solicit my eyes is mutual: nonesuch gore in the panoramic goodnight. O, beneficent twin, on to the inexperience. Somewhere physicality is the point.

∩

Evan Williams (they/them) is a Chicago-based writer interested in asemic texts and surrealism. Their work can be read in DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Evan is on social media @evansquilliams.

Two Stanzas from “Inanimism”

Inanimism 64: Mortuary Science / Last Days of Layne Staley

the... articulate informality in Proust and Roubaud... the [diffusive] and topographic prose in Simon, Lewinter's prose... is disconcerting and frequently disruptive to the [level] of incomprehension, of jettisoning any sense of burden on one moment producing the next... (Trefry, John. 2016. "Reading Two Novels by Roger Lewinter." Full Stop. http://www.full-stop.net/2016/11/09/reviews/john-trefry/the-attraction-of-things-story-of-love-in-solitude-roger-lewinter/) "Get Born Again" and "Died"... the last [recordings of] Layne... with Alice in Chains. (De Sola, David. Alice in Chains: The Untold Story. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015) Body parts... [are] not [decomposing] for years... are... wax corpses. (Hibbing, Martin. 2008. "Mortuary covering for use in holding of corpses to maintain the condition of the body has thick wire grid of U-shape with windows." German Patent DE20071019954, filed October 30, 2008.) the volume of liquid escaping the body is too large [for containment] by the undergarment resulting in overflowing. (Novak, Ronald J. 2009. "Mortuary Undergarment with Drainage System." US Patent 8,943,613, filed December 8, 2009, and issued February 3, 2015.) Larusta... [references]... John Larusta, the alias [of] Layne [Staley] (De Solas 2015) In addition to providing fuel, long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), such as arachidonic acid, provide [substrates] for enzymatic reactions... [producing] eicosanoid signaling molecules. (Steinhauser, ML, BA Olenchock, J O'Keefe, M Lun, KA Pierce, H Lee , L Pantano, A Klibanski, GI Shulman, CB Clish, and PK Fazeli. 2018. "The Circulating Metabolome of Human Starvation." JCI Insight, (August).) [laminae] are solid eggshell black... [oleaginous staining on] the [laminae]... the [oiliness compiling] a patina and this patina is [definitive relative] to the [literature] and [relative to the secret visitors] and [their] unctuousness... Out of that contingent black veil [an emergent]... series of [hallucinations obscurant] in the grain... [censorial] over clarity in... trepidation... a bright white [luminance]... (Trefry, John. 2015. "Language in Place of the Body." Entropy. https://entropymag.org/language-in-place-of-the-body-a-reading-of-m-kitchells-apart-from/) preparation for draining its internal cavity of liquids (Novak 2009) a [lowtemperature] mortuary bed which is convenient for corpse preservation. (Zhao, Jinhui. 2005. "Low Temperature Mortuary Bed." Chinese Patent 20,042,092,009, filed December 14, 2005.) the cryptic mysticism of a myth... hermetically tangible [presence] (Trefry 2015) Staley... a scant 86 pounds. (Christopher, Michael. 2017. "Remembering Alice in Chains Layne Staley 15 Years Later." Daily Times. https://www.delcotimes.com/2017/04/06/rock-music-menu-remembering-alice-in-chains-layne-staley-15-years-later/) a recent study in rats demonstrating a role for fasting-mediated hypoleptinemia as a causal driver of the shift to lipid metabolism in a mechanism involving the HPA axis and corticosterone stimulation of adipocyte lipolysis. (Steinhauser 2018) The target is never without the ordnance. (Trefry 2015) "I've seen pictures of my sister and her husband Greg in the court. And it's with her best friend, and Greg's friend... I'm pretty darn sure that Layne wasn't there." (De Solas 2015) [retrospection of]... [datapoints]... [with the assignation of postfacto] coincidental significance. (2016) shroud at... bottom of... coffin... corpse on top... second shroud on top of... corpse...tissue [rotting]... corpse [lying] in... grate... flesh... [consumption]... no more waxy corpses. (Hibbing 2008) the monolithic block of Lewinter's prose... [indulging] a specific form of Mechanism, the [generally abandoned anisotomic constriction] of scientific philosophy that describes all systems in terms of simple collisions of matter... [indulging] deterministic fantasies of [temporality and spatiality]. (Trefry 2016)

Inanimism 166: Last Days of Layne Staley / Mortuary Science

property... [acquisition is] through this roundabout mechanism... [keeping Layne Staley's] name off any public records [in association] with the transaction. (De Sola, David. Alice in Chains: The Untold Story. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015) [in] stacks of Banffy, Mann, and Proust... William Gass's THE TUNNEL... had an aura of sorts. (Trefry, John. 2020. "Tunneling the Tunnel." John Trefry's Personal Website. https://www.jhtrefry.org/the-tunnel/) A six foot tall man of average to muscular build who weighs about 180 pounds will have about 25 pounds of bone. (retrieved November 10, 2020. https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-a-human-skeleton-weigh#:~:text=A%20six%20foot%20tall%20man,about%2025%20pounds%20of%20bone.) "He wasn't crying, but he looked like he was about to cry. He reverted to about a four-year-old boy," Jerden explained. (De Sola 2015) The em dash and the content it [is dividing] are not as jarringly discontinuous... is... highly contingent and masonry. (Trefry, John. 2016. "Reading Two Novels by Roger Lewinter." Full Stop. http://www.full-stop.net/2016/11/09/reviews/john-trefry/the-attraction-of-things-story-of-love-in-solitude-roger-lewinter/) The image of the door [inaugurating]... Think Tank is not... [directional]... It is simply a threshold. (Trefry, John. 2015. "Reading Julie Carr's Think Tank." Entropy. https://entropymag.org/think-tank/) [preparation of] a human corpse... for... viewing or funeral... is...by embalming. (Novak, Ronald J. 2009. "Mortuary Undergarment with Drainage System." US Patent 8,943,613, filed December 8, 2009, and issued February 3, 2015.) this [inanimate], this book... [is] capable of admitting us into [itself]. The book... has this effective permeability. (Trefry 2015) flea market discoveries are [demarcating] events in time... [electing] the physical form [of mnemonic embodiment] (Trefry 2016) [In accordance with] traditional funeral rites, [the family is retaining] the [corpse]... at home for several days. (Zhao, Jinhui. 2005. "Low Temperature Mortuary Bed." Chinese Patent 20,042,092,009, filed December 14, 2005.) Human starvation is marked by an early period of glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis. By 2-3 days... fatty acids released from lipid stores become the primary source of fuel; (Steinhauser, ML, BA Olenchock, J O'Keefe, M Lun, KA Pierce, H Lee , L Pantano, A Klibanski, GI Shulman, CB Clish, and PK Fazeli. 2018. "The Circulating Metabolome of Human Starvation." JCI Insight, (August).) [equipment of] a bed [fascia]... with refrigeration equipment and a transparent cover [forming] a [discrete lowtemperature] mortuary space... for corpse parking... for a long time... [preventing] the corpse from deteriorating, rotting and spreading odor and harmful germs outward. (Zhao 2005) In cemeteries with clayey soil... a lack of oxygen... [is preventing] complete decomposition of the corpses. (Hibbing, Martin. 2008. "Mortuary covering for use in holding of corpses to maintain the condition of the body has thick wire grid of U-shape with windows." German Patent DE20071019954, filed October 30, 2008.) The circulating metabolome... [reflecting] systemic metabolic processes... [is a misunderstood] aspect of starvation physiology... (Steinhauser 2018) large books... LA MEDUSA by Vanessa Place... MOBY DICK, (Trefry 2020) an amino acid surge... [driving] the shift to fatty acid and ketone utilization... [shifting] to ketone production by the liver... enabling [human survival for] prolonged periods of starvation. (Steinhauser 2018) Recording Layne's vocals was difficult because of the loss of his teeth, [resulting] in a lisp... [affecting] his speech and singing ability. (De Sola 2015) vessels [are not legible as] vessels, but [in colinearity with other things]... they [become] vessels that define contents and not contents. (Trefry 2015) coincidences... dog-ear the ceaseless events, (Trefry 2016)

∩

John Trefry is an architect in Kansas.

Three Poems

The God of Lesser Evils

is running for President of the United States
because The God of Lesser Evils
lacks imagination.

He is, of course, running unopposed.
They’re still holding a televised debate though,
hosted at Crypto.com Arena in LA.

During the Q&A section a reporter asks where
The God of Greater Evils is. Immediately, security slips
a black bag over her head and drags her from the premises.

The God of Lesser Evils then pulls
a 9mm from his waistband and fires
randomly into the audience.

This awakens a religious and erotic fervor in the crowd,
who launch into a ferocious orgy while The God of Lesser Evils
stands on stage with his hand over his heart, reciting the Star Spangled Banner.

