So They Say— They Finally Nailed— the Proton’s Size— & Hope— Dies— by Rosebud Ben-Oni
but love does not, Menelle Sebastien.
Of all the afflictions
& luck,
all the sums & paradoxes,
& gravitons that add up
to more minus
than plus,
I promise that love
is often as inconsiderate as it is just
because actual love,
I imagine,
is a wave function
that isn’t restricted
to being
in any one place
at one time.
No, love must
be a superposition
with a measurement problem,
but don’t worry,
I won’t get into alternative
realities & how a single judgement
from one can so easily
dissolve
whom,
or what,
she’s sizing up— ...
add up
to a single hush.
Like how we try to escape
what makes us human by trying
to make sense of what made us
human.
These days,
when I think on the proton,
I only observe love
as entanglement
in which we bias & sway & touch
over great,
great
distances.
...
until aching
each other’s spoils,
stripping bare
their delicate
& deadly
creaking
coils—
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Evolution by Linda Bierds
How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled, jellied, symmetrical cell become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk, the sun’s last shafts doubling the fence posts, all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just after Schrodinger’s What is Life, not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before supper. How does a chemical soup, he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how does a pattern shift, an outer ear gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird’s stubby beak sharpen toward the trout? --- How do solutions, chemical, personal, stable, unstable, harden into shapes? And how do shapes break? What slips a micro-fissure across a lightless cell, until time and matter double their easy bickering? God? Chance? A chemical shudder? He was happy and not, tired and not, humming a bit with the fence wires.--- Like time, he thought, we are almost erased by rotation, as the dark, symmetrical planet lifts its asymmetrical cargo up to the sunset: horses, ryegrass— In no case, then, is there a loss of personal existence to deplore— marten, whitethroat, blackbird, lark—nor will there ever be.
How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled, jellied, symmetrical cell become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk, the sun’s last shafts doubling the fence posts, all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just after Schrodinger’s What is Life, not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before supper. How does a chemical soup, he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how does a pattern shift, an outer ear gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird’s stubby beak sharpen toward the trout? --- How do solutions, chemical, personal, stable, unstable, harden into shapes? And how do shapes break? What slips a micro-fissure across a lightless cell, until time and matter double their easy bickering? God? Chance? A chemical shudder? He was happy and not, tired and not, humming a bit with the fence wires.--- Like time, he thought, we are almost erased by rotation, as the dark, symmetrical planet lifts its asymmetrical cargo up to the sunset: horses, ryegrass— In no case, then, is there a loss of personal existence to deplore— marten, whitethroat, blackbird, lark—nor will there ever be.
Textbook & Absence (Anatomy) by Catherine Barnett
At school he studies the human body: aorta, valve, muscle, vein. At home he redesigns it out of cardboard and twine until it looks like a coat he might hang on a hook with other missing coats.
At school he studies the human body: aorta, valve, muscle, vein. At home he redesigns it out of cardboard and twine until it looks like a coat he might hang on a hook with other missing coats.
Scientific Method by Adam Clay
Twenty-three percent when placed under intense pressure did in fact kick the door in. Soldiers creep on the other side of the turn. Every little thing is destined for ease. Music, be still. Keep the mannequin secrets to yourself. Remember a ladder can take you both up and down. The weather grows less stable than us. This line here is where the season starts. Spring seems fluorescently golden. Too much milk in the fridge. When left alone long enough, the prisoners began to interrogate themselves.
Twenty-three percent when placed under intense pressure did in fact kick the door in. Soldiers creep on the other side of the turn. Every little thing is destined for ease. Music, be still. Keep the mannequin secrets to yourself. Remember a ladder can take you both up and down. The weather grows less stable than us. This line here is where the season starts. Spring seems fluorescently golden. Too much milk in the fridge. When left alone long enough, the prisoners began to interrogate themselves.
Having a Coke with You by Frank O’Hara
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles--- I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles--- I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
Abstract with Red Square by Jenny Xie
after Etel Adnan And there, between clean walls you assume the position, angled toward the red squares roiling on her canvases. @@@ There, impasto: her mountain. @@@ Mountainous, she, too— which is to say surfacing, color latching to the seasons where meaning rushes. Of this transition the living are given no access. @@@ A red square appears in your days yet you know not yet where.
after Etel Adnan And there, between clean walls you assume the position, angled toward the red squares roiling on her canvases. @@@ There, impasto: her mountain. @@@ Mountainous, she, too— which is to say surfacing, color latching to the seasons where meaning rushes. Of this transition the living are given no access. @@@ A red square appears in your days yet you know not yet where.
Contemplating Extinction as Theme in Basquiat’s “Pez Dispenser, 1984” by Kristina Kay Robinson
for Malcolm Latiff Shabazz yellow roses in my mother’s room mean I’m sorry sadness comes in generations inheritance split flayed displayed better than all the others crown weight the undue burden of the truly exceptional most special of your kind, a kind of fire persisting unafraid saffron bloom to remind us of fragility or beauty or revolution to ponder darkly in the bright the fate of young kings the crimes for which there are no apologies.
for Malcolm Latiff Shabazz yellow roses in my mother’s room mean I’m sorry sadness comes in generations inheritance split flayed displayed better than all the others crown weight the undue burden of the truly exceptional most special of your kind, a kind of fire persisting unafraid saffron bloom to remind us of fragility or beauty or revolution to ponder darkly in the bright the fate of young kings the crimes for which there are no apologies.