Nature vs. Fertility, God vs. Science by Philippe Sollers, trans. from French by Armine Kotin Mortimer
I have no choice but to think that I have been desired by the Dealer in Death, just as the very ugliest of the least of the believers can always tell herself, with satisfaction, that God so wished it. Death, as a result, becomes my natural and social contract, instead of being a tragedy... Read More
WINTERHATE by Greg Mulcahy
Ice cutting as an industry was dead. The ancient sledges had vanished decades ago, and if any draft horses survived, no one saw or heard them. There were other activities, but the general view, after years of accelerating decline, was stated in the last clergyman’s suicide note: Nothing works now... Read More
Metro by Tony Duvert, trans. from French by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier
You sit down on a bench. It’s not a seat, but rather a sign suggesting a position of rest: half crouched, thigh-bones level, back squared or hunched toward the knees, pelvis crushed between both weights—a scale’s balance beyond all use. Migraine. The head gone, migraine within its space... Read More
Ossuarius by Eva Bujalka
Strange that the air down here should have more the texture of something living it, breathing it. Strange that the air itself should impress upon the living the sensation of breathing in the grave soil, the soil that is so afflicted with several lifetimes’ humors: black bile and phlegm, the cold... Read More
Three Poems by Ivonne Gordon Carrera, trans. from Spanish by Cindy Rinne
A secret lodges itself in the ellipsis. / The dream eclipses my body into yours. / The suns multiply themselves in thousands of eyelids. / Green disguises us as fluid dreams. / We suspend from the lung of the wind. / The burnt stone, our witness, blesses the sacredness / of our name... Read More
Acéphale or the Initiatory Illusion: Paule Thévenin and André Masson, trans. from French by Rainer J. Hanshe
In the mid-1930s, during a flagitious political era, Georges Bataille founded the journal Acéphale as a protest against the horrors of Nazism, all forms of fascism, and decadent democracy. In addition to serving politically as a contra-force to the populist spirit of the times, Acéphale was also to function aesthetically as a Dionysiac contagion... Read More
Never Change by Ali Power
weeks go by / you’re watching a black & white trilogy / with someone you resurrected / from a plane of holograms / who gifts you a hologram moon / you’re eating chocolate & popcorn / you’re waking up / between ugly cities / muddy paintings / heavy with geometry... Read More
A Senile Lucifer by Forrest Roth
I am spoken by having. I am kept by saying. I am laughing. A thing less by one witness, no longer keeping my company. Who has moved on far from without, without a cause to take with. I keep the thing. I wit the thingness, as in now, should one take offense to my laughing... Read More
Excerpts from Island by Tom Haviv
The rocks’ peaks push higher and higher, splaying water, producing more wake. / As the travelers empty out their sockets: a rain, a volley of eyes, vectorizing the white sky. / Islands burst into view, wherever an eye sinks. / Until nearly all of the travelers go blind...
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Two Texts from Apostasy by Katy Mongeau
I fell asleep with our innards like a long sentimental rope. The white pillar holding all of this up has a halo. You can be ruined but not empty. You can be a temple but not empty. You can be a ruin but not nothing, no... Read More