As you watch this scene unfold, on your
52 inch plasma screen, you try to summon horror
or disgust, but all you feel is empty.

Like if you could reach your fingers underneath your rib cage
you could touch the gashes left in the bone by the carving knives
the doctors used to hollow you out at birth.

You’re so empty, you don’t even know how
to miss what is gone. But you can’t shake the feeling
that what is gone somehow misses you.

There’s Nothing Inside Me

that I put there.
You might call me a vessel,
but that implies purpose.

I’m more of a styrofoam
cup floating in the ocean
filling with salty water
it was never meant to taste
and slowly decaying into
microscopic pieces that will end up
in my stomach.

I’m always returning
to the ouroboros.
The irony is not lost on me.

God filled me with organs
and man fills those organs
with disposability.

I ask God to what end?
and God appears to me in a dream
as everyone I’ve ever grieved.
All of them formed together in one
horrific mass, they speak simultaneously
from their many mouths in a language
my organs understand.

I do not tremble before this
monstrous God because
I am dreaming and in dreams
I only fear the mundane.

When I wake up
I am hungry for a taste
I’ve never tasted.

The irony is not lost on me.

Etymology

After Threa Almontaser

The Poet asks me
What is the holiest

thing you’ve ever seen?
and I think of my best friend

sitting on our kitchen counter
telling me this place we

are in now, must be hell.
I think of our friend asking

what direction they should
orient a tattoo of a dead bird

they found. I tell them I like
the artistry and drama of the

side profile. Like the bird
threw their little head back

as they drew their final breath.
I wanted to stop writing

about dead birds but poetry
recognizes itself. Recognizes

what is holy. The word
from which holy is derived

means literally set apart.
Which begs the question,

from what?

∩

Delilah McCrea is a trans, anarchist poet living in Dearborn Michigan. She loves the NBA and knows the lyrics to every Saintseneca song. Her debut poetry collection, The Book of Flowers, is forthcoming in December 2024 from Pumpernickel House Publishing. More of her work can be found on her website.

from The Horoi Control System

Part IV

The Blessing of the Spectral Wall — The Horoi Control System Activates?!

Outside Client’s home, at oldest bound.
Sun near set, birds settled for evening,
A tension about the air confusing all.

Surveyor: with steel tape, theodolite, Pain’s Pain, ecto-bricks

Client: In waking semi-trance, left hand (TDH 51-17) gesturing rapidly

Client (quiet):

Today no one living left yet can
Pronounce the name I’m hauling
To front of cloud-dript consciousish
Mind’s melt, call him “lunar sprite,”
For a moon’s color native to the co-
Lor hitched aurically to his form,
Not a body, not a laughingly “friend,”
But a Form’s Form, feeling I know,
A surveyor can call off to distantest
Bound’ry and never hear back
Echoing that name, this non-
Being I seem now to, as being,
Re-member piece by bit, some-
Thing sleeping in what someth-
Ing else signifies, a guide I me-
An, ecto-name-in-form, a fai-
Ry harvest horned in spree of
Goodness, that goodness which
I, and thee and all against the
Rule of Being Seen in Pain, or
Seen in any seen event, of,
You pity self and I and all, yes,
The Horoi Control System… but
That goodness to which we call
Out, in sum, to summon, much formal
Magic studied to rally all this,
But whose name, whose
Real free presence!
Only dreams’ jokes reveal…

Surveyor:

That my fetched to ’ttention
Tens of thought-to-be beings
In habit clinging to your land,
Your home and you brought
Back to foyer of your thought
This “Lunar Sprite” you make to
Know is lucky meter for this job:
Reminds my Survey’s Self of
One I met in ancient dozen
Years ago, a little fellow with
A sort of angel’s glowing illth
Who traded at a loss with me
A boundless box of ecto-bricks,
See, ghostly mortar too, of use?
None at all, to a dead man living
Such as I, a realist scientist of
Land and its proper tying up,
What good some half-ghost’s
Sticky blocks? What good I see!
In here, in space-in-space, old
Measurer’s trick, bricks enough
Of ghostly make to make private all!

Client (with Bishop print slipped from sleeve):

Noth’ ever may constitute eth’ric
Wall but ghosts’ slab and stone,
These blocks you now prod-
Uce, Surveyor, from pet-
Ite wooden magic box there,
They sun a special light,
A white that’s black, a grey
Enlisting colors each, so like
The white a crow’s lost fea-
Ther takes on in singular,
So too like Lunar Sprite,
Whose copy in my mem-
Ory arrays itself to fuller
Still authentic presence,
As here remember is to make,
Think I’ve as much to offer this bles-
Sing as you’ve, if only like thus:
Note my sly gesture, from I. Bi-
Shop-Wolff’s “Conversation,”
1931, I tuck it now behind
My anxious back, please strike post-
Ure, friend, of man on left,
As I embody man on right…

Surveyor (assuming directed pose):

So! A gesture for occasion,
So pools from I to you
All confidence in this thing,
A strong tableau on which
T’hang a sign reads “under con-
Struction,” yeah? And dim-
Ensions come to sense as
If always plain as birth:
17 foot wide, 11 foot tall,
A wall not, clearest, wall
For keeping out a scaler, but
A Wall as Charm, pure wall,
A doll, in part, a charm…
But here: a shift in air and void!

Client (breaking posture):

Yes, a change along this olden
Line we prep for phantomic ba-
Rrier, Bishop’s gesture-database
A utility as ev’r, a second pose
Now for the formal blessing:
From memory, hand at per-
Fect angle to tilted chin, left
Woman in 1948’s “Double
Date Delayed,” ha! Dark surge
Flowing forth, the inevitable,
See it come to brutal halt,
See glow bright the bricks stackt
There, see outline faint of wall
To-be, see! name of what I called
“L_ S_”! … “Liar Punster…?” No
It says…. “Pale Sir Runt?”

Surveyor:

I can read it fine: the name,
“Plat Insurer.” No, a darker
Lean: “Saturn Peril!” No…
“Raptures Nil”…

Client (smiling):

Calm, calm,
A laugh rings out!
It settles, it settles.
See words form writ
On shape what will the spec-
Tral barr’ be: “Neural Trips”
Shifts slow to “Pulsar Inert”
See now these fade, no name
Exempt from shuffled punning,
A lunarific play on endless shifting,
Like I said, no mouth pronounces
Quiet, guiding quiet, no statement
But to say the human life
Is a system of cycles…

Surveyor:

Systems of cycles of met-
Rical bundles, yes, your
Trance-memory idol, brought
At final stand to ghostly
Light, lacks all name, all sen-
Sation its language, as
Distance and line are
Mine, gesture yours, so
Clear as transparent, it
Lives in its own absence|
And its blessing here
Seals our wall and will.

Client (realizing a plain fact):

I an owner-debtor to
The credit of that light.

Surveyor:

We build now then
A horos-wall of specter’s
Skin and marrow, an
Apport’d announcement
Of an old ownership of land:
Thee and thy moonish
Friend, osmosing credit-
Debt dyad, spirit to body,
This wall a boundary aga-
Inst the seeing-in of other
Binding lines, bound’s
Bound that is, a wraith-horos
Construction emitting pul-
Sing mass song of “nothing
Here,” do you, then, take
This hypno-figment savi-
Or as thy lawfully conj-
Oined spirit for sake
Of this ritual erection?

Client:

A satyr seed sows so
As to later satis reap,
Et dream-self cong-
Eals the slime of exp-
Erience into form for
Light to silhouette a
Sprite of lunar aspect,
If not of lunar rock,
Nor rock of any sphere,
But stuff of no material,
This same matter best
Fit for baking into bricks,
I guess, the components
Of this wall. Arising there.

Surveyor:

Arising here.
And right in time, as
That great Survey’s God,
Sol! does set in stone’s
Drop moment, here, it rests
Its lower edge on yonder moun-
Tain, as ever ’flecting it moon
Does rise to see the HCS awake,
Minding all with smile’s mask.

Client:

Lay then first brick in out-
Line of talisman wall.
And second brick. And on.

Surveyor (laying ghostly bricks, applying mortar):

I hear a tune,
Survey’s fade-hum gives warning of
A song strict non-unrepeatable,
The loop of song to govern mind
As eye of all lines ’bserves body,

Client:

I hear it too.
Choreographie instructed just
Under ear’s horizon, keys to
A posture subtle HCS asks us
Assume, it means it comes on.
What whispers. Well. Oh. The
Wistful lilt of that nymphe-horos
Head blends in with song, hear it?
Unison mech-voice calls in too.
They’re saying: “I hold the head
Above my head in triumph like
Winners do, recall earlier’s war-
Ning, the future upon which’s
Nipple sux the present pivot’s
Lips, a place-based past dug
Up from earth, cemented unna-
Tural to world gate as gargoyle,
Artemisian virgin Dianic pan-
Ic churning the cream of vo-
Yeur big-mind! The arrow a tra-
Veling property line strikes
That hearty space of secrets!
What lust fumes steam-power
The looping song of all time
Watched in passive malice?—”

Surveyor (still at work, cutting off Client’s channeling):

Let thy hand fall from ear, client, cut
That transmission’s current out
Of notice, is but our Control Sy-
Stem feeding back the light
We fed in in digging up round
Noon that bulge in plot’s flat,
HCS is all a ghost of all to come,
And in to come, what was, the
Hair-strands of past found on
Tomorrow’s pillows, look!
I’ve exceeded my height
In stacking these nothing bricks,
We’ll need your ladder, now.

