Tenderness has no place here. / The long lineage / of gentle touch severed / by jagged images of the instant.
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Behold No More the Chalked Calves of the Hunter
the whip crack from the snout of the gun / steel elephant blued / to a deep, desperate negative / stark against the snow
Read MoreStink Ape Resurrection Primer (Part 3)
The Rumbumble followed, its bellowing laugh chipped through the alarm in a way that made Junyp’s head feel like it might explode. Just before the ship swallowed her, The Rumbumble chopped off her hand with its horn and pulled Junyp back. They watched the hatch slam shut. The ship burst up from the swamp with a slurpy whump and disappeared into the sky.
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Wer Don't Need Much
as we wipe our tears on stone altars
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Crown
beware how delicately you wear / this crown of oblivion.
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I Wish I Was a Rich F*G
Working in that warehouse / Scanning Boxes by the rate / In Bezo’s dusty ass house. / I wish I was a rich f*g.
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I Gather
it’s too quiet, / too dead, / too ripped apart by sirens, / too veiled by the rot of concrete
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What if You Had Taken the Day Off?
What if you had taken a day off? / Read books in backyard jungles? / Enjoyed your coffee before it got cold?
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Last Night on Earth
we’ve imagined more / than this last night on earth / bent over grinding machines
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Abstract Art
you are the art / that hangs by strands
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Bitter
you are the tree / that I nailed myself to
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Class Revenge Fanfiction
I want to create characters not that people aspire to be like but whom people see themselves in who end up doing things they already aspire to do but won’t, for whatever reason. Probably this penchant for fictional violence against wealth hoarders will get me into trouble eventually. Until then, however, I will continue to write about working class robots in sewers trying to shoot the evil meat above.
Read More16 Contentions 4 A Brechtian Cybernetics
The internet promises democracy but delivers reactionary politics (and is designed to do so). It promises expression and valorization of the subject, but delivers, more often, dopamine denial and depression. Meanwhile the analog, at least in the arts, promises authenticity, but fails to deliver much more than rarefied bourgeois spaces, out of touch with the vast majority of the human race — as Amiri Baraka would say, “fingerprints of rich painters”... Or, empty art museum spectacles; Epcot Center immersion for the cosmopolitan bourgeois and petit-bourgeois.
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Withdrawal
withdrawal…
the worst is the parasitic organism
organism of the gut dying gunfire organism
the hallucinatory organism of railway seasons
hypnotic golden morality organism the kind
that justify them worthless carnival shootings
of jazz and tejano toned people; far away omitted poor;
momentary people...
a flu of noise bullets picking at the silence
death from spiral barrelled throats
weak cities black dimes accustomed to accumulated crisis
country horses force submission
fear not the gallery
be as empty as the dead exist
never count again years of defeat
gnaw the backstage rats grown fat with nervous words
seize the jealous ankles and mechanical muscles
of capital
the old god
the dead god
all that’s left is roses
This work originally appeared in the print edition of Locust Review #7.
Laura Fair Schulz, The Song of the Barren Tree (2021)
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Some Days Are Better Than Others
JUST AFTER sunset, the bay doors opened and two men picked their way through the half-light, carefully, through the remains of East End Offset, a recently abandoned printing plant in Barking. They stood together, one in grey overalls and the other in a suit (no tie). They stood and watched a giant cocoon of mulched newspaper as it vibrated softly, together/alone with the marvelous. To kill the (near) silence, the Suited Man (Dave) looked up at Felix (the Man in Overalls) and said:
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