ISSUE 43 | AUG 2014
BAR
Image by Ellis Calvin
Piper Wheeler
So Damn Relatable
monument to unrelatability - a better reason than « it's Important Literature. » - the father’s strange subjectivity - a banal insistence on the humanity of humans - But once I read a preface - I SEE YOU! How do I respond? - It had none of the disinterest expected of the philologist - so much more imaginative labor
Caroline Lemak Brickman
The Covers Record
she couldn't take it from Jagger - as though handsome men could be blessed then had - do these lines startle the listener unfamiliar with hell - ugh, another man's song - paved with intentions and already a dead end - the word bar is so beautiful - there are interesting covers that don't belong to the bar - « bedcovers » ask, « am I the same or different? »
Michael Kinnucan
An Interview with Yasmin Nair, Part Two: The Ideal Neoliberal Subject is the Subject of Trauma
it allows a certain kind of white feminism to flourish - trauma as a defining feature of the ideal neolibral subject - gynocentric ethnocentric maternalistic bullshit - you cannot speak about capitalism as a person of color if you are not willing to talk about yourself as a trauma subject - the fucking left media will not touch it with a bargepole - the geopolitics of rape
Andrew Patterson
Poems
if you remember anything about me remember - the tedium of state made lit - I needed to destroy it now - unjoke the cashier, unstroll the boulevard - the barroom, / Dec. 7th - dispirited by the thought
Ray Osborn
Poems
oh fuck / how you looked! - my red semen - the Lotus without teeth - wishing to be / indifferent sky - this impersonation / does please me - over sessile rot - you think I care - teal tokens of twice-chosen sea glass - to imply anything human at all - like something Nature made / after Nature was made, an afterthought to the fuchsia-fucked - you were never color me once