Client (having fetched tall ladder from home):

Climb, Surveyor, and at top edge ins-
Cribe in bleeding chisel-path word,
After Hipparkhos, whose herms’ mut-
Ilation broke distance wide open,
Whose herm-erection made all equi-
Nox sing the axial precession of doors
Of season’s hour, the land’s light’s wobble,
And in whose name mystery resides,
Write, yes, “I AM AN EMPTY ACRE”

Surveyor:

Didn’t take you for a student
Of statue and its geographic
Dosage, though your apotr-
Opaic compulsions lend a
Kinder light to your study
Of the herm and its inno-
Vator— yes, a wise greeting
Or luck-sentence for thy wall!
Weightless ecto-bricklaying
Makes for quick labor, here,
Our last few blocks whisp
Into place, allow a wall to be.

Client:

At distant mountain’s foot,
From up on ladder’s top step,
Surveyor, see a quilt of dusk
Begin its mute stomping march
Along the land to us, publicizing
Advent dire and our altar wall
Just this minute standing done?

Surveyor (grimly, though not without humor):

A test of my dead-masonhood, this—
Let’s behind this new wall sit on stones
And listen for the voice of HCS pron-
Ounce its dark debut to all who live
And me, too.

Client:

I call out now, to what’s that
Name? Your name? I use
No word for, uh, Selenic Gnome!
For lack of your name!
That Guide-Poem face! Urn,
Moon, ghost, crow, mint, slug,
Dream, grail, card, disc, stone,
Stone, stone, stone, stone,
Bless this slab with gen-
Ius of light! I ask with ut-
Ter humble friendship here
As false god-infused devil mind
Lymphs through all edges
And their sleeping guards the
Soft nodes of world’s corpse,
Bless this spectral wall, I beg.

Surveyor:

A light, you see, ensues
In innermost gut of wall,
My spirits’-bricks alive
Like living death so healthy,
Here, the sundown settles
On the world, Horoi Con-
Trol system cracks an eye
On every object’s every angle.

Client (bracing self now against that wall, yearning, childlike):

The blessing of the spectral wall
Has taken full effect on all
Within the land I own or keep,
And douses lines of bound
With light and calm and sleep
To bend all HCS detection ’round
Us.

Surveyor:

The Horoi Control System is active.
I see with my plain pierc’d eye your
Nameless Lunar Sprite at at-
Tention sitting on our wall, keeping
Watch of watchful waking all.
We’re unseen.

Client:

Matter’s matter becomes the joke
Played on its own recitation, like a come-
Dy that ends in frozen laugh: it
Dies where it descends to punchline,
Reaching, like a Bishop etching,
The cold smile of not knowing
The laugh exhales a final breath.
Or put otherwise: see the jowl
Of the old man call itself to notice
By his bad feelings on it, so our
New watcher is its own keeper,
An irony which fuels rather
Than combusts the mind of HCS.
The snake which not eats but
Is and studies its own tail’s scales.

Surveyor:

Last breaths laughed out strain
The air with the stiffness of the
Planetary humor of a new vampire.
I’ve eaten last laughs and cried.
And of snakes, circles, body’s
Jowling and age: I’m but the
Unaging Surveyor whose plane
Lies flat and whose points must
At the grand middle of all converge.

Client:

May have been a misspeech.
But to plumb the depths of metap-
Hor in hour of our ever-broadcast
Feels, to my private heart, an eye
Worth goggling for protection.
Your eye, your special eye,
Which Pain’s Pain plays in,
What, around the bend, sees that?

Surveyor (preparing Pain’s Pain for insertion into left eye):

Small talk in the face of it.
How small, too, our zone
Of tentative safety. Here.            (plunging knife in)
Let us peek out from behind
The blessed spectral wall,
Now pierced orb is full,
Expanding sight of Survey’s Eye.

Client:

What’s seen? All eyes?

Surveyor:

An element-elf of nature is
Embodied there in crook
Of eldest tree in view,
An elemental fairy form
Spies a distant fence
Which now, HCS alive,
Discerns and transmits all.
The living representatives
Which I mentioned flock
To figments of our minds
And to which each thing in
All creation corresponds,
Are all about, all out in
Gangs and lonely pairs,
Startled by commotion
Of new and dark attention.
My subtle eye has rare been
So full of these quiet lights.

Client:

Off there, on hill
At some peak’s shoulder,
A boundary stone long
Meaningless cracks a rough
Eye, notes us not here,
For this wall a nothing makes
Of all this land I tend and am.

Surveyor (quietly, to himself):

Though against the pay
Of my good trade, I know
That no man can be more
Than a drift fixture on land,
And this Control System H,
So sure of land’s mal-
Leability, and too Client’s,
And all’s, assumption of
Private property’s reality,
The secret shadow of
Survey, that all earth
When cut against grain
Will its spirits spew
To make right the offense.
It rallies so sudden.

Client:

What’s that? Land leaks?
It leaks some presence?
I feel a crowd gather all over.
I misheard, or heard else. Must have.

Surveyor:

So you’ve not got
The eye, but have some sense.
Yes, some things inhere for-
Ever in a place, a plain or
Wood or hill, some things
Awake when changes come
And you feel them now, I see
Them, cousins to the forms
You summon with a mind,
Ancienter, and less of friendship
Made, more deeply writ by
Knife of matter’s illusion, its
Depth of other-than-seeming,
So matter is a mask of meter?
Yes, the meter of the animation
Of it all, all life, HCS app-
Roximates this in bad faith,
A mechsuit worn by earth
In monster battle with itself’s
Own god of terrain and situs.

Client:

Who is the god of the forest, of the land?
Pan’s Pan?

Surveyor:

The earth wears an armor.
Gaia’s meat blue and green
Softer than space under shell
Of man’s compulsing waves
Of self mistrust, self control,
HCS the body’s body, which
Cancels and clips off Pan’s
Matted fur, to horror of dad,
Frozen haste now recycled
Like his staff to mark estates.

Client:

I feel a great crowd beyond,
Must puncture, gnaw that
Armor-of-watch now roused,
And disemboweling douse
The world with its celebrated
Death. What luck! Luck’s son.

Surveyor (without Client’s excitement):

Course’s curse corrects the upheave.
Control suggests to spirit freedom system,
Talks ’em into comfort’s castle, locks
The door. I’m watching it happen, smooth
Speech from lips of false-all to ears of
All-is-alive totem gnomes, how dark it is.

Client:

Now I see it, a vision sitting
Up on wall, my Moonlit
Figment real, but some-
Thing must’ve cracked in
Nature’s diviner-bowl for
One without a vision hitting
Upon all that hidden always.
Now I see it looking down
At me, with quiet simple face.

Surveyor:

It knows what I know,
The quick exchange now
Cutting up the floor of
Night, all of earth at it,
Those elemental to it
In tiny war with the built
Dark mirror’s swirling wo-
Ven eye mesh mind-cloth,
It’s plain as heart’s beat
Back’d by beat’s lack,
The Horoi Control System
Lib’ral in its lab’ling “bound-
Ary” encrusts all human ter-
Rain, falling over life with
Heartless scrying, mocking stare.

Client (understanding the situation):

That animate force
Native to the dust
And all the dust com-
Poses poses in defense,
A choir of action in
Struggle with its pr-
Ying twin, a clanging
Dread all on earth,
What will local see?
Unveiled flickers at
Us all an army implied
By HCS undoing veins
In time’s body, spirits
Ever present quiet start
In every voice to shout,
Though lunarsprite silent
Keeps. No word from that.

Surveyor:

HCS in practice,
Past its theory,
See time’s limping
Gait in total public,
Needed some space
To give it its path,
Now time’s just now,
Not never sure what
Was to be will be done.

Client (panicking):

We’re here a long now,
Knelt at foot of Spectral
Wall, that Sprite above us,
Sentry sitting, a scene
Unseen by HCS and in
This privacy not in the game,
We’re out of time, in boundary
Of boundary, in the wall,
Stuck in the wall, paved in,
All time paved into us carved out.

