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
Read MoreOn the Rest of Us
There are four great interwoven crimes that create capitalism — enclosure and the creation of the proletariat, industrializing chattel slavery, colonization/imperialism, and the subjugation of women and gender normativity. Not one of these is possible without racism. Not one of them is “over.” Not for working-class and poor people. Not one of them has stopped its ruthless destruction of life and being. But the mountain will come crashing down in a wave of a billion voices, accusing, exposing, confessing, rebelling. Hamilton’s book of brilliant poems is, in this sense, prophecy.
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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:
Read MoreMy Body Planned Something
WE WERE heading east to pick up the samples from the army depot. Our 29th time on I-40. The return trip would be number 30.
“I probably put out more CO2 doing this job than the company cleans up at the site!”
My body had looked up some figures. It should stop looking up figures. Idle hands, devil’s workshop, hasty conclusions.
Read MoreMimetic Society and its Consequences
The architecture of possibility always-already compromised
The unconscious has been gentrified
Meme shocked and future lost
Mommy milkers on the final boss
A Most Deserved Anxiety: Four Poems by Joe Stapleton
A most deserved anxiety
The great pig of the North
Reeking, blood dripping from its snout
Glances warily about
For it heard the scream
Exit Interview
You needed me more than I needed you.
I retired Friday of Labor Day Weekend,
eight months after I told the boss off
for the first time, four days in a row,
my product manager told him to sit down.
Don't Get Lost In Heaven
AT 11.23PM on the 31st of October 2020 an unknown and unidentified aircraft appeared in airspace directly above London. The aircraft was and has remained motionless and uncontactable to date. On the same day an MP4 was discovered in the cloud archive of the Department of Metaphysics, Hillingdon Facility, apparently pertaining to the incident. This is a transcript of that file.
Read MoreI Am an Embryo
A collection of cells
and half-formed tissue.
I have no thoughts,
no will,
no urge to change the world.
Stink Ape Resurrection Primer
“YOUR FUCKING ocean is on fire.” The blob of glowing plasma pleaded in disbelief.
The panel of thirteen human representatives exchanged hushed glances. One of the humans spoke as the whispers subsided: “It strikes us as suspicious that you’re this concerned with our resources.”
Read MoreBlack Dime
REMEMBER WHEN you stung like a bee, leaving your ink all over the kitchen floor and the orchids in the kitchen window never seemed to notice how drab the sun had become over the years? It makes no sense. All languages die in the gap. So, don’t speak. There’s no reason to give voice to our discontents. We are driving and the bridge is a snake crossing the snaking water ways. I became possessed with your hand on the back of my neck. I know you by the smell of lavender and tea. Don’t blink. Never blink again. We have all the time there ever was.
Read MoreDisintegration: Three Poems by Leslie Lea
flashing neon signs:
DRIVE-UP EUTHANASIA
CREDIT CARD ONLY
OPEN 24 HOURS
past-life recall:
centipede exoskeletons
trace dark lines
of rigor mortis
150,000,000
In these United States
This Union
This US
Trammeled & trampled
& put aside
For later we will
For our country we will
For our cities
We will stan & star & stand & fight
Montage
YOU’RE IN a town square in Croatia with the greatest film of all time in your luggage. The arditi are coming and if your rescuer takes a few more minutes, you’ll have to hightail it out of Istria on foot. You check your pocket watch; it’s an hour before noon. Your right hand is in your greatcoat, gripping the firm, comforting wooden handle of your revolver.
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