The Washing and the Clothes Line by Serge Pey, trans. from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
I learned my letters as I ate my alphabet soup. Tiny letters, without much meaning. For her part, my mother read the earth, because marks on the ground were the writing of the night. From those signs, outside the house, she knew that a fox had passed by along the road... Read More
Open Call for Submissions: Vestiges_05: Lacunae
Black Sun Lit is now accepting submissions for the fifth volume of Vestiges: Lacunae. The writer of the twenty-first century is both confronted and confounded by a world that has become all too knowable. With erudition and the future at their fingertips, today’s writer is no longer fulfilled by saying the inexplicable but depleted by... Read More
Editor’s Note: Vestiges_04: Aphasia
A Dada ad leaves an analysand uncooperative, speechless; a situationist détournement… propels words beyond the pleasure principle… Because there is so much toil and injustice in the use of language… two images begin to take shape. One of the rich mystic unscrolling their parchment; and… one of the police officer turning the pages of a... Read More
Six Prose Poems by Alistair McCartney
When I die, my memory—or do I mean your memory of me?—will dissolve like the Platonic (abstract) form of a cube of sugar in a cup of tea, like the post-abstract expressionist (Neoplatonic) form of the corpse of a boy in a hot pink ceramic tub of hydrochloric acid, correction: sodium hydroxide... Read More
Five Poems by Anna Gurton-Wachter
I get to re-experience / a fly bouncing / off the walls / equivalency began / each time I swell / a cloud or angel / evoked off-hand / I don’t think I would / separate myself / accept love sad art / unanswered / how it is... Read More
Episodes from OMAR by Sam Truitt
0. / Prison / — / the pervasiveness of penology / — / to be inside a thing and unable/unwilling to leave / — / some involuntary but most to varying degrees riding it / — / or climbing its walls / — / the glass mountain and relation to the practice of the open... Read More
Two Poems by Sawako Nakayasu
Girl F’s the getting, and tiredness is the reference, and the other is girled by their initials. There’s the decisive finding, that is, the name-outer, the girl-eacher, the come what may, but there are also some extremely marching shes, which makes Girl J say very well why there was so much Hi, name, fuck, of... Read More
Open Call for Submissions: Vestiges_04: Aphasia
Black Sun Lit is now accepting submissions for the fourth volume of Vestiges: Aphasia. The linger of the last avant-gardes is the survival of their premier violation: the trespassing of generic frames, the grievance against textual patterns of forms. This first lapse would be terminal. Schlegel, Novalis, Hölderlin. Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Rilke, Stein, Barnes... Read More
Editor’s Note: Vestiges_03: Mimesis
Reflect upon the frond and in so doing neglect the fern. Write its veins, the stains, its gloss; ponder with inaccuracy its divisive parts. Writing is autumn’s discoloration, the experience and expression of wilting. Only stems are left. Imitate and discover what’s not there any longer... Read More