Surveyor (resolutely):

I hear a new eye open,
Soft scuff of boot behind
Us, I know what’s sure
To happen next, the rose
Which is the Survey’s Flower
Doubles as the wick of candle
When inverted, don’t turn
Around to see who trips
Toward us, client, he holds
That rose and is the light
Of land’s dederangement.

Client (turning around):

That familiar figure.
I’ll pose A Question.



What luck

END

7/17 – 11/17 ’23

∩

Ben Roylance owns and operates Apport Used Books. His books include A Talking Skull (the holon project, 2022), AQ Saga (Hiding Press, 2024), and The Horoi Control System (Apport Editions, forthcoming).

PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde

The harder and stronger Palestinians fight for liberation, the more, like lightning bolts of ever increasing luminosity, they bring the relief of the world system into clearer view: the impotence of the United Nations; the imperialist contempt for international law; the complicity of the Arab neo-colonial states with Western capitalism; the fascist racism at the heart of modern European and U.S. capitalism, as murderers and maimers operate in Western capitals; the neo-colonial structures of the Arab and Third World; and the hollowness of Western liberal democracy and its constellation of civil society institutions.

                        —Max Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I”

This essay takes up the last, reverberatory clause of Ajl’s indictment of Western imperialism in light of the Palestinian fight for liberation: the hollowness of our civil institutions, specifically our cultural institutions. It does this through the case of PEN America, a human rights organization with an alternatively storied and sordid history.

PEN claims to protect the freedom of writers, but is best understood as an exemplar of American cultural imperialism. The contradictions between PEN America’s purported mission and actions became wickedly clear in late January 2024.[1] By this time, even through the blinkers of American news media, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians was unignorable. While in October the press carried water for the IOF by repeating the story that it was unclear who bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital (Israel, definitely Israel), killing, by some estimates, 500 Palestinians seeking refuge there, by December major Western outlets like CNN and The Washington Post were reporting that the IOF had left NICU babies to die and rot in Al-Nasr Hospital. South Africa had lodged its case to the ICJ charging genocide and the ICJ would soon find their case plausible. According to Euro-Med Monitor, in early December, after receiving death threats for months, the IOF bombed poet-professor Refaat al-Areer’s apartment, martyring him and his family.

As the West chanced glimpses at this horror, writers organized to demand PEN take a more unequivocal stance on the killing, jailing, and torture of writers and journalists in Palestine. Despite this pressure campaign, the Los Angeles branch of PEN decided to proceed with a conversation between comedian Moshe Kasher and self-identified “Proud Zionist” Mayim Bialik, who, prior to the event had made social media posts opposing ceasefire. Palestinian writer Randa Jarrar and members of W.A.W.O.G. (Writers Against the War on Gaza) interrupted the event. PEN had Jarrar ejected.[2]

PEN’s ejection of a Palestinian writer in favor of platforming a Zionist celebrity opposed to ending the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians punctuated several months of muted responses from PEN.

---

[1] PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 PEN centers worldwide which collectively form PEN International. PEN America will be referred to as PEN for the remainder of the essay.

[2] A fuller account of the event. PEN’s statement.

---

A Liberal Imperialist in Control: Suzanne Nossel & PEN

PEN’s failures in early 2024 were not the result of cluelessness. Rather, the organization was helmed by an out-and-out imperialist who had already committed to using its humanitarian clout to further U.S. foreign policy interests. Enter PEN’s CEO since 2013, Suzanne Nossel, who can be best understood through a sustained look at her history prior to PEN.

Since graduating from Harvard, Nossel ascended into the highest circles of privilege and power. She began her climbing as an associate at McKinsey & Company, moved on to the Council on Foreign Relations, then served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary under the Hillary Clinton-led Department of State.

As a think tank employee and state official, Nossel assiduously greased the wheels of massively destructive campaigns against Arab nations and wrote apologias when these campaigns failed. She did so through her influential 2004 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Smart Power,” her role as a high-ranking state department employee, testimony as an Amnesty Executive Director, and through articles and op-eds in major outlets like Foreign Policy and The New York Times. Amid allegations of human rights violations, Nossel helped set in motion the catastrophic invasion of Libya, manufacture consent for intervention in Syria, and justify policies relentlessly hostile to Iran.

While one could survey noxious ideas across Nossel’s body of work, her 2004 “Smart Power” represents its most succinct distillation. Why “Smart Power”? It was published in Foreign Affairs, a publication dedicated to hashing out imperial grand strategy, where the U.S. application of force abroad to maintain its position at the head of the world system is a granted. The 2004 timing of the publication was crucial as liberalism tried to form a post-9/11 foreign policy vision. “Smart Power” is widely cited in academic and popular publications (400+ citations in Google Scholar; a Wikipedia entry). A 2009 New Yorker column, riding high on Obama-era triumphalism, includes a fawning profile of this imperial architect: “She’s in her late thirties, she has the strawberry-blond ringlets of a Dickens heroine, and she’s the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch.” The profile ends with a truly cursed quote from Nossel about her soon-to-be boss in the State Department, Hillary Clinton: “‘Hillary was impressive,’ Nossel said a couple of days afterward, in her office, about a third of the way up the Empire State Building. ‘She didn’t gloss over the difficulties, but at the same time she was fundamentally optimistic. She’s saying that, by using all the tools of power in concert, the trajectory of American decline can be reversed. She’ll make smart power cool.’” Hillary Clinton adapted Smart Power as a guiding principle in her role directing the U.S.’s imperial power as the head of the State Department from 2009-2017. Nossel played a crucial role in providing a theory of imperialism in liberal terms.

Nossel’s Smart Power accepts the post-9/11 commitment to U.S. global military hegemony.[3] It rejects the Bush-era naked militarism (think of the invasion of Iraq) for a multilateral approach in which the U.S. is the head of a coalition of subordinate powers (think of the NATO destruction of Libya) and extends its power less visibly by using proxies (think of the massive amounts of arms flowing into Ukraine, Israel, Syria—or the Saudis dropping U.S. bombs on starving Yemenis). It also involves an all-of-the-above approach, using diplomacy, sanctions, culture, etc. to advance U.S. interests. Nossel sees these efforts as complimentary: “A renewed liberal internationalism strategy recognizes that military power and humanitarian endeavors can be mutually reinforcing.” Nossel also accepts the principle of “preemption” i.e. U.S. aggression (think of the Bush Doctrine’s pre-emptive strikes), recasting it as “smart preemption” through language that shades away from violence but does not take violence off the table. In effect, Nossel widens the definition of preemption to involve any number of uninvited U.S. interventions that violate the sovereignty of other states. In sum, Nossel’s “Smart Power” is a crystallization of a post-9/11 liberal re-commitment to global hybrid warfare in think tank addled platitudes.[4] Very cool.

If the dismantling of Iraq and Afghanistan was the outcome of the Bush era, the legacy of Obama and Biden includes the dismantling of Libya, destabilization in Syria and Yemen, and the intensified and world-shattering acceleration of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Nossel’s goal of maintaining global U.S. hegemony that maintains the capitalist order heavily overlaps with that of the neo-cons; the difference is in tactics. Indeed, Nossel’s “Smart Power” may be more pernicious because hiding the exercise of U.S. power through proxies is a powerful way to mystify the U.S.’s relentlessly violent foreign policy.[5]

However, the way Western media consumers receive U.S. imperial activity is far different. Smart Power’s emphasis on “foreign policy that is viewed as liberal” [emphasis mine] has meant replacing George W. Bush on a warship declaring “Mission Accomplished” with a series of humanitarian justifications that in the case of Israel have descended into farce. Nada Elia succinctly describes one distinct flavor of imperialism with a humanitarian face as ‘imperial feminism’: “Such are the consequences of imperial feminism, which presents women’s rights as a Western gift to the benighted Orient, and of pinkwashing, which celebrates Israel as gay-friendly, because its soldiers can fly a Pride flag after torturing Palestinian prisoners.”[6]

The arc of liberal administrations claiming to free Libyans from an Orientalized sovereign and protecting the rights and freedoms of women in Afghanistan in the late 2000s and early 2010s terminates in the blistering contradiction of bombs and aid packages raining down on Gaza.

The unapologetic and unrestrained pursuit of U.S. interests justified by “Smart Power” has been catastrophic for the Arab world. Ali Kadri, a theorist of empire, war, and capital argues that “U.S.-led imperialism in the Arab region pursues a clear policy of state decapitation and depopulation.” Historically, “since the second half of the twentieth century, the number of war and war-related deaths in the Arab Mashreq is in the millions. The number of refugees is even greater. Together, deaths related to war, expulsion from the land, and premature austerity-related-mortality, or deaths occurring long before the historically determined life expectancy, are tantamount to depopulation.” This depopulation campaign is reaching its apogee in Gaza.

