They should have slept, would have
but had to fight the darkness, had
to build a fire and bathe a man in
flames. No
other soap’s as good when
the dirt is the skin. Black since
birth, burnt by birth. His father
is not in heaven. No parent
In Poets We Must Trust
Mateo Senolia’s “Baldwin”
on Yoruba Records
New Work From Igor Posner & Mary Di Lucia
Igor Posner’s untitled photograph (below) is from his newly released book, Past Perfect Continuous. Mary Di Lucia’s response to that photograph, titled “A Brief History of Mid-Century Portraiture” (also below), is excerpted from her new collection, titled Accompaniments. The companion books are newly out on Red Hook Editions. [Read more…]
Arcturus
from Last Poems
by Anthony Hassett
A new day comes
like something you cannot name.
And perhaps because once again,
you must bend yourself
to the task of living
you begin to hack your way
through the mute glyphs
and weird print of your own thinking.
Searching among the splayed alphabet
of time and space
for the word’s cordite shape. [Read more…]
Saint Anthony
by Erin Currier How many times have I turned around on as many malecons to find the corners of your eyes? Scattered paper offerings at our feet. Terns circle a midnight in Iquique; and in Beirut: Muslim schoolgirls hand in hand with midday. [Read more...]
Words And Wanderings With Anthony Hassett
by Dahr Jamail
On Saturday, January 21st of this year, Tony welcomed me into he and Erin’s warm home. Greeting me at the door with a big hug and smile, Tony, despite his ongoing lengthy battle with cancer, was his usual self: cracking gallows humour jokes about his health, about the newly inaugurated President Trump, the cop-rotten planet, and so much more. [Read more…]
From The World
A heel is not a hammer
But whatever fulfills
The function of a god
Is a God.
I feel, when you sleep beside me,
The touch of your familiar breath
On my mouth.
It is in this place
Where, through some concentration
Of emptiness,
That ghosts are changed into men…
♦
From Gazette.
Where she is opened. Where she is closed.
by Donika Kelly
When he opens her chest, separates the flat skin
of one breast from the other, breaks the hinge of her ribs,
and begins, slowly, to evacuate her organs, she is silent.
He hollows her like a gourd, places her heart
below her lungs, scrapes the ribs clean of fat
and gristle with his thick fingers. He says, Now you are ready, [Read more…]
Cosmography
by Anthony Hassett (2 of 3) Amongst their kind was one thrust through, who fell off from his house and made such a lowing that we Christians thanked Almighty God for his delivery, and fell straight way to our labor with full power upon his body. [Read more...]
Nudging Chaos Into The Frame
An Interview With Harry Gamboa Jr.
by Pancho Lipschitz
Harry Gamboa Jr. is best known as the co-founder of ASCO, the mas chingon performance art group to emerge from the 70’s and 80’s. But his post-ASCO output, in a wide variety of media, has continued to defy the boundaries of categorization and commodification. Working with a new group of performers he published the photo-novela Aztlángst 2, a poetic grito against corporate culture, constant wars, digital surveillance and the criminalization of “others”. [Read more…]
Centra Coronalis
by Anthony Hassett (1 of 3)
For three months, and in a confusion of names now vanished, our rotting vessels made slow headway through the strange aberrant splendors of the sea. Finally, in a state of madness, we ran our ships on shore, and so embedded them forever in sand.