Ode to the New York Heat Wave
My family discovered each other in a house
during a heat wave. The five of us,
on the bare floor, trying not to touch
each other, breathe too loud, and
inching closer to the window. My sister
is the youngest and won’t stop crying.
She asks if we’re poor now, if she has to go
get a job. We laugh, congratulate her
for being able to see the bigger picture.
At night, my dad orders buffalo chicken pies,
vodka pies, a classic pepperoni, and as many
cold liters of Coke we want, keeping our mouths
full and quiet. We broker
bathroom time like strangers
meeting for the first time
every morning.
Su Cho, from The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin Books, 2022)
‘These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.’
Annie Dillard, ‘Seeing’ (1974)
summer solstice
Jenny Zhang
will be significant
im going to release something
soft and radiant
and true
into the world
The uses of not
Lao Tzu
Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)
Translator’s note: “One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so funny. He’s explaining a profound and difficult truth here, one of those counter-intuitive truths that, when the mind can accept them, suddenly double the size of the universe. He goes about it with this deadpan simplicity, talking about pots.”
Kleinood. April, 2023.
June, 2024.
There Are Mornings
Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.
Liesl Mueller, from Alive Together (LSU Press, 1986)
The Consulting Room
By Dawn Garish (CEO of Life Righting Collective, poet, medical doctor)
what we bring:
the encumbrance of the body with its weighted spaces
the body’s volume, its flabs and backups
the bomb of the flesh, its distress flares
with rampant blooms of delinquent cells
the stink and leak and soak
the mysterious liver, with its dark acrid ink
the exhausted horse of the beaten heart
the rubbish bin of the distended belly
the body as faithful dog, or extreme machine
the reluctant child, the terrorist, the caged beast
two smoky bellows, the chug and growl of gut
the sweet taboos of penis and anus
the silenced vagina, silenced
the glands releasing their secrets, the blood salt
the national flags of skin, all itch and burn
world turmoil condensed and funnelled
into the skull, the body vault
what we want:
the elixir and tonic, the weightlessness of flight
or support of root, movement clear as water or wind
warm ember of the palm held as a poultice
against a headache, the hurt flank, the panic
relief from the blind cyclical scrimmage
a sanctity that fills the intact and serene body
a reliquary for the sacred, the explicit lyric woven
and distilled into exquisite music, a new holding story
the physical forged from a different kind of image
https://www.chicagoreview.org/fred-moten-the-little-edges/
David Krut Projects Residency. Johannesburg, January 2023. Photographs by Robyn Park Ross
Work in progress. Leuven, 2023.
Visiting Daniella. Berlin, 2024.