Along the way to Gaza there was string of quiet wars, led by liberal imperialists. Foremost for Nossel and the HRC-led State Department was the catastrophic early 2011 intervention in Libya. Here humanitarian discourse was mobilized to preempt “a genocide” for which there was no actual evidence. Nossel herself, as a State Department employee working to craft U.S. policy in relation to the UN Human Rights Commissioned reported to the House of Representatives her office’s work as instrumental in ejecting Libya from the UN General Assembly membership and, ultimately, the U.S.-led NATO invasion of the country. [7] This invasion resulted in NATO bombing civilians. After the gruesome killing of Gaddafi, the state plunged into chaos from which it has not recovered. This chaos includes multiple states committing arms and weapons to various factions, vying for colonial position on Africa’s northern shore; the return of slavery; flooding as the result of post-NATO invasion neglect of crucial infrastructure; and ethnic cleansing, infamously the Tawergha massacre.

Libya should hang from Nossel like an albatross. The veteran journalist and author Chris Hedges cited Nossel’s hiring as executive director in his resignation from PEN: “The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire.”

---

[3] “Washington...should thus offer assertive leadership—diplomatic, economic, and not least, military” (131).

[4] Hybrid warfare as defined by the Tricontinental: “a combination of unconventional and conventional means using a range of state and non-state actors that runs across the spectrum of social and political life (Ceceña, 2012; Borón, 2012; Korybko, 2015).  Korbyko (2015) defines the term hybrid war as: “Externally provoked identity conflicts, which exploit historical, ethnic, religious, socio-economic, and geographic differences within geostrategic transit states through the phased transition from colour revolutions to unconventional wars in order to disrupt, control, or influence multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects by means of regime”

[5] Nossel: "Smart power means knowing that the United States’ own hand is not always its best tool: U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals."

[6] Nada Elia, Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism Inter/Nationalism & Palestine, Pluto Press, 2023.

[7] In praising Nossel, the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for Advancement of Human Rights, wrote: “During her two years in office, she and others were able to return a scrutiny to massive human rights violators such as Iran, Libya and Syria through new mandates to investigate situations. To some extent, they were also able to reduce somewhat the obsessive focus on Israel as compared to other countries, although the structural bias against Israel within the UN system continues.” JBI is actively running cover for genocide, describing Israel’s response to Hamas as “one of the clearest examples of its adherence to the proportionality principle.”

---

Imperial Capture: An Insider Account

Nossel’s tenure at PEN has been marked by internal turmoil and the prioritization of Nossel’s imperial worldview.

In 2013, PEN was looking for a new CEO after the newspaper veteran Steve Isenberg announced his retirement. While staff lobbied for a candidate with a literary background, the board chose Nossel, a hawk feathered in blood. The announcement of Nossel’s hiring blindsided staff and polarized the cramped Soho office. Nossel’s ties to the highest levels of the foreign policy establishment and projected presidential candidate Hillary Clinton were not lost to them, though they hoped PEN would be a pit stop on the way to a position in the Clinton administration.

According to a former PEN employee who spoke on condition of anonymity, soon after Nossel’s arrival at PEN she began a unilateral, tumultuous transformation of the direction of the organization.

Nossel’s cleaning house included running out one of the only women of color on staff. She made decisions unilaterally, did little to build relationships, refused staff requests to be paid for off-the-clock labor necessary to continue the organization’s programming, and shortchanged employee benefits. Layoffs were followed by high-profile resignations, including that of the director of advocacy. Nossel and management are currently embroiled in a high-profile battle with its union, PEN America United.

Nossel also transformed PEN’s output. This meant ceasing publishing original works by writers, burying that digital archive, and requesting PEN staff publish links to her editorial writing on international affairs from other websites like Politico.[8] PEN began to reflect Nossel’s imperial worldview and, under Nossel, PEN maintains what Juliana Spahr describes as “a symbiotic relationship with national security interests.” This includes a PEN conference on “The Future of Truth” which featured an ex-CIA director and general, an ex-attorney for the NSA, and a former DOD employee.[9]

Under Nossel, PEN’s literary programming is disintegrating and its advocacy has contorted itself to accommodate the increasingly unpopular foreign policy positions of the Democratic establishment. While Nossel is a particularly risible character, it is unlikely a Nossel-less PEN is redeemable. As documented by Deborah Cohn and Megan Doherty, PEN has historic ties to the CIA and State Department and has served as a vehicle for U.S. soft power abroad.

---

[8] At the same time, as chronicled in a 2019 New Yorker story, a white staffer (Antonio Aiello) appears to have been involved in attempt to launch a “congress” composed of minoritized writers meeting in an informal workshop setting. The program was attached to the deep pockets of the Riggio Foundation and shrouded in secrecy, perhaps because one workshop participant was Stephanie Riggio who, unbeknownst to the others, was running the show. Despite the seemingly intentional diverse composition of the workshop, discussions of race and gender were discouraged by the lead white staff member, Jackson Taylor (also in charge of PEN’s prison writing program) who, in response to pushback, banned class discussion before pulling the plug on the project altogether. The purpose of the workshop appears muddled. On one hand, it appears to simply be Stephanie Riggio’s vanity project, a way for her to purchase access to other writers. If you squint hard enough in the initial branding of it as a “congress” you might see PEN blundering its way toward trying to develop low-rent Congress for Cultural Freedom 2.0.

[9] See Spahr’s DuBois’ Telegram, Harvard University Press, 2018, 168.

---

Loud Silence: PEN and Genocide

The fact of PEN’s ties to the foreign policy establishment and national security state should be all any writer needs to know to join efforts to hammer the organization to dust. However, it is also important to understand how PEN has used language to weaponize a humanitarian and rights-based discourse to mystify genocide. These distinctions matter because they can be applied to other literary and cultural organizations whose communications confuse the fact of the matter.

PEN’s response has been to defend Israel and Israeli expression first, and then to either stay silent on the matter of Palestinians or present a weak defense of Palestinian cultural resistance. Before October 7th, PEN had regularly issued condemnatory press releases immediately following attacks on any international writing community. It issued such a statement in its email to subscribers on the morning of October 7th. As early as October 13th, Israel’s assault on Gaza was labeled “a textbook case of genocide” by a prominent scholar in Jewish Currents, yet PEN remained silent on the atrocities committed by Israel for months. Their next email to subscribers was on December 27th, requesting year-end donations.

As of the moment of writing of this essay in May, June, and July 2024, even after overwhelming evidence and untold suffering, a boycott of its 2024 literary awards by the awardees that caused the cancellation of the awards ceremony, and a letter signed by thousands of writers and artists, asking PEN “to respond to the extraordinary threat that Israel’s genocide of Palestinians represents for the lives of writers in Palestine and to freedom of expression everywhere,” PEN has refused to use the word “genocide.”[10] It prefers the comfortable liberal framing of a “war and humanitarian crisis.” “War” suggests a symmetrical conflict between two sovereign nations with standing armies. In the broadest terms, what is occurring is, rather, the assault by a settler-colonial state backed by the full might of U.S. imperial power upon an already displaced, rightless Palestinian population. The object of this assault, as has been expressed by Israeli officials and identified by the ICJ, is mass civilian death and the displacement of civilians from Gaza (genocide). If we are to be more specific, Israel has decided to kill as many civilians as possible (genocide) in the belief that this will destroy the base of support for Hamas, which is waging a guerilla struggle for liberation for the Palestinian people. This struggle is supported by the larger Axis of Liberation.[11] In either case, there is a radical asymmetry in power and Israel has decided in this struggle to radically accelerate the process of a genocide which began before October 7th to achieve its ends.

Yet PEN’s “war and humanitarian crisis” is presented without location or agent. The “humanitarian crisis,” beyond genocide, is the famine raging in Gaza, the preconditions of which were created well before October 7th and which has been inflicted upon Gaza by the stranglehold Israel holds on its airspace, waters, and surface. It has included the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. It has included a series of flour massacres in which the IOF shot and killed hundreds of starving Palestinians trying to collect aid from convoys at the Kuwait roundabout.

PEN’s dangerously inaccurate descriptions of the direction and agents of violence in Gaza find their parallel in PEN’s response to Palestine Solidarity activism in the United States. On October 31st, PEN issued a bulletin on “Handling Rising Antisemitism on Campuses,” putting their weight behind a narrative that campus protests are characterized by antisemitism while also calling for campuses to undertake “enhanced security measures.” They did so before making a statement about the more numerous and violent hate crimes against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim individuals as well as the intensifying criminalization of their and their allies’ protests.

