from “Flag”
I imitated a cormorant’s wings with my elbows, flocking with the birds, then I turned to walk home alone.
from “Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room”
I didn’t settle upon philosophy out of some dispassionate search for meaning; I turned to it because I felt like I was drowning and was desperately searching for a life preserver.
from “Notation”
The buds are insistent that the roots' energy is expressed despite the trunk’s non-existence, and there is little evidence I have tried to live a single moment with such vigor.
from “Anamnesis”
Can an object—in the form of language—seeping out of these cracks elucidate some semblance of a truth?
from “Cybernetics, or Ghosts?”
Officially, what happened in the story hadn’t happened and the story didn’t exist. It had never been compiled and was never to be uttered outside official hearings. In this matter, secrecy was of paramount importance: somebody would be made to take responsibility regardless of what anybody thought about stories.
from “No One Knows Their Blood Type”
Death is on offer, on our screens, free of charge. Revolutions everywhere—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria. I try to formulate my stance on each of them, but I can’t. I want to go out and declare a revolution against something, but I can’t.
from “The Kármán Line”
This desert basin, here, or volcano crater, there, exist outside language—yet they’ve become places, narrated by discourses of nation, produced through imaginaries of space.
from “No Measure”
I’m also an instrument. My wingspan, another measure. I spread my palm beside the grass. What fraction of me is the height of this?
from “Vague Predictions & Prophecies”
I couldn’t see anything but I could hear that the pasture was now moving, alive with women. I started to run before a hand stopped me, landing across my chest.
from “In the Suavity of the Rock”
I hugged constantly for five years. It made me a better angrier man.
from “NEARLY EARLY ARTLY NEVER”
the invisible signals (yes) of
a net, of a rain, of a cloud—
from “A Mouth Holds Many Things”
“These works sometimes manifest in multiple forms that cannot be contained by the print page alone.” -Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, Co-Editors
from “Delinquents”
I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered. My goal was to write a book about middle America during the opioid epidemic. I ran cars full of dope boys with fake MRIs from Ohio to Florida.
from “Walden Pond”
Then I realized “Damn, that’s fucked up” and ruminated, chewed on grass like a lilac cow in the Alps.
from “Four Concretures”
chog an experience in eppy set: {x},{x} smeers to {yyyyyy}, concresscing, cryssle (CR) to cemend (CM). i positt a numbmur (n), it hings
from “Home Movies”
I’d like the work I do to matter somehow, which is all the proof I need that it doesn’t.
from “We Made it to School Alive”
& that someone asked the blushed face father will he see him again & he said absolutely absolutely & I thought we are the same
from “Say in the end”
Each center describes what happens in another center
I’m not a cynic, I’m here