On December 7th, PEN wrung its hands over the “Crisis of Polarization and Free Speech,” again working to frame the conflict as symmetrical and the problem as a lack of moderation, rather than that of the historic slaughter of a civilian population by a nuclear-armed settler-state. In this bulletin, Nossel repeats the canard that “the conflict” is eternal: “recognizing the many-sided nature of a dispute that dates back millennia and has confounded generations of diplomats and statesmen.” The conflict is not eternal. It is a political-historical phenomena in which European political Zionism found imperial sponsors in Britain, France, and the United States across the 20th and 21st centuries.[12]

As police began to wield rubber bullets, clubs, and zipties against students seeking to end the genocide via university divestment across the nation, PEN issued a press release condemning the protests and focused on criminalizing speech, alleging “that some protesters taunted [students] with antisemitic slurs.” In this case, PEN links to a news report that quotes protestors as chanting “Long live the intifada,” “Hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go” and “Killers on campus.” Though it wasn’t always the case, the notion that criticism of Zionism and its adherents or the State of Israel is not antisemitism should be common sense at this historical juncture. However, PEN appears to have adopted those definitions provided by staunch supporters of Israel like the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt that equate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism and expressions of solidarity with Palestinians and the freedom of Palestine with antisemitism.[13] In its communications, PEN has often translated statements of solidarity with Palestine and criticisms of the state of Israel with exceptional and isolated cases of antisemitism, inviting readers to buy into the myth, gleefully embraced by the center and right, that campus Palestine solidarity encampments are hotbeds of antisemitism. In doing so, PEN’s “defense” of student freedom of speech has been so feeble as to be meaningless.[14] 

Even as the repression of student protests against genocide assumed historic proportions and PEN spoke out against them in an April 29th bulletin, it still could not help centering the potential hurt feelings of some students in the face of Pro-Palestine/anti-genocide chants: “The fact that peaceful protests may involve rhetoric or slogans that some students and members of the campus community find deeply abhorrent or offensive cannot be viewed as justification for calling in outside police or the National Guard.” Nowhere in this communication are mentions of student demands or the genocide and epistemicide that have fueled them, replacing attention to the dead, displaced, and suffering with attention to the emotional barometer of imperial subjects identifying with an ethnostate.

PEN’s two-step of first centering the feelings of those who don’t like Palestine solidarity protests before expressing concern over the lives of Palestinians and physical safety of students reached farcical levels in early May. After seemingly adopting the ADL’s definition of antisemitic speech, PEN issued a press release on May 1st stating its “concern” over enshrining into law overly broad definitions of antisemitism. PEN is concerned about the criminalization of speech it helped fan. At this point a violent reaction against the student encampments by colleges and universities themselves was already in full swing, culminating most visibly in UCLA authorizing cops to shoot faculty and students with bullets coated in rubber.

PEN’s slow-footed reactions and constant false equivalency might be seen as the product of a hapless and wildly out of touch organization more concerned with the disposition of its donors than with facts on the ground. But it’s also possible that PEN, headed by a liberal imperialist, is engaging in a purposeful strategy of leveraging the credibility of a humanitarian organization to flood the zone with shit in order to muddy the field of the debate.

During the month of February, well after PEN was catching heat for its silence, it tweeted its condemnation of the actions of several nations against writers (“we condemn,” “PEN America Condemns”). It did not use condemnatory language against the state of Israel. It posted or reposted tweets critical of Russia (11), China (6), and Iran (4), more than those of the entity engaged in destroying every university in Gaza (3). It posted summaries of other organizations’ defense of journalists in Gaza. None of its tweets name Israel as a killer of journalists or writers. Rather, these deaths are blamed on the “War in Israel and Gaza.” None of the tweets express that PEN explicitly affirms the defense of journalists in Gaza. PEN names as under threat a number of threatened artists and activists in China, Russia, and Iran. These posts often include pictures of the artists. Nowhere does PEN explicitly articulate its concern for a single Palestinian writer, artist, journalist, or intellectual that is under threat (though they all are) or who has been murdered by Israel. Rather, they include a summary of another organization’s mourning the death of Palestinian visual artist Fathi Ghaben. In an entire month’s worth of communications read carefully and taken at their word, PEN takes no position on the genocide of Palestinians, does not condemned Israel for this genocide, and mourns no Palestinian writer.

Contents of PEN Tweets and Re-posts in February 2024.

This does not reflect the content of links included in the posts.

Black History Month	12
Campus Speech	18
Book and Movie Bans	34
State policy and legislation on speech and education	34
National Policy – Social Media Regulation	3
Human Rights Legislation, United States	1
Libraries are Good	3
Suzanne Nossel Editorial or Article in Non-PEN Publication	9
PEN-associated author boost	8
Disinformation and AI	4
Prison and Justice Writing Program	2
PEN Literary Programing	2
PEN Summary of Programming	1
PEN Statement Defending Jan 31 Ejection	1
Other	5
Russia: Criticism of State Actions	11
China: Criticism of State Actions	6
Iran: Criticism of State Actions	4
Israel: Criticism of State Actions	3
Sudan: Criticism of State Actions	2
Mexico: Criticism of State Actions	2
Vietnam: Criticism of State Actions	2
Thailand: Criticism of State Actions	2
Egypt: Criticism of State Actions	1
United States: Press Freedom	1
PEN Statement on War in Israel and Gaza	1
War in Israel and Gaza – Death of Palestinian Journalists	1
Ukraine: Pro-Ukraine Programming	5
Individual Victims of Repression
Li Qiaochu (China)	1
Ilham Tohti (China)	1
Alexei Navalny (Russia)	3
Vladimir Kara-Murza (Russia)	1
Darya Kozyreva (Russia)	1
Narges Mohammadi (Iran)	2
Sepideh Rashno (Iran)	1
Fathi Ghaben (Gaza)	1

It is unfathomable that a free speech organization that feels compelled to weigh in on international affairs would not dedicate the majority of its communications to denouncing the unprecedented mass killing, jailing, and displacement of Palestinian writers, journalists, and academics. 

Here we might turn to the Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqa, killed by Israel in 2024 in April through imprisonment, in regard to the larger structure of human rights discourse as applied to Israel: “This discourse, employed by human rights organizations, concentrates its special efforts in order to prove specific violations considered by the Israeli judiciary and media as the exception to the rule, which is respect for human and prisoners’ rights. The result is that contrary to the pretense of exposing and being transparent, in reality this discourse hides facts and obscures truth.”[15] We know that under an apartheid system within Israel and military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, there is no respect for human and prisoners’ rights; rather, the system is committed to genocide. PEN reflects this centrist and liberal discourse of normalizing the idea that in general Israel is an equitable democratic society marred by a few exceptional incidents. This idea has no connection to reality and the distance grows greater by the day. Palestinian resistance has revealed, again, that Israel is a massively, structurally violent settler society where violence against Palestinians is gratuitous and regular. This same human rights discourse treats signs (even if fabricated) of resistance to this gratuitously violent order as themselves gratuitously violent and not as an exception (as Israeli acts of savagery are treated as exceptional) but rather indicative that resistance itself is systemically illiberal and that those who resist are placed outside of the order of ordinary rights. It is a shame Palestinians are silenced, fired, beaten, jailed, bombed, and killed. But that is what happens.

---

[10] On the UN Goldstone report in regard to Israeli war crimes in Gaza during the December 2009 Operation Cast Lead, Nossel criticized the credibility of the report and, generally, the UN Human Rights Council’s attention to Israel, and suggested that Israel should ultimately investigate itself and hold itself accountable for human rights abuses.

[11] See Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I” in Agrarian South.

[12] See Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020).

[13] Nossel explicitly adapts the equation that criticism of Israel equals antisemitism in a 2020 interview with the Jewish Book Council when she labels the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement as antisemitic: “At times, the defense of free speech can be pit­ted against the dri­ve to com­bat anti­semitism; for exam­ple, through laws that advo­cate pun­ish­ing those who sup­port BDS. We are wit­ness­ing a spike in anti­se­mit­ic expres­sion and actions, which is gen­uine­ly alarm­ing.”

[14] Indeed, Nossel’s defense of the speech of Neo-nazis is more thoughtful and nuance-mongering than that of Pro-Palestinians protestors: “The ACLU was crit­i­cized for sup­port­ing the Nazis in their quest to march, but the orga­ni­za­tion ulti­mate­ly won itself enor­mous legit­i­ma­cy by demon­strat­ing that it was pre­pared to apply its prin­ci­ples even in rela­tion to a cause that most of its mem­bers found abhor­rent.”

[15] Walid Daqqa, “Consciousness Molded or the Re-identification of Torture.”

---

PEN, Who Counts As A Writer, & Bourgeois Mind-Rot

Throughout Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and epistemicide of Palestinian writers, scholars, and intellectuals, PEN has stuck to directing its audiences’ attention to writers jailed in countries who oppose the United States’ strategic interests. A related tool PEN has used in service of shifting attention from the ongoing genocide is its Freedom to Write Index, a purported global survey of those targeted for state oppression via their writing. PEN’s Freedom to Write campaign debuted in 2019. The 2023 index itself reports China and Iran as the top two countries with the most writers jailed. It spotlights the Asia-Pacific (152) and Middle East and North-Africa (105) as the regions with the most writers jailed. Is it a coincidence that these are also the regions where the United States has waged the most wars (Middle East and North-Africa) and is, with the Obama-era pivot to Asia, rapidly expanding its military footprint.

PEN reports 100+ writers jailed in each of these regions. The number of reported writers jailed in the Americas? 10. These numbers, to put it mildly, raise questions about PEN’s methodology and who counts as a writer.

PEN’s methodology: “The 2023 Freedom to Write Index is a count of the writers who were held in prison or detention during 2023 because of their writing or for otherwise exercising their freedom of expression. Individuals must have spent at least 48 hours behind bars in a single instance of detention between January 1 and December 31, 2023. We define imprisonment when an individual is serving a sentence following a conviction, while detention is defined as individuals held in custody pending charges, or those held in pre-trial or administrative detention.”

The numbers this methodology reveals reflect bourgeois conceptions of what constitutes a writer and the imperialist agenda of the counters.

For instance, the 2023 index does not include Walid Daqqa, the Palestinian prison writer and thinker cited earlier, jailed by Israel for 37 years until his death in 2024. The great influence of Daqqa’s prison writing contributed to the extension of his sentence, as well as the medical neglect and torture that quickened his death. In 2018, Daqqa, already imprisoned, was brought to trial for writing a children’s book.

Neither does the index include the enormous number of Palestinians arrested for social media posts. 410 were arrested in 2022. Reporting from American outlets in December 2023 found Israel had initiated 250 prosecutions for social media posts, mostly of Palestinian students. For PEN, Palestinian posts aren’t writing and Palestinian posters aren’t writers involved in politically resonant and consequential activity.[16] Given the increase in social media arrests after October 7, it stretches credulity to believe that a mere 17 Palestinians exercising their freedom of expression (PEN’s count) spent more than 48 hours in Israeli jails. In March 2024 alone, Israel held no less than 17 Palestinian journalists in administrative detention.

Moreover, Israel’s apartheid system is such that Palestinians can be held indefinitely without being charged under what is termed administrative detention. B’Tselem: “Since March 2002, not a single month has gone by without Israel holding at least 100 Palestinians in administrative detention.” This is to say, Israel can jail a Palestinian for a look, a word, for being Palestinian. Such an extreme state of well-documented oppression calls for latitude in counting who has been jailed for speech or writing given that it can incite jailing but not a formal charge.

And of our 10 writers jailed in the Americas?

The index posits that there are two individuals from the United States and six in Cuba. Are we supposed to believe that of the 1.9 million individuals the United States’ sprawling prison population, only two of them are there because of their writing or for otherwise exercising their freedom of expression?

What of the RICO and domestic charges leveled against 61 individuals organizing against Cop City? According to the ACLU, “the indictment paints the provision of mutual aid, the advocacy of collectivism, and even the publishing of zines as hallmarks of a criminal enterprise.” Why haven’t any of these individuals been counted? Zines aren’t writing? Advocating collectivism isn’t expression?

What of the thousands of people or protestors in the United States jailed or detained on charges of disorderly conduct, the substance of which is insulting a cop aka “contempt of cop”? Isn’t this political expression?[17]

And what of the waves of legislation washing over a bedrock of pre-existing law criminalizing protest? That makes assembling in public space to provide collective voice subject to any number of criminal charges? As we have seen in the violent, carceral responses to Standing Rock, to the 2020 uprisings, and now to Palestine solidarity, the United States wants people to shut the fuck up and will create that silence—remove the signals and signage—from public space through laws that allow the ruling class to say they are not targeting speech or writing but rather bodies, trespassers, loiterers, and maskers.

Some of the most profound poetry in the United States in the past several months has been the sign poetry of student encampments: banners renaming academic halls “Hind’s Hall” or a bookshelf in a student encampment named “Refaat Alareer Memorial Library.” The police have destroyed these poems and beaten and jailed the poets who wrote them. PEN doesn’t bother to identify or track these writers once they are in police custody.

In the largest sense, the United States has sought to strangulate through law and its enforcers what Kluge and Negt call the proletarian public sphere—one that includes zines, graffiti, signs scrawled on cardboard.[18] By hewing to bourgeois definitions of who counts as a writer, PEN’s erasure of that public sphere and its thousands of writers is part of this assault on a proletarian public sphere.

To get to two, PEN only counts in America writers legible as members of a Habermasian bourgeois public sphere, writers who have access to extensive training and accreditation through publication and, generally, present themselves as a proper subject—a needle’s eye for working class, minoritized writers. A wall for the collectives, for the necessarily anonymous. PEN’s quantification of jailed writers condescends, wildly, to the intelligence of anyone who with some knowledge of the world-beating scope of mass incarceration in the United States and how the speech and writing of working class, racialized, and indigenous groups in the United States are the grounds for criminal charges.

And the thousands of students in the United States arrested on various piddly-shit charges applied in an ad-hoc fashion when we know their real crime was expressing Pro-Palestinian speech? Or even just the 132 students arrested at SUNY New Paltz? Do you think PEN will count them?

And what of the uncounted number of individuals in the archipelago of U.S.-operated black sites? Guantanamo? How would we even know why they are there? They have written. They are writing.

There were two writers in 2023 in the United States jailed for their expression.

Michelle Murphy has a word for these kinds of emotionally charged performances of population quantification: “phantasmagram.” She defines the phantasmagram as such: “The term phantasmagram points to the affectively charged and extra-objective relations that are part of the speculative force of numbers.” And we must look at PEN’s numbers as exactly this: speculative fantasy. And a quantitative fantasy that parades as objective the purely subjective racism, classism, and chauvinism that finds jailed writers quite conveniently in states that have found themselves in the crosshairs of U.S. empire for resisting subordination to the U.S.-led global capitalist system.

Yet, even if we were to take PEN’s counts seriously, we could rework them—presto!—to show that Israel leads the world in jailing writers:

According to PEN, China has jailed 107 writers. Iran 49, Saudi Arabia 19, Vietnam 19, Israel 17.

If we consider number of writers jailed against total population size we find that Israel leads even PEN’s fantasy world in writers jailed per capita.[19]

Such analysis is absent from PEN’s report.

Historically, human-rights groups’ distortions of scales of oppression have helped manufacture the popular consent for war on these countries. We might think of the presentation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya as unique and intolerable locations of oppression in need of U.S.-led intervention: the U.S. bombed the women of Afghanistan to save them. While many nations have jails and militaries and are linked to the accumulation of capital in one way or another, Kadri reminds us that “the power to which war is foundational in financial and ideological terms is the U.S.”[20] PEN’s work mystifying this fact through its incessant pointing away from the U.S. and Israel paves the way for further hybrid wars and the continuation of the campaign of extermination the U.S. is backing against Palestinians.

---

[16] Note PEN’s willingness to identify an anti-state poster in Russia as a writer worth defending.

[17] Lopez, C. E. (2010). Disorderly (mis)conduct: the problem with contempt of cop arrests. Advance: The Journal of the ACS Issue Groups, 4(1), 71-90.

[18] See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

[19] China 107/1,412,000,000 = 7.57790368e-8
Iran 49/88,550,000 = 5.53359684e-7
Saudi Arabia 19/36,410,000 = 5.21834661e-7
Vietnam 19/98,190,000 = 1.93502393e-7
Israel 17/9,558,000 = 0.00000177861

[20] Kadri, Ali, “Imperialism with Reference to Syria.” Springer, 2019, 31.

---

The End of PEN(s): Cultural Imperialism & Writers in the Imperial Core

In the face of fierce organizing, PEN has buckled but not broken. The determined, principled actions against PEN by writers and activists have caused it to cancel its 2024 Literary Awards Ceremony and World Voices festival.

PEN has drawn such intense criticism because Palestinian resistance has shown us how profoundly it is failing its purported mission, its prominence as a literary organization, its considerable budget, and because Nossel is a particularly detestable operator.

In this time Nossel has only doubled down, continuing to theorize strategies for waging cultural imperialism in a February 2024 Foreign Affairs article entitled “The Real Culture Wars.” Without a word for Palestinians, Nossel recommends a strategy for which the U.S. and compliant civil institutions avoid direct export of U.S. culture but, rather, enlist compatible artists and intellectuals embedded in those societies over which the U.S. seeks influence. Following the U.S.’s strategy of war by proxy, Nossel advocates cultural imperialism by proxy—divide and conquer. Nowhere in the article does Nossel eschew violence and her language is self-consciously, chauvinistically militaristic, framing culture as playing a leading role in a global battle of Western democracies (beating the shit out of their students) against Orientalized Eastern totalitarians (Russia, China, Iran, Russia): “Western governments should recognize that culture creators are part of the infantry of antiauthoritarianism. U.S. embassy personnel should make a point in developing relationships with key cultural figures.” Global cultural war with shades of millenarianism.

We need to be honest with ourselves here and ask why it took such rank hypocrisy in the face of a world-cleaving genocide for PEN to draw fire from the literary community. Years before October 7th, PEN’s emphasis had already shifted to align with the priorities of liberal imperialism. There was little outcry.[21]

Why? First, I think this speaks to the hegemony of liberal-imperial ideology over these elite cultural leadership positions. Second, discussions of cultural imperialism are muted within literary circles: we have not taken seriously the relationship between cultural production, human rights discourses, and the reproduction of the United States’ imperial power. 

Through Nossel, PEN represents an example par excellence of a larger literary non-profit industry that is a hand-servant of liberal imperialism and, in some cases, partially constituted by the violence-directing wings of the state. Their modes of operation include active suppression of radical voices, the weaponization of humanitarianism in service of national war-making projects, and constituting politically feeble theatres of conversation in regard to what constitutes national and international literature.

Whereas we may be more resistant to shallow weaponizations of identity politics in the realm of politics (having an Arab University President crack down on Pro-Palestinian students, as in Columbia’s case, for instance) to maintain a violent status quo, can we say same of our cultural institutions?

It is not enough to give them a pass because they hold up writers from other countries without being curious about how and why they select these poets and how to situate these poets, their poetics, and their politics both within their context and a larger context of international relations. This requires us to know something about the interaction of cultural production, reception, and states.

Here a brief illustration by way of the Latin American literary boom might be useful. As Deborah Cohn and Juliana Spahr have documented, private foundations, the CIA, State Department, cut-outs like the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and literary non-profits like PEN collaborated in the 1960s, mobilizing significant resources to create cultural arenas that both promoted and depoliticized the work of Latin-American authors. Though individual writers did not always stick with the program, such cultural diplomacy was sponsored by the State as part of a cold-war effort to pull authors out of the orbit of Spanish-language publishing networks with more radical politics, particularly those associated with the spirit of the Cuban revolution. State and foundation dollars funneled to organizations like PEN would help soften the attitudes of Latin American authors towards the United States and counter the influence of organizations like the Casa de las Américas, a Cuban state-sponsored foundation that disseminated a new wave of Latin American literature with a revolutionary and de-colonial bent.[22]

This is not a thing of the past. The journalist Chris Hedges recognized that Nossel’s PEN was symptomatic of “the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.”

Yet in our present moment, Spahr has noted the increasing willingness of writers supposedly operating autonomously from the larger literary establishment to take state money and participate in state-sponsored international events. Establishment writers like Victoria Chang, Dianne Seuss, and Li-Young Lee have their poems appear alongside articles justifying the killing of Palestinian children as lawful in The Atlantic. Poet Laureates lay low.[23]

Given the liberal establishment’s commitment to genocide in Gaza, ambivalence about the relationships between writers, the state, and literary and human rights organizations must give way to direct, forceful criticism of organizations and poets doing the work of empire or allowing publications to use their work as a fig leaf over genocidal or imperial discourse.

So, as writers, how do we do this? Fargo Nissim Tbakhi outlines a series of actions for writers to take in his trenchant “Notes on the Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” They are very good. Do them.

In addition, we should approach literary organizations with a well-earned skepticism and have a clear and common-sense set of criteria when judging whether or not an organization can be trusted to not coopt our cultural labor into acceptance of an intolerable imperial order.

What to do will always be an open-ended question as strategies are tested, as conditions and capacities change. In the meanwhile, the following is a list of questions to ask of cultural organizations to try to determine where they stand and what actions to take and demands to make in relation to them:

• The basic stress-test: Where does the organization stand on Palestine?

  • If it has made statements, has it gone beyond both-sides condemnation?

  • Has it identified Israel’s conduct as genocide?

• Has the organization signed onto the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli (PACBI)?

• Does the organization maintain ties to Zionists?

• Does the organization platform Zionists?

• Does the organization platform Palestinians?

• Does the organization receive funding from the state or major foundations? What are the politics of those foundations? Who sits on the boards of those foundations? What characterizes their political donations? What are their other institutional links and loyalties?

• Does the organization, through its pensions, retirement funds, and/or foundations, have investments in Israel (like Israel Bonds), Israeli companies (like Elbit Systems), or the military industrial complex (Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, etc).

• If the organization has an international dimension:

  • Does its internationalism converge or diverge with U.S. state policy?

  • How does it characterize the United States’ role in international affairs? Is it able to criticize U.S. militarism and hard power?

  • If it criticizes states or state actors in the name of human rights, what is the balance of that criticism? Is it focused disproportionately on those political formations of countries the United States is actively involved directly or through proxies in sanctioning (Venezuela, Iran), bombing (Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, etc.), or manufacturing the consent for conflict (China)? Does it account for human rights abuses done by the U.S., Israel, or other junior partners in the U.S.-led order (Canada).

  • If it platforms dissident writers, does it do so only to feature writers whose discourse centers on criticizing state entities opposed to U.S. strategic interests while remaining mute on the colonial and imperial violence of the U.S. led imperial order? Do they platform writers opposing ongoing settler-colonial violence within the U.S., Canada, Israel, or British or French colonies?

  • If it hosts conversations or conferences:

    • Do these depoliticize cultural production? Do they evaporate the political i.e. depoliticize issues in attention to universalism?

    • Do these create space for decolonial, anti-imperial, socialist, anarchist, or communist ideologies?

Let’s push our stress tests further to that wide swath of literary organizations busy being silent. Here, I am thinking in particular about those organizations that constitute their “voices” through the writers they make their face via literary reading and speaker series, city and regional literary organizations, conferences:

• Do they feature authors who speak to stress-test issues like Palestine? Or anti-imperialism or actual decolonial or left-revolutionary movements? Or do they only feature authors who say it’s all very complicated? Or authors who are rigorously silent on issues like this?

• Do they feature Palestinian authors?

• If the organization has a more local orientation, what are the stress test issues in your community that involved the interlinked webs of carceral and imperial power? Police abolition is one such instance given the well-documented connections between the IOF and various police and sheriff’s departments across the United States.

As writers, it is not enough to simply get Nossel fired or to stain PEN’s reputation, though that’s a start. We must continue to identify, critically debate, and counteract the instantiations of cultural imperialism where they appear in our spheres of action.

A major power of the avant-garde is its capacity to recognize when a new break with the conventional order is warranted and to make that break, hard and complete. In the lightning flashes of Palestinian resistance, the time for that break is now.

Historically, organizations like PEN worked to create prestigious discourse networks defined against revolutionary-spirited publishing houses like Casa de las Américas. Our break with PEN and the PENs of the world must be hard and complete. In that rift, what’s to be done is an open and thrilling question. But let me propose that whatever we do must be finely attuned to the political, economic, and social dimensions of our emergent moment in its multiple scales and geographies. Let me propose that we create new cultural networks allied with revolutionary and liberatory politics in general and Palestinian resistance in particular; that we break down the firewalls that quarantine the so-called literary from the political; that we recognize, strengthen, and expand existing publishing and cultural-political networks already doing this work. And through it all, we must be more than writers. We must read and write in a dialectical relation with political action and the reproduction of that action.

We owe it to the decimated universities and libraries in Gaza, to the massacred writers, academics, journalists, street-artists, prison writers, those inscribing and reinscribing on the surface of their consciousness those burning words they would speak or write if their bodies were freed. We owe it to Palestinians keeping the evolving flames of their culture alive in the diaspora, the tents of Rafah and encircled camps and villages in the West Bank. We owe it to the wider resistance struggling to liberate Gaza and all of Palestine from an occupation that has taken selfies of itself burning libraries and turning Palestinian universities into military bases and torture houses. We owe a robust anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and (really) decolonial literary culture fighting for the liberation of all to the writers not yet born in a still undecided future.

---

[21] I took PEN’s righteous posturing at face-value when an editor for them solicited and published poems from me eight years ago for their now-defunct poetry series.

[22] See Deborah Cohn, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism During the Cold War, Vanderbilt University Press, 2012; Juliana Spahr, DuBois’ Telegram.

[23] U.S. poet Laureate Ada Limón has made no public statements about Israel’s genocide. Amanda Gorman, the National Youth Poet Laureate and who performed a poem at Biden’s inauguration, has made no public statements about Israel’s genocide.

---

∩

Joe Hall is a writer and educator. His books of poetry include Fugue & Strike (Black Ocean 2023) and People Finder, Buffalo (Cloak 2024). Current Affairs on Fugue & Strike: “a remarkable poetic project, unlike anything else in literature today.” Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at bars, squats, universities, and rivers. Protean, Postcolonial Studies, mercury firs, Best Buds! Collective, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have all featured his writing. In Buffalo, he has taught community-based poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers.