Three Stories

Masterpiece

A week before my birthday, I spent the night with my friends, a husband and wife who lived outside Charlotte. They moved to the state when I did and enrolled their daughter in pre-school. We didn’t do much that night: had dinner and drinks, played cards, ate a gummy. The next morning, I sat with the husband at their kitchen table while he drank coffee. Their daughter sat in another chair and sketched on her tablet. Her head struggled to reach the table, but I could tell she was mouthing the words of whatever she drew.  

The wife walked in with her phone and sat down. Her posture indicated she had an announcement to make. “I’m so sad,” she said. “Mr. Rutabaga just died.” Mr. Rutabaga was her high school art teacher. She worked in insurance, though she was once a painter. She had a studio set up in their garage, which I guess meant she was still a painter after all. 

“How old was he?” her husband asked. 

“Eighty-one,” she answered. 

“Oh, eighty-one,” he said. “Wow.” 

The wife looked at him. The husband sipped his coffee and placed the cup back on the table. His posture too indicated he had something to announce. “The thresher comes for us all!” he said and laughed. His wife stood up and left the room. I looked at their daughter, but her head was still down.

On the drive home, I thought of the attraction I’d felt for the wife during her pregnancy. I’d never felt such attraction for her before, not even in college when I was attracted to everybody. I’d heard of the pregnancy glow, but didn’t expect to feel it so palpably. How do I put it? It was like the moment before you touch the plastic fruit.

I sped up and passed a car, then the road dipped into a long, slow decline. An old man stood by the side of the road, wearing a cap and overalls. “Old man,” I mouthed. His arm rested on the mailbox next to him so I assumed he was waiting for the mail. That’s what old men do when they live in rural areas and want to feel useful. I craned my neck around after I drove past, so I could keep looking at him, though this was dangerous. When I turned again to the road, the only vehicle I saw was a garbage truck in the distance. It too was driving down a long, slow decline. Soon we’d meet at the bottom of the bowl, there, in the middle.

Celery

Gary wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t find his wife. He walks around the house looking for her, then calls the police.

The police arrive and find Gary’s wife, who has been asleep in bed all this time. Gary has called enough times that the police charge him a fee for their visits, which they have deemed unnecessary. But to Gary the visits are necessary: they help him find his wife. Fining Gary is supposed to discourage him from making future calls, although this logic is suspicious. How will Gary remember the reason for these fines when he can’t even remember that his wife is next to him in bed? He is 84 and he calls celery “salsa.” 

I almost called this “Cruelty,” but then I worried that the cruelty I referred to might be ambiguous. It could mean the cruelty of Gary’s age, or the cruelty of his waking up in the middle of the night unable to find his wife of fifty years, or the cruelty of his wife watching her husband chip away. It could mean the cruelty of writing this. I’m referring, however, to the police, whose cruelty consists of making Gary pay for all the other cruelties. The next night, Gary wakes up and is alone again. He picks up the phone.

John Newton

The other day, a friend told me an anecdote about a lecture he attended, entitled “Equity and Power in Art Studio Critique.” During the presentation, a painting professor asked the lecturer, an art historian, why it was wrong to ask students about their work as it pertained to their race. By students, the painter meant students of color, which is the term many white academics use in reference to a group of people they consider important, but only because that group has the ability to make them look bad. The art historian told the painter he should be careful asking students questions about race, since the painter was white. Then the art historian referenced his own Latino heritage to detail the problems therein. 

My friend related this anecdote because the painter’s last name was Castagno and the art historian’s Castellini. “See what I mean?” I interrupted. Of course, I hadn’t said anything yet. 

I meant that here was Castagno and here Castellini, and one guy’s parents immigrated to this latitude and the other guy’s parents immigrated to that, which meant that Castagno’s father was from New York and Castellini’s father from Mexico. This meant Castellini was Latino and thus in position to correct Castagno, who was not Latino but Italian or Italian-American or white with Italian heritage, which Castellini also was—white with Italian heritage—which meant nothing whatsoever and quite a lot as well.

Not that I disagreed with Castellini. All of these things are confusing. I just felt I had to say something—that I was expected to say something—because my name is Cannelini.

The painter was actually from Connecticut, though he lived for a time in Brooklyn, as many professors do. Of course, neither Castellini nor Castagno were their real names.

My friend changed the subject.

A week later, I attended the memorial of a former colleague over Zoom. I could only attend a half hour because I had to teach afterwards. The memorial opened with a photo montage of the deceased, set to “Amazing Grace.” I don’t often cry, but I did then. I attributed this to a fondness for the colleague, though I barely knew him; he had once corrected my pronunciation of Charon, the mythological ferryman, during a Q&A. The song made me cry as well—“Amazing Grace” often does—and so did the sadness I spend my life unable to put into words. But then the montage glitched and the image froze, and I could hear the graduate student whose computer it was curse quietly. The moment no longer felt natural, even though it never had been. Not knowing what to do, I opened up a new window and went back to work.

∩

Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of the essay collection The Book of Resting Places and a translator from Portuguese. A 2025 NEA Fellow in Translation and a fiction editor at DIAGRAM, he lives in Iowa City, where he teaches Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Iowa.

Editor’s Note: Planned Obsolescence

I forgot to write an editor’s note this year. I had thought that doing one on May Day forever would be fun and funny for a tiny fatalistic publishing project, in the save-our-ship sense more than a gesture at some labor politics, but not not that either, exactly. Then May 1, 2026 passed. I totally forgot. It didn’t matter, I miss deadlines all the time, but there is something about failing one’s own arbitrarily self-imposed deadline for one’s own unpaid project of self-appointed self-importance (what else is “being a publisher”) that stings a little more than just whiffing on a work thing. I don’t know about you, whoever you are, but I have been feeling increasingly behind and befuddled these days and increasingly unequipped to catch up or do anything about it. I’m not sure if that really is the tide of tech-capital cultural “progress” sweeping up some core human faculties in its accelerant holy froth, the ambient always-ramping magnetic field of anxiety we all get to just hang out in everyday now; or if I really have lost the ability to read and think to the degree that I cannot adequately make sense of this sensation and what it means anymore; or if the entire experience is a hallucination whose contours delimiting personal and collective effects can no longer be perceived accurately, our days melting out of planetary sufficiency to render lived time a single continuous skirmish with content, which is capital, which is global violence. Everywhere embedded, all of us in it.

I read a new book earlier this year that was trying to think hard about this stuff and the end of history, but as it tried and failed (convincingly) to convince of that condition I realized that its discussion of the end of history as such was actually more effective as an illustration of the end of rhetoric, not only because language had failed so totally as a technology (Though: When does a technology “fail”? What is the difference between failure and disuse? What is obsolescence? Where is the border between a device and its user?) to relate and inform and convince, but that we had failed ourselves totally by totally failing it. One could make a connection to the many forms of cognitive offloading our daily tools and lives increasingly facilitate and even require us to permit, which take as their operative materials language and thinking itself, just as one might make some connection to the infinitely necrotic nature of our political discourse, an activity of language and cognition as much as anything else. In both cases, we stop listening. We no longer want to understand. We no longer understand why we want or would have wanted to understand. 

If it sounds like I’m hopelessly back on some convoluted doomer bullshit, well, this press is called Community Mausoleum. As a project, a technology, it has been invaluably negative and hope-affirming over these last two and a half years of my life, which in a global context have been some of the most violent and humiliating in the modern human record, at least from my own personal historical position, approaching only four decades as an American on earth. In that period, despite and in spite, though not because of, certainly, I’m not insane, the press has managed to produce ten titles and publish more than 120 new poems, stories, and essays on Coma. If you missed it, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard recently summed up our first years of print publication activity with an excellent and sharp multi-title review in Annulet. There have been some other nods and affirmations out there as well, and I hope I’m not missing too much of that documentation in the world by failing to mention it here. Lest it dissolve or go unappreciated. I’m disorganized. All to say, learning and continuing this publication practice has been a huge pain in the ass and a crucial structure for my life. I love it and am grateful for it, especially thankful for every reader, you, a kind of person who is disappearing. Supposedly. Where are you going?

Some things have changed during this period, personally, which I hope you’ll excuse my updating for the sake of far more minor historical records and contexts. The main ones are: I don’t live in Cleveland anymore. I have one full-time job instead of three or four part-time ones. I have health insurance. This only bears mentioning insofar as these facts support the continued operation of this press, which I intend to keep up until I run out of resources (time, money, motivation). I guess I feel a little self-conscious because I specifically mentioned the role of the above details in the very first editor’s note, insisting the best reason to start a press is probably because you can’t, or something, but I think it’d be weird to keep operating under some auspice of ongoing self-reported privation. Report: My life’s fucking easy.

Things are changing, though, still, and I want to get to the important point here while there’s still time. Which is that, between you and me, over the past year in addition to behind and befuddled I have also become increasingly disheartened, disinterested, and skeptical of “publishing” “literature” on the internet. I think there was a time when it all felt very possible and powerful, and even up until a recent point like copping to tools owned by corporations such as X and Meta in order to disseminate weird, vital, experience-altering language and art was a reasonable enough compromise to make (forgetting ideas about co-optation or re-inscription, surely we’re past that). And I know there are clever ways to do this self-reflexively, but I am not doing anything that deep here. I have just been trying to publish literature that I think is necessary using the tools that seem most useful and available. But I am not so sure about some of them anymore. Their trade-offs feel increasingly offsided. There are always a few things in a given year that I’m glad to have found out about, a few exchanges I’m glad to have had, by remaining reluctantly plugged in to social media, but the surveillance creep has been taking on new dimensions, and even at its best our participation in so-called online community still becomes a longer soak in self-replenishing infinity pools of nefariously applied data. It’s all more than enough to make one want to climb out entirely, and yet our relations to attention and relation itself, information and each other remain governed by these data systems on a fundamental level. Maybe my biggest problem when it comes to formulating an adequate response to them is that I am not convinced by any extreme or total measures. It’s true that we gave up our ability to opt out long ago, but even if we had consented to opting in, this world would still keep getting made for us by entities that do not have any of our interests, health, or personhoods in mind. They do not care and they need us not to either. We can break and disconnect from them all we want, which will feel good, but it won’t matter. There will always be another device. There is always another scab. We each have to figure out how to live together in this perpetually compromised, involved, unabsolvable state. There is no such thing as agency anymore. There are no more good answers.

I’m getting carried away I think, but I think that’s what publishing is. That’s all I have, anyway. I didn’t develop any other skills. So, to keep it all going in a way that can still be reasonably sustained and emotionally wholesome, Community Mausoleum will be putting a lot less work online in the future. We’ve got a backlog of new stuff scheduled at Coma, which I’ve been reading through since I closed submissions this summer, and I’m excited to get it all out in the coming weeks. After that the journal will publish digital work only on occasion, no longer the every-Wednesday clip we’ve been keeping since May Day 2024. This is mainly because I’d rather focus the time and effort on publishing books. To that end, new full-length poetry collections from Corey Qureshi and Austin Miles will be out before the end of this year, and 2027’s catalog will include new titles by Philip Sorenson, Colin Russell, Kate Kramer, Geoffrey Detrani, and Katherine Duckworth. Maybe a few others if I can find the money. None of this is going anywhere. I admittedly have a lot more thoughts and feelings and wish I could express them all well enough here, but I really do seem to be losing the language. I think this is an important thing to keep finding new ways to respond to. That is the point. Sign up for the newsletter if you’d like to stay in touch. It’s the easiest way. Or write to P.O. Box #1, Madison, ME 04950. Easy too.

Thanks for reading.

Time is on your side.

Zach Peckham
Labor Day 2026

from Coming and Going Among the Old Mountain

“…the two issued from the same mold, differing in name…”

                                                                                               —Daodejing

[…]

at a loss, in a loss, along the banks of Loss—

one foot in front of the other

all the way down long rocks

together named Blue Ridge

the pitying waters of Roanoke—

I take off my shoes and socks

and rub my heels together—

on a pebble in the water 

light and lichen play draughts—

[…]

doors deep now

in everything—

now a calf lows

inside doors—

o fawn, tell me

what’s “inside,” what’s “outside,”

when planetrees, sycamores,

sweetgums, locusts, grasses 

candied in rich ticks all, 

all, all indoors, and me flung

out like their asthmatic little shadow—

calf in my pocket, plump as a muscle

o but how he choked 

his liver and rubbed 

and rubbed his yellow

plumdeep ankles

heavier than even a river

I can’t understand, can’t

put one foot in front of—

[…]

Talk to me. I approach you.

I approach you—you don’t come closer—

I leave you yet hear you afore me—

Calf, I think you’re

what’s always been—

Mum bell beneath the old mountain

his hands have moved, his hands

are full, have done. His hands

are full. His hands are gone.

The loof of his hands are gone.

[…]

The river splits 

the land in two:

Elsewhere on the left.

Where-Else on the right. 

June now Elsewhere.

Thursday in Where-Else.

Though I’m told, 

though I’m shown,

through the words, 

numbers, brocades

of logics, shown 

through all the particulars

bright as pigeons: 

It’s Thursday,

It’s July.

That it will be Thursday again.

And again, and again,

in the Triple-Watered City

nested among the Alleghenies—

that I am Me again, again.

Again that I have never been otherwise.

But deep in my (I admit it) thieved Elsewhere, 

still by you, Roanoke, 

little thread, 

oh I don’t believe it. 

I don’t believe and I don’t know what it is that I don’t believe.

That fact, of not believing, is an opaque pane: 

I can’t see through it, but I see it.

[…]

by the bed the nurse 

held a bowl to the man’s mouth

outside it was beginning to rain 

one drop in front of the other

the man’s mouth said “baba wawa” 

among brimming milk

outside light was whistling, walking deeply

putting days in things

at the sink the nurse held

a bowl to water

outside Salem’s outskirts

raspberry among blue mountain thickets

[…]

one foot in front of the other

an old woman walked 

across the mountain—

“I’ve lost my cow,” 

she said, “brown, 

white spots, kind eyes, 

have you seen her?” 

“No,” I said. “My father 

has died,” I said, 

though it had been months. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” 

she said. We looked 

through the field together. 

At the field’s end,

as though remembering

the forgotten stove, land 

ran back down to a doorless

barn by the sobby 

river. 

She put her hollowed 

hands mouthside 

and rung out:

Bamboo! Bam-boo! 

Bam-bam! Bamboo?

Bam-boo! Bamboo!

Where’s my Bamboo!

“Well, hopefully

she turns up soon,

she knows where

we live. You local?”

“No,” I said. 

“I’ve lived here 

a while,” she said, 

“my husband is vice-

provost. “Of what,” 

I said, “and what’s 

a vice-provost?”  

“You know…I don’t 

actually know,” she said. 

We said goodbye 

back at the car. 

There was a film 

of silver on high 

mountains. Light 

in the fields seeped 

onto the flakeful road

with radiant 

veins I drove slowly 

down the flying 

mountain, stopping,

starting, stopping, 

looking for Bamboo, 

until I wasn’t—

[…]

[ The Roanoke in Time ]

Think of water on glass: there water sheds its opacity and suffuses the pane.

(1) There never was any water—only the glass in all its clarity.

a. Corollary: The more fanatic the clarity, the less you see glass,

the more you see only water. There was only water.

(2) There never was any glass—only the water in all its opacity.

a. Corollary: The more fanatic the opacity, the less you see water,

the more you see only glass. There was only glass.

—for Kokyo Henkel

Time in the Roanoke

[…]

splitting the lands

the river was going 

along clad in all 

its sards minnows 

cubs bagworms

nothing more

nothing less

than minnows

moths bears 

bright lattices

gleaming

stretching

going along

was now

was gone. 

In the wake

bells, plods, 

lows of cattle,

muds, trout, roan,

seamless Where-Else—

[…]

∩

Varun Ravindran lives in Pittsburgh. His debut poetry collection, Betweenness, was released by Baobab Press in 2025.

Five Poems

Jeu No. 34 (Silk Road Memories)

Aleph! I would begin
here, making morning
coffee as an alien.

I have much empathy
for my french press, dear
glass and steel vessel.

We speak to each
other through antennae
invisible to the naked

eye, it’s the psychic
thing I told you about
once, long time ago.

So everything has
a soul? Yes, a great soul
overarches all things.

Things said, things
felt, picked up, palpated,
et cetera. I said all

and I meant it, even
though there is nothing
too serious to joke of.

Jeu No. 30 (Lovers)

There’s a hair across your lip and it makes you
sad, like nothing fun will ever happen again...
just because the wedding is delayed, you feel
like it’s been cancelled? No chance! Or choice
in the matter, really, the unity of spirit & matter
is all preordained. In fact, time isn’t even really
passing by. We’re waiting like now isn’t Now.

Jeu No. 160

Let’s just pick up where we left off, if that’s possible.
In the intervening period, everything has become else.
Suffice to say, unless you have the emerald tablet,
you cannot catch a fly in midair without crushing it,
and nobody will hold onto the necessary chinoiserie
to put new plants shoulder to shoulder with an old lamp.
This is a hot ticket concept. If you don’t believe soon
it will be gone. If you don’t believe now, that’s okay.

Jeu No. 40

Magnetism, the stars, all other
occult accidents, they charm
us, they seduce us, turn our eyes
to the circle whose center is nowhere,
or everywhere, that whole thing.
Certain stones play in high spheres.
You can’t tell me why but you can
know why, and that’s okay. I do too.
It doesn’t need to be said out loud.
It’s not possible anyway. It’s better
to tell a joke or sing a song if we want
to pass the time given... please don’t
get me started on what’s passing,
or if anything is! Again, unspeakable.

Jeu No. 47 (Battle or Pretend)

Your mana is showing in spurious parallel to other
concepts of life force, energy, spirits that possess
bodies they move around in “the world.” As we see
further into the past and future, the tree meets earth
or explodes into the sky depending on perspective.
In any case, it is inarguably there, and is extended.
Don’t act like man is not the measure of all things.
That is a revolutionary statement, and a lie as well,
but why should the truth be so important? It’s not
my idea, just one that I often play my games with.

∩

Sam Robinson publishes regularly at sunworship.substack.com. He just released a new collection, AT LAST GLACIAL MAXIMUM, available now from Creative Writing Department.

Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde, Part II: The End of PEN America and A Future for Publishing In The Imperial Core

This essay is a companion to Joe Hall’s “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde,” first published July 3, 2024. In this update, Hall re-examines PEN America in the context of continuing genocide in Palestine, war in Iran, and leadership changes at the organization as of August 2026.

“I suppose, having worked with PEN Utah for the past few years to fight for First Amendment rights and against book bans in my state, that it was just a matter of time till I myself got banned. I was slated to speak and deliver a lecture from my book THE BROKEN COUNTRY at the US Air Force Academy this September...”

—Paisley Rekdal, Facebook Post, August 24, 2025

“At the moment of the first strike she [fellow teacher Ms Shahriari] had been in the yard. When the first missile hit the school, [Ms Shahriari] ran toward a classroom to bring her students out, and then the second missile hit and unfortunately she was killed.”

—Wajiheh Zakari, Teacher at Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School

“I want to teach creative writing at the Naval Academy 

I'll make the midshipmen slit their wrists

and write PEACE with their blood 

on the hulls of nuclear submarines.”

—from “Nostalgia” by Chris Toll[1]

On February 28, 2026 the United States blew apart over one hundred and fifty children, the result of a double-tap Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab in Hormozgan Province in Southern Iran. This massacre was part of larger and ongoing U.S.-Israeli assault on the people and leadership of Iran that includes universities, refineries, and water facilities. This includes teachers, students, workers, everyone reliant on clean water, and the other-than-human beings in impacted ecologies. The assault extends the U.S. and Israeli massacres and city and village demolitions of Gaza and Lebanon. 

The Minab massacre is one of many U.S.-Israeli war crimes. Part of the purpose of the scale of the initial wave of attacks that also included assassinations of political and religious leaders and the killing of several teenagers playing volleyball was to dismay the people of Iran into submission. Another purpose was to overwhelm the U.S. population into numbly accepting more U.S.-Israeli savagery past and present: the massacres of Iran, of Lebanon, and of Gaza. Who can absorb it all? 

Such savage acts of the U.S. state occur while the U.S. deepens its participation in the genocide of Palestinians, building a base at the edge of the concentration camp of Gaza; proposing legislation to formalize military integration with Israel; and continuing the years-long campaign of criminalizing speech in solidarity with Palestinians and jailing and sometimes deporting protestors. The U.S. has doubled down on the eradication of the Palestinian people even as reports continue to flow out of Palestine about the hellish depths of the occupation forces’ crimes, including the Israeli state’s systematic use of sexual violence against Palestinians, including training dogs to rape Palestinians.

This ongoing genocide, which is deeply interwoven with the fabric of U.S. and Israeli institutions, exists within a decades-long assault on the Arab and Islamic world by the U.S.-led imperialist coalition that has shattered several nations not aligned with the U.S. and killed millions in the Arab and Persian world.[2]

Moral collapse, unlimited barbarism abroad and at home. 

---

[1] Republished in The Mystical Hobby of Christ: The Collected Poems of Chris Toll (zerodegreewritingprogram, 2026).

[2] See Ali Kadri, Imperialism with Reference to Syria (Springer, 2019).

---

PEN Returns to Form

So what about the literary resistance? What about PEN America, the self-appointed protector of free speech at home and across the globe?

I chronicled PEN America’s complicity with genocide, exhaustively, here in 2024, showing the organization to be an instrumental tool of cultural imperialism within a broader U.S. strategy of hybrid war against its enemies. 

My initial article was part of a wave of criticism leveled against PEN America’s response to the genocide. PEN’s harmful actions were numerous and included contributing to the criminalization of student anti-genocide protests using lines of reasoning shared with reactionary organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, which equates criticism of the actions of the ethno-supremacist state of Israel with anti-Semitism. Protests against PEN America’s remarkable failure to forward its purported mission included a total boycott of PEN America, which caused the cancellation of the 2024 awards and the ensuing gala. The writing community had PEN’s feet in the fire. 

In 2025, in the face of sustained criticism by organizations like Writers Against the War on Gaza, PEN claimed it was changing its stance on Gaza. PEN’s reforms included a commitment to protecting writers in Gaza and the departure of CEO Suzanne Nossel. Nossel, an almost unbelievably committed hawk and influential imperial theorist, would eventually be replaced as PEN’s face by Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and faculty member at Bard College.

PEN began pledging money to Palestinian cultural workers, released a report detailing the destruction of Gaza’s cultural sites, and finally used the word ‘genocide’ to describe what numerous scholars, human rights groups, and international law organizations, including the International Court of Justice, called the unprecedented scale of violence unleashed against Palestinians for over a year—genocide. Believing PEN’s promise of reform, Writers Against the War on Gaza called off the boycott on December 31st, 2025. The campaign was celebrated as a success in outlets like Literary Hub.

A month after the United States killed over one hundred schoolchildren in Iran, on March 31 PEN America announced the winners of its 2026 Literary Awards. Writers quickly returned to crowing about receiving PEN literary awards and the attendant big money (“It’s an honor...,” “Still in Shock,” “thanks @penamerica”). PEN held a glitzy awards ceremony in New York City’s Town Hall hosted by actor Murray Hill. PEN was back in business, baby. 

Sure, the genocide it helped launder continued, with Israel continuing to starve, bomb, and occupy Gaza. Sure, lawfare against student protestors continued as a result of the crackdowns PEN helped legitimize. But PEN assured everyone they were on the phone doing need-to-know things to help writers in Gaza. They got it. 

Peace, justice, and all good things prevailed.

Right?

Jesus Christ. No. 

Scandal engulfed PEN once again. In July 2026 PEN’s relatively new president Dinaw Mengestu resigned in response to PEN’s July 9 publication of “A Silent Moratorium.” “Moratorium” is a piece sympathetic to the “isolation and exclusion” of Israeli and Jewish writers. With the cultural boycott of Israel squarely in its sights, the piece also reiterates PEN’s stance against cultural and academic boycotts. 

Mengestu was supposed to be the reform president that would more fully support PEN’s mission, which should ostensibly extend to Palestinian writers trying to survive. “A Silent Moratorium” represented PEN using its platform and capacities to both-sides genocide. Sure, Palestinians sheltering in shredded tents are enduring bombings and starvation, sure BDS tactics, which seek to exert economic pressure on the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel, are being criminalized. But what about the delicate egos of writers who “feel” they are experiencing temporarily diminished publishing opportunities? To give its argument the veneer of an empirical basis, the report draws on tallies of self-reported “antisemitic literary incidents.” These reports rely on faulty definitions of antisemitism that confuse criticism of the state of Israel and Israeli institutions with prejudice against Jewish people. Mengestu recognized the reports’ seemingly purposeful conflation of the terms in a lengthy Instagram post: “The cultural boycott of Israel is aimed at institutions, not individuals, to influence policy. There is no boycott of Jewish writers.” Mengestu then addressed the report’s loud silences, arguing that if the report were truly interested in discussing discrimination “It would engage with the hundreds of writers—Jewish and non-Jewish—who have received racist and insulting messages, been doxed, and blithely accused of antisemitism for speaking out against that genocide.” 

On cue, PEN’s constant defender, The Atlantic, responded to Mengestu’s departure on July 11 with an article critical of Mengestu. Mengestu fired back, accusing PEN of an “ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably” and “production of work that supports suppression through bigotry and indifference.” Mengestu then published an article in Lit Hub on July 17 illustrating how PEN subtly but definitively changed its stance on boycotts: they are not protected speech. By taking this stance, PEN falls in line with a raft of draconian anti-BDS laws, hanging writers and organizations who boycott Israel out to dry, as it had done with student protestors in 2024. 

Our champion of free speech has fled the field. PEN’s brief about-face is over. 

PEN, to any writer with a conscience, should be over—an enemy, a wolf wearing the soft wool of humanitarian concern. 

But this essay isn’t over. Because we should have seen this coming. Viewed through PEN’s relationship to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, PEN never meaningfully change its pattern of behavior during Mengestu’s tenure. Viewed through the composition of its board, PEN never ended its service to the war-making state.

A Massacre-Friendly Board

While presidents and CEOs help formulate strategy and oversee day-to-day operations, boards often have the final say over top-level personnel decisions and provide organizational oversight. They can exert meaningful pressure on staff and, in doing so, shape an organization over the longest terms. A serious oversight in my previous report on PEN America was forgoing an analysis of its board. Such an analysis is overdue.

A close examination of the Board of Trustees and Executive Committee (all Executive Committee members are also board members) composition helps explain PEN’s return to redirecting concern away from Palestinians writers to Israeli writers and adoption of a definitively anti-BDS stance. 

The findings that follow are a result of examining the institutional affiliations and publishing activity of this group of 36 as of June 2026. 

The Council on Foreign Relations & The Foreign Policy Blob

The Council on Foreign Relations is a long-standing and influential Atlanticist think-tank with deep Wall Street ties dedicated to fleshing out imperial grand strategy. It takes as its sine qua non the rightness of maintaining the United States’ place bestride the international order against the dark authoritarian other (Iran, China). The threat or use of violence is central to that pursuit.[3] CFR has received millions in funding from Pentagon contractors. Members of the CFR have ties to major players in the military industrial complex like the Rand Corporation, the Department of Defense, and Boeing. Foreign-policy think tanks themselves are integral parts of the military industrial complex.

CFR members sitting on PEN America’s board include Tracy Higgins (Executive Vice President), Markus Dohle (Treasurer), Ken Miller, Patricia Duff, and Tom Healy. Their activity reflects CFR’s imperial orientation. Dohle, a former CEO of Penguin Random House, has appeared at book industry events in Israel and conducted an interview with the hawkish Atlantic Council.[4] Ken Miller is a millionaire with deep Wall Street ties who has donated thousands of dollars to hawkish establishment democrats who have been stalwarts in ensuring the flow of arms to Israel like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Patricia Duff, in addition to being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is the CEO of the non-profit Common Good, whose American Renewal Project has featured events with die-hard centrists Rahm Emanuel and Andy Beshear. Emanuel recently put on the record in a conversation with the Council on Foreign Relations a plan to strengthen the Abraham Accords in order to cement the U.S.’s and Israel’s presence in the Middle East.[5]

Perhaps most troubling, board member Maria Arana has direct military ties. She was a member of the Advisory Board for SOUTHCOM, the U.S. Military Command for Central and South America. The purpose of SOUTHCOM is to exert power over the Caribbean and Central and South America through violence and its threat. The list of the war crimes, coups, and atrocities that SOUTHCOM is implicated in is too numerous for this essay. They include the ongoing torture and killing of ‘narcoterrorists,’ many of which were actually just fisherman. Experts have described these as war crimes.

Remarkably, one in six PEN America Board members has ties to the military or military industrial complex.  This includes three of its eight-member Executive Committee (Higgins, Dohle, Arana), where they exert outsized influence. This center of gravity of ‘foreign policy expertise’ for PEN is defined by the nationalist liberal-imperial worldview of the Council on Foreign Affairs. Over the past two decades, this worldview, as realized through U.S. state action, has led to a body count and human immiseration beyond reckoning in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, and now in Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. 

Further, given PEN’s historic ties to the CIA and State Department, its present deep connections to the military-industrial and foreign policy blob also do little to dispel doubts that PEN is in service of bloody-minded U.S. foreign policy objectives or that PEN can be evenhanded when speaking about close U.S.-allies, such as its partner in war on Iran and genocide in Palestine: Israel.[7] 

The Western Neocolonial ‘Aid’ Complex 

There is no counterbalance to this imperialist bloc on PEN’s board in terms of claims to foreign policy or international expertise that aren’t grounded in imperial or colonial frameworks. For instance, two members of the board have worked for neocolonial NGOs. 

Suzy Wahba is a former consultant to the World Bank, an institution heavily involved in subordinating global South countries to the U.S.-led capitalist system, burdening them with Structural Adjustment Programs that tied loans to state austerity and the privatization of lands and industries.[8]

Board member and current co-CEO Summer Lopez has a similar, troubling resume that in many ways reflects that of former CEO Suzanne Nossel’s. Lopez spent five months on Freedom House’s Middle East and North Africa Team. Freedom House has long been understood to be in service of U.S. foreign policy aims. It is largely funded by the state, including the U.S. Department of State. Lopez transitioned from Freedom House to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where she spent eight years in influential roles, including as the Acting Middle East Regional Coordinator for the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance. There is a large body of reporting and scholarship on USAID’s involvement in dirty wars, regime change, and election interference.[9] ‘Democracy’ promotion, in the hands of the U.S., often means by any means necessary.

With this background, Summer Lopez played a key role at PEN, serving first as Suzanne Nossel’s Senior Director of the Free Expressions Program from 2017 to 2022 then as the Free Expression Chief Program Officer. She represents another link in the chain between the old PEN delegitimizing student anti-genocide protests and the new PEN helping build the case for war on Iran. 

Wall Street, Developers, Landlords, and Millionaires

Wall Street, the real estate industry, and the ultra-wealthy are well-represented on PEN’s board. These board members include Ken Miller, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger, Roxanne Donovan, Morwin Schmookler, John T. Chao, and Suzy Wahba.

Ken Miller is the president and CEO of Ken Miller Capital. He has spent his life as a financier and financial advisor. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger serves as a board member of the New York City Police Foundation. Her late husband was the former chairman of the New York City Police Foundation. Hemmerdinger’s links to the police foundation are particularly relevant given PEN’s refusal to defend student protestors as the NYPD was arresting scores of students. Hemmerdinger was also a 44-year employee of the Hemmerdinger family-owned ATCO properties, a deep-pocketed, major real estate player. ATCO has had entanglements with Israeli investment firms.

Roxanne Donovan, a former writer for the New York Daily News, is the president of a large firm that does public relations for real estate companies. Among Donavan’s clients are RFR, which does deals in Israel, and Jack Rosen, who is deeply invested in lobbying for Israel’s interests.

John T. Chao, a former McKinsey partner advising energy companies, serves on the board of Westlake Petrochemicals. His father, James Chao, is estimated to own 25% of Westlake. Forbes estimates the worth of the Chao family at over three billion dollars. There’s a rough consensus that under Trump the U.S. has returned to oil imperialism. Chao’s financial stake in dirty energy could represent a conflict of interest when it comes to PEN commenting on foreign policy matters. 

Though PEN claims to represent writers across the globe, the priorities of many of PEN’s board members are those of western capital. When making personnel decisions and setting the priorities for PEN, these individuals are not free of the priorities and pressures of the institutions they align with and profit from.

Defending PEN, Downplaying Genocide: PEN’s Media Industry Ties

PEN’s board also includes numerous ties to the wider media industry, including Hollywood and the highest echelons of the book industry. This includes Hachette CEO David Shelley, who faced protests and quits from staff after establishing the Basic Liberty imprint in 2024 and hiring a fellow at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, Thomas Spence, as an editorial director. The Heritage Foundation authored Project 2025. This PEN board member seems to be quite fine profiting from publishing the intellectual scaffolding for migrant concentration camps.

Three board members are or have been regular contributors or columnists for The Atlantic: George Packer, Phil Klay, and Zachary Karabell. This centrist magazine has published numerous articles post-Oct 7th defending PEN from criticism while also engaging in genocide denial. Its Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, is a former IDF member who served as a prison guard at Israel’s Ktzi’ot prison. In his memoir, Prisoners: a story of friendship and terror, Goldberg describes concealing the torture of a Palestinian prisoner and admits to participating in beating Palestinian prisoners. This is just what he will admit. Torture in these prisons has been thoroughly documented.

Under Goldberg’s editorship, PEN board member George Packer penned the infamous “When Writers Silence Writers: PEN America and the Authoritarian Spirit,” defending PEN’s dangerous response to student protests. In March of 2024, Marine veteran Phil Klay wrote an essay for The Atlantic, “The Cowardice of Guernica,” criticizing the magazine for being too responsive to staff members and the public who criticized it for publishing an essay that forwarded a morally confused, settler vision of the occupation and genocide six months into Israel’s campaign. In a recent Substack post, PEN board member, finance capitalist, and foreign policy expert Zachary Karabell was exultant over the destruction of Iran. He is a former regular contributor to the Atlantic via his “The Edgy Optimist Column” and has been a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy. Like Suzanne Nossel and Summer Lopez, he is an energetic theorist of the application of U.S. imperial power. 

In recent weeks The Atlantic again defended PEN, characterizing Mengestu’s departure as an unfounded, hair-trigger response to what the author, a former Jerusalem Post writer, considers an eminently reasonable article.

Through The Atlantic, board members have promoted a genocide-indifferent literary culture and a genocide-indifferent PEN. While PEN contains board members willing to defend PEN’s worst moments in the public spotlight, no board members exhibit a similar willingness to publicly forward a vision of PEN that decisively protects pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide speech, opposes U.S. military interventions that annihilate writers and journalists, or protects the right to boycott genocide-supporting organizations at home.

The Board, In Total

Roughly half of PEN America’s board has ties to either the military industrial complex, Wall Street, real estate, big oil, neocolonial international financial institutions, or hawkish media. 

These ties represent a multitude of potential conflicts of interest, some hypothetical, some quite concrete. Several board members draw paychecks from a media outlet that has consistently lashed out at critics that would seek to move PEN toward reform as PEN, ostensibly, seeks to reform. Several board members are part of a military industrial complex that profits from war and a foreign policy establishment predicated on identifying and dominating enemies of a U.S.-led world order. Several board members are tied to businesses with investments in Israel or have clients with financial stakes in Israel; they have financial incentives to move PEN to downplay Israel’s U.S.-funded world-shattering violence against Palestinians and its neighbor states. These ties fatally undermine PEN’s credibility when speaking to international affairs on a humanitarian basis. 

Given this board, it is no wonder that PEN has again waffled in its approach to the U.S.’s ethno-supremacist partner. 

Could it be another way? Of course. 

PEN’s board could include any number of journalists, academics, or writers who are consistent and principled critics of U.S. foreign policy and wars of aggression, who are deeply knowledgeable about the evolving forms of western colonialism, all of which exert their own forms of coercion over speech, including the bullet, the bomb, and the crippling economic sanction. There are plenty of them out there. But PEN’s board does not include individuals like this. 

If Dinaw Mengestu’s split with PEN represents a crack in its façade, its foundation remains strong. 

While writers of conscience should certainly resume their boycott of PEN, the purpose of such a boycott should not be to reform it but to starve it of writers until it dies. Otherwise, PEN will continue to legitimize U.S. wars of aggression under the guise of humanitarian concern. 

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[3] See Laurence H. Shoup’s Wall Street’s Think Tank (Monthly Review Press, 2015).

[4] An organization caught in what has been described as a “pay-for-play” scheme with the oligarchical United Arab Emirates. https://prospect.org/2023/02/24/2023-02-24-based-corruption-fifth-estate-think-tanks/

[5] “If you redefine the Abraham Accords, which we’re party to, as a vehicle not just for UAE recognition of Israel and Israel recognition of Bahrain and UAE, but as a financing vehicle, and also for other political and economic purposes, you alter fundamentally, and you communicate to Iran, we are going nowhere.” https://www.cfr.org/event/a-conversation-with-rahm-emanuel

[6] The Revolving Door Project defines the Military Industrial Complex as “the array of arms manufacturers, defense contractors, private military contractors, think tanks, advocacy groups, and lobbyists with a vested interest in American foreign policy and the U.S. military establishment.” https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/the-industry-agenda-military-industrial-complex/

[7] Higgins, to her credit, signed a letter in 2016 defending students at Harvard Law School against criticism from the Israel Lobby.

[8] See Silvia Federici’s Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2018).

[9] Scholars of USAID’s activities have noted how many of its documents reveal their understanding of democracy promotion as existing squarely within a framework of bolstering the power of private (and often Western-tied) capital within target states. In Bolivia, USAID’s activities were firmly in opposition to the rise of an indigenous-based socialist movement that would eventually challenge global north mining interests.

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PEN’s Rafah Model for Iran: Weaponized Humanitarianism & Literary Community Mass Amnesia

PEN may have been forced to support Palestinians after Gaza’s destruction, but it never stopped speaking the language that enabled that destruction. There’s a bright line between the U.S. vaporizing the schoolchildren of Minab and PEN America’s activities, between PEN’s humanitarian concern and manufacturing consent for war. 

In late 2025 and early 2026, economic protests broke out in Iran. After they turned violent, Iran cracked down on them. On cue, the PEN soft power machine kicked in to decry that crackdown in the strongest terms. On January 26, PEN issued a press release linking the larger state response to the arrest of the writer Ali Asodallhi: “In the context of horrific and widespread state-directed violence in which tens of thousands of protestors have been killed or wounded, coupled with a near-total internet blackout, the arrest of Ali Asadollahi on unknown charges is a grave assault on freedom of expression.” Four days later, PEN posted to Bluesky an article by their new co-CEO, Summer Lopez, an article in Just Security, about Iran’s arrest of writers in the context of the winter 2025-2026 protests. Just Security theorizes imperial strategy. For instance, a March 2026 article argues that the U.S.-Israeli assassination of Iran’s leadership and supreme leader (and his fourteen month old niece) was lawful, shattering an international norm that the U.S. had abided by for decades and opening the door wide for escalatory violence.

As with the 2023 and 2024 crackdowns on student Palestine solidarity protests, which PEN critiqued, in 2025 and 2026 the objects of PEN’s critique and the objects of the U.S. state violence coincided. PEN uses its platform to provide rhetorical cover for impending U.S. state violence by strategically weaponizing the language of rights, applying it on a highly selective international basis such that it promptly and overwhelmingly aligns with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Over the past year, despite draconian crackdowns on speech and protest in allies like the U.K. and Germany, and Israel’s continued assassination of Lebanese journalists, the overwhelming object of PEN’s international censure has remained China, Russia, and especially Iran.

Four days before the U.S. massacre of schoolchildren, PEN posted an open letter calling for the release of a writer jailed in Iran. Then bombs began to rain in Tehran, Minab, and elsewhere across Iran. 

After war breaks out, PEN consistently fails to decry the annihilation of writers and destruction of culture via U.S. and Israeli bombs. In the case of Gaza, it only did so well after an enormous pressure campaign had been mounted against it and several months after enormous swathes of Gaza had been flattened, tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, and many more injured. This is the liberal-imperial mode. 

Over the course of months and thousands of bombing sorties, the U.S.-Israeli war machine bombed Iranian cultural heritage sites like the Gholestan Palace, universities, and upwards of 55 libraries. PEN stayed silent on this cultural destruction. 

This mirrored their silence during the Twelve-Day War in 2025 as well. In this war of aggression, Israel, with U.S.-backing, killed Iranian journalists, media workers, the poet Parnia Abassi, and the well-known painter Mansoureh.

Similarly, during the 2026 war on Iran, PEN had nothing to say about the U.S. stifling the free expression of artists by killing them. Soroush Khazaie was a twenty-nine-year-old new media artist who was into Radiohead and whose multimedia vocal performances were eventually banned by the state. On March 2, the U.S. killed him in his home in Tehran by dropping a bomb on it. In its various reports and posts PEN also left unmentioned U.S. and Israeli involvement in creating economic pain in Iran and setting the table for violence on the streets. There was no mention of the Israeli-initiated Twelve-Day War, no mention of decades of sanctions against Iran, no mention of the U.S. sending arms to Iranian dissidents, no mention of Mossad’s self-professed involvement in the uprising, and no skepticism of the numbers of dead civilians provided by U.S. state-funded groups. Iranians, like people of all nations, have legitimate grievances against their state and states must not respond to protests with bullets. However, it is likely that Israeli intelligence activityhelped amplify the violence that sparked this nation-wide crackdown in response. That crackdown was then framed as grounds for a humanitarian war by a white supremacist U.S. regime. Trump promised “help is on the way” and urged Iranians to continue protesting. 

It was only after the historically unpopular, massive bombing campaign that killed thousands of civilians was well underway and to head off the embarrassment of the U.S. or Israel potentially killing the writers PEN advocates for that PEN released a statement of concern for the safety of these writers. Curiously, PEN limited its concerns to jailed writers and not the larger number of cultural workers in Iran, some of whom had already been killed by the U.S. and Israel. Nor does PEN, while calling for “all parties” to prioritize civilian safety in Iran, actually name the parties—the U.S. and Israel—dropping bombs on Iran.

Similarly, when Trump’s threats “to destroy Iranian civilization” stirred fears he might unleash nuclear war, PEN broadcast a statement it cosigned with several other humanitarian organizations condemning Trump’s language and arguing that if Trump carried out his threats, this would constitute a ‘war crime.’ Yet there’s no mention of the war crimes and destruction of civilizational infrastructure that the U.S. and Israel had already carried out. 

This is PEN’s Rafah rhetorical model. Across the course of several months in 2024, President Biden had claimed Rafah was his red line, even as Israel bombed Rafah. If Israel attacked Rafah, he would end support. Israel demolished Rafah, killing, injuring, and displacing thousands of Palestinians in the process. Yet U.S. support continued. In the Rafah rhetorical model, the moral red line for U.S. or U.S.-ally violence against a dehumanized other is always in the future, even when in the present that red line is crossed repeatedly, flagrantly, and in full public view. In the process, the names of the piling dead die on PEN’s tongue. 

Meanwhile, as the immoral and historically unpopular assault on Iran continues, PEN’s demonization of the enemy proceeds unabated; it has issued several more press releases and updates condemning Iranian state oppression.

In late April, after two full months of U.S. assault, PEN again singled out Iran as the height of international oppression by awarding jailed Iranian writers the Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee and Ali Asadollahi the PEN America Freedom to Write Award. This news was rebroadcast by Radio Free Europe, a U.S. state-funded propaganda channel.[10] In the weeks to come, the U.S. would deliver freedom to the villagers of Southern Iran by destroying their water sources.

Taking the broadest view of PEN’s reports, press releases, and social media posts, the majority of its international activity is focused on demonizing the U.S.’s largest strategic opponents through the liberal-imperial frame of a freedom-loving democratic U.S. versus ‘totalitarian’ states, who also happen to resist the unfettered extractive activity of U.S. capital.[11]

Rather than change direction post-2024, PEN has continued to align itself with U.S. foreign policy objectives, providing rhetorical cover for U.S. imperial carnage. 

This is the double game of the liberal-imperial ideology that animates PEN: to stir up humanitarian outrage against state enemies then condemn the worst excess of wars against those state enemies but to never, ever question the war itself or humanize the writers and artists killed by the U.S. and Israel.[12] In this liberal-imperial mode, human rights are secured by killing humans, culture is protected by destroying culture. You just don’t talk about the latter.

This was all before Mengestu’s resignation. This was all while writers were normalizing relationships with PEN. 

PEN may have changed its relationship to the massacres of the past in regard to Gaza. It has not changed its relationship to the massacres of the future. Under its imperial board, it never will, even as U.S.-Israeli war-making threatens to ignite the planet. 

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[10] PEN laments cuts to its funding: https://bsky.app/profile/penamerica.bsky.social/post/3lkhps5u5mk2h

[11] On totalitarian states: in May the U.S. increased ICE funding by $70 billion accelerate domestic ethnic cleansing.

[12] Bafflingly, the body of PEN’s belated report on Israel’s assault on Gaza’s culture does not call for an end to the occupation but rather a ceasefire and an end to the ‘war,’ as if the genocide were a symmetrical conflict. It also does not name a single slain writer or journalist in the body of the report; rather, they are consigned to an appendix. Gaza’s most famous writer, Refaat Al-Alareer, is described as a scholar in report’s main text. PEN only fully humanizes writers, featuring their faces and biographical details, when they face oppression by an enemy state.

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Who Is A Writer & The Limits of Western Subjecthood

History will remember February 28, 2026 as the day the world shifted on its axis. The same day as the Minab massacre, U.S.-Israel assassinated the 86-year-old Ali Khamenei in a ‘clinical’ operation that killed several of his family members, including his infant granddaughter, Zahra Mohammadi Golpayengi, via a strike on his ‘compound.’[13] The murders galvanized Iranian resistance, further eroded U.S.-Israeli moral credibility, and shattered international conventions against assassinating heads of state. The killing of Khamenei may well prove to be the act that plunges the world into a downward escalatory spiral of military violence. 

To understand PEN’s failures, let’s imagine how a vaguely humanist (not even anti-imperial or decolonial) free speech organization that insists on commenting on international affairs with a bit of spine (and unfettered from links to the military industrial complex) might have responded to the assassination of Iran’s political and spiritual leader, a voluminous author and poet.

Perhaps this organization would cast him as a complex figure, a source of spiritual guidance and political, even revolutionary clarity, across a great deal of the Islamicate world, a figure whose death was publicly mourned by millions, whose funeral was a world event. A humanist approach might also note that Khamenei opposed western colonialism and imperialism, that some of his teaching overlapped with western liberal values and some of them diverged from them quite definitively. As a political and revolutionary figure, he had blood on his hands, as do most successful revolutionaries and heads of state (certainly every U.S. president). A complex figure. Light and shadow. 

But Khamenei the writer, no matter how important, is consigned, through silence upon his death, to the category of the dark other who cannot be anything but the enemy of the Western order, whose killing is not an unprecedented, world-inflaming event precipitated by two sovereigns drenched in the blood of genocide in Palestine, ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon, and war on Iran in order to maintain and expand an ethno-supremacist order Khamenei proved an obstacle to. Rather, Khamenei-the-writer’s assassination is something unremarkable to PEN (so interested in Iran), something that just so happens as the West cleans house. 

Perhaps this humanist organization would comment on the writers jailed by Iran and the United States and also say that it is wrong to kill someone for their speech, no matter how powerful or powerless. Perhaps this humanist organization would also have something to say about the journalists of Lebanon. As the war on Iran captured the world’s attention, Israel conducted a ferocious assault on Southern Lebanon in which it tracked down and killed journalists. Israel killed the sibling journalists Fatima and Mohammed Ftouni, along with the iconic reporter Ali Shuaib on March 28. Weeks later, Israel killed the Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil. Khalil rescued stray cats and received visitors in a garden of citrus trees she planted with her father. Israel killed the Lebanese poet and broadcaster Khatoun Salma in her home, alongside her husband on April 2026. Israel conducted these assassinations while engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Southern Lebanon, demolishing village after village. Israel did this flush with arms from the U.S. PEN America had nothing to say about a state’s historically unprecedented violence against journalists.

This leads us back to PEN’s vexed definition of who it counts as a writer. PEN America cannot address the death or persecution of everyone oppressed for their speech in every country. Yet even after its so called about-face, it has been laser-focused on those writers persecuted by countries the U.S. is about to bomb and largely ignoring the U.S.’s partners—Israel, Germany, the U.K.—who have erected draconian discourse regimes where the law refuses to distinguish between criticism of genocide and hate speech.

Who is a writer to PEN? You are not a writer if the U.S. or Israel has killed you.

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[13]  ‘compound’ is orientalist for ‘home’

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Publishing After PEN: A Few Notes  

The U.S.-Israel nexus represents an immense source of oppression to all people of the world. Israeli drones, tested on the children of Palestine, fly over Africa. The U.S.-backed mercenary CEO Erik Prince has turned Haiti into a fiefdom, drone-bombing civilians while collecting tax revenues. In this nexus, state organizations interlink with private security and surveillance firms and transnational corporations seeking to do business in vulnerable countries and occupied territories. These security and surveillance firms sell counter-insurgency—war against the peoples of a state—as a product to western-aligned regimes in exchange for access to markets and resources. 

Gaza has been the most visible sign of this global apartheid regime whose growth depends on the destruction of states and movements that resist its racial-capitalist order.[14]

As the U.S. ignites more fires via the war with Iran and begins to formally administer concentration camps for Palestinians in Gaza and migrants at home, writers cannot trust a mainstream cultural sphere that has enabled this kind of foreign and domestic state terror to meaningfully oppose it. We must abandon PEN until PEN is no more. 

In a post-PEN landscape, writers and translators must seriously commit to building robust translation and publishing alternatives not just without state funding but without funding from war-state-aligned organizations. Otherwise, they will not find room to seriously challenge the state or forge transnational solidarities around writing that isn’t easily compatible with liberal-imperial ideology. 

Yet writers keep dragging themselves back to PEN because PEN has money and access. In a recent conversation, a high-profile translator informed me that grants and awards from PEN are often instrumental for lesser-known translators in inking deals with Big Five publishers. 

Breaking from PEN in order to break PEN means finding different ways to put resources in writers’ hands. While it is beyond my expertise to recommend one solution, I’ll end with a few thoughts: 

First, if making one’s primary living from writing and translation means taking extremely dirty money and all the unspoken strictures on the content of one’s writing that entails, then writers and translators should consider how to align themselves with projects and organizations that both align with the values of transnational solidarity, abolition, and human liberation and support the cultural production of their members. Many will roll their eyes at this. But here we might point to the militant anti-apartheid South African Unions that offered cultural centers, writing workshops, stages for worker-plays, cultural festivals, and union newspapers that published union-members’ and allies’ poems. Unionized work paid the bills; the culture it fostered fortified workers’ spirits in the struggle for emancipation. What if the organizations we are a part of—that are truly fighting the good fight—also provided a home for making and sharing culture? And what if writers wrote to the struggles and desires of the people they are shoulder to shoulder with, rather than a largely hypothetical ‘national’ audience? This isn’t a point about unions in particular but about the possibility of movements and writers consciously reproducing each other. Here I’m also thinking of Toni Cade Bambara’s move from a professorship in the northeast to Atlanta to do community work as the writer-in-residence at the Neighborhood Arts Center. 

Let’s also look at this from the perspective of publishers. If we’re being real, small publishers are lucky if they break even, let alone make a modest profit, making many small presses dependent on outside funding.[15] Given this, it may be useful to abandon the pretense that publishing can be a primary source of income instead of one in concert with others. This isn’t something to lament but a reality to ground different approaches. There’s a strong tradition of radical presses scaffolded by brick and mortar bookstores. These bookstores can act as more reliable sources of income, house equipment and inventory, and serve as points of distribution for their press. Ed Sanders’ Fuck You magazine was published out of his Peace Eye bookstore. The Drum & Spearbookstore anchored Drum & Spear press, which put out Enemy of the Sun, representing a point of transnational solidarity between the Black and Palestinian liberation/resistance movements. More recently, PM Press bought the last remaining used bookstore in Ithaca, New York. 

In a moment of the increased criminalization of speech and literature that has closed many spaces like universities from currents of liberatory thought, bookstores have also acted as strongholds of social movement organizing. They have also traditionally acted as covert distribution points (below/behind the counter) of criminalized literature. In the years to come, this may be particularly necessary for titles too dangerous in the eyes of a wildly paranoid state for publishers to list online or for readers to have appear in their search histories or delivered to their homes. Merging the activities of publishing with physical spaces responsive to the surrounding communities is a promising alternative to grant-chasing, gala-fundraising model of genocide-washing NGOs like PEN, which fundamentally depend on keeping in the good graces of millionaires and deep-pocketed foundations. 

Further, in this moment in which not only the browsing and purchase of digital texts but digital reading itself is highly surveilled, down to the second, there’s something to say about the role of small press print culture at the ground-floor of liberation—liberation of the mind. To read print, for your attention to be unsurveilled, is also, as Matt Seybold argues, a rent strike against surveillance capital and the massively consumptive computing infrastructures it relies upon. Would you feel more comfortable—more free—reading Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature in a hard copy that lives in your bag or through digital software, where your activity becomes both monetizable data in possession of a tech goliath and a record of potential evidence against you by this rapidly Red-Scarifying state?

If the problem of the PEN model of funding is that these organizations reflect the priorities of their elite boards, state ties, and funding sources, presses can renew their exploration of from-below funding models. With few exceptions, literary publishing has not caught up to the crowd funding models that have floated several of your favorite podcasts for years. There are also sturdy funding models that can continue to refurbished, including direct subscriptions to presses. And, as the editor of this article reminded me, buying books is a form of crowdfunding. I’ll add that buying books from insurgent presses in social reading contexts—sharing books, discussion groups, political education groups—amplifies our capacity to create cultures beyond the liberal imperial one PEN seeks to maintain. 

Finally, I would like to point out that at this moment in the United States, where moral crime is frequently made law, the gap between legality and morality has never been so stark. As repression ratchets up, we should not disqualify funding sources or expression that run afoul of the current legal regime. If certain forms of expression are made illegal and printing, funding, or distributing those becomes something along the lines of ‘material support to terrorism,’ then there may need to be a necessary consonance between extra-legal funding and extra-legal expression—expression which is still necessary, lawful or not. This means expanding the definition of who is a writer, publisher, and distributor and going to bat for those people when they face persecution, rather than shrinking these categories for the sake of respectability. For instance, PEN, our free speech champ, has been silent on the Prairieland 19, some of whom received life-destroying, decades-long federal prison sentences for making and transporting zines. It is time to bring these writers, publishers, and distributors from the margins of our attention to the center. PEN never will. 

Above all, this is not a call to disorganize as we walk away from organizations like PEN. The problem with PEN is that it was taking the desire for an organization like it to exist and bending that energy to imperial purposes. Rather, we needto approach forming alternative writers organizations with internationalist dimensions with a renewed sense of rigor, patience, and seriousness of purpose. Whatever comes after PEN should looking nothing like PEN. Whoever is involved should look nothing like PEN’s board or leadership. Some experiments will fail. Some will succeed. Either way, this moment calls for a decisive realignment of our activities and methods as cultural workers to fight U.S.- and Israel-led global apartheid. There’s less time and little excuse to be fooled again.

---

[14] For an analysis of Israeli-based security, surveillance, and weapons companies on the global stage and the term “global apartheid,” see Kambale Musavali, “From the River to the Rift: The Global Struggle for Self-Determination in Palestine and Congo.” Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonisation & Liberation (Pluto Press, 2026).

[15] In a recent fundraising email, Ugly Duckling Presse noted that “book sales make up one-third of UDP’s budget, but book production accounts for more than one-third of our expenditure.”

---

∩

Joe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Buffalo Free Rapid Transit (Black Ocean, 2026). Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at bars, squats, universities, and rivers. Protean, Postcolonial Studies, mercury firs, Best Buds! Collective, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have all featured his writing. In Buffalo, he has taught community-based poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers.

Three Poems

MINISTER

Not even weed works anymore:
The boredom is muscular.
I came here to outrun the environment
To be stimulated by the internal spirit
But the payment’s late, I’m
Grounded, a crater
Of data that frays at the edges.
Each word is leaking gas.
Each word insists
Sky bird, ground bird, water.
So I seek a less ethical god.
I am kissing my lover’s knees.
I am taking my house plants 
To bed with me
Where we will eat like astronauts 

ROUTINE ORIENTATIONS

On the ridge everything’s in triplicate: three fences, three gardens, three cats.
Like a blood cell, the shape keeps the structure stable, viable
even when a train blows into the valley 

and disrupts the peace and quiet with its ravenous breath.
Three bird feeders spin slowly in breezy Venn diagrams. 
The house is always set up for a party, aluminum tub

with three bottles of Corona in rusty water. The promise of rain 
imbues the air, humid grass and cat litter in the shag carpeting
and everyone moving around as if in soup 

except Beatrix, BB, and Kiddo
who strut religiously through the gardens, bothering the dirt for seeds–
confined to their essential purpose, the chickens commit to it.

PERPETUAL SHED

Surrounded by empty fields

we carry beams, bags 

of trash, broken 

refrigerator drawers full of 

boxed pasta, beans.

We wander alone 

or in pairs or in pairs

we weld the pieces of a trellis 

together. We don’t talk

about the labor 

of transporting entire

buildings here and

painstakingly re-

assembling them plank by

window frame by tin 

sheet til they beat

back rain—we talk

about how the shed is going nowhere;

we keep having 

to redo the joint 

work, hammer out 

fillers and flip them 

or plug the holes.

Other than that, it’s quiet

except for the insects

and the far-off sound of bullets

hitting beer cans

until a military helicopter drones overhead,

impossible 

except there it is.

After sound, look for color.

All yellow is probably a warbler

but if there are olive or black wings

look for size: female orioles are bigger

and less personable

than the goldfinch, who flies

as if riding sad waves, trilling

each time he comes down.

Look for

the invisible hand

in praise of production,

the crush of metal

pilings, smell of burnt plastic

emanating from the tin drum,

hoisting of planks.

Look for us standing around as a group

under the hackberry tree.

Putting nuts and bolts in my pocket, 

taking them back out.

∩

Suzanne Highland is a writer, educator, and wildlife rehabilitator. Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and it appears in Apogee, Tagvverk, Works & Days, mercury firs, and in the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart from Foglifter Press, among others. She is also the voice of Mortal Lives, an essay series about cities, money, death and wildlife, available on Substack. Originally from the gulf coast of Florida, Suzanne lives in Brooklyn and at suzannehighland.com.

One Poem

Refuse

It’s a good garbage pile, I said, of the orange corduroy sofa stacked with tree limbs. Absent meaning, garbage emanates. A beatific scrawl upon the morning, the city, the visionary populace leeching motor oil from the river. On the pier beyond a superstore, youth snort drugs and set assholish fireworks ablaze on ad hoc dancefloor. The end of the world heralds untoward shipping delays, consumer goods clogging oceanic harbors. A click of data systems hums a mournful song, fascinating its own tuneless concept of music. I meant there were beats per minute engineered to collapse the frontal lobe. The best song ever written was still a piano lit on fire, supplanted only by the silence of a striking garbage truck. Vague groan, low terror, undergirding the morning’s harmonious offering of golden light leaking around the perimeter of the landlord’s blackout blinds. TV-watchers, that’s who sit on sofas, green and woody stems downed in rabid storms. A pair of brown pants I own because I purchased hovers somewhere over Texas, for months, refusing to arrive.

*

Vivid textual artifacts proclaim the existence of a sweating mass. A woman I thought I loathed reveals herself as merely stupid, hollowed out by money’s vacant gleam. A psychic nonrelation to even concept of boss, having one’s hands dutifully observed by an agent of metronymic fortitude. This was the sort of surreality that made it hard, at a party, to sustain conversation. A plume of smoke issued near the domed church which served as anchoring neighborhood landmark. Psychic, groaning terror of the world experienced from a remove, afforded scenic, nearly panoramic vistas of the burning city. The cartoon fat cat lurches against city hall’s iron gates, plumped with air, secured by glued vinyl seams. It’s an astonishing weight, air, when flooded with neon particulates, smoke which weaves in cellularly to delicate alveoli. Anger could scrape raw, with a hungry throb, a puncture. A mirror tilted against a tree, reflecting weeds and a crotch in vague, genderless underwear.

*

Because I purchased, I owned the morning pile of eggs named for liberal democratic slogans: Internment Camps Are Back Eggs Florentine sauced thickly on a white plate. Beyond a certain threshold, an act of terroristic violence becomes a saner option than foamy supplication of one’s political consciousness to latex lawn signs. Less scenic vistas existed, in frantic pockets of urban solitude. What I liked was arcing off grid into dirt pile flattened by tractors, which was how I got tricked into believing I was in love on more than one occasion. Fruits burst on feeble branches, inedibly sweet and tanged with lithium. Legally, the picket has nothing to do with the protest, the garbage speaking for itself of the putrid conditions light cast upon the sacred populace. Affidavits attest with factual gravity the existence of a past action, namely a handoff. Against interpretation, the judge said, hurling a book against the so-called defendant’s agog jaw.. To be served a plate of eggs, by the court of common pleas.

*

To stop in one’s tracks, meaning refuse to chuff. Boot sunk deep in concrete becoming permanent, crusted white apostrophe. An invented you hums a brutal melody that raises the spirit of caged ghosts framed in a burnt-out building’s blackened windows. Trash bloated the intersection so thickly it became cliche. False news of bags dropped on the mayor’s lawn spread, the protest more vital in conceptual image than action. The city itself constructed with aluminum barricades an inviting zone for protesters to deposit their garbage at city hall. A bank is a dump for money, in clean, marble architectural grandeur, or the neon flicker of endless suburban dimness. Bob’s cracked basement window ushered in a swarm of flies who became too hot to fly, skulking on the floor. Orange needle tips connote urgent, commuted suffering under the elevated train. Relief, which becomes a chain.

*

Because it existed, it had a government name and stateless signatory. This was how a baby possum felt, mistaken for a rat in the bricked patio corner. A wall was built to be backed up against, by a cop commanding you to back up, against which you can back up no further. While men heckle, a tongue in a mouth multiplies, imperceptibly fattened by the fragrant meats of empire. Parties, having their own tenuous logic, against thickened routines, disrupt, with blue liquor, an evil day. A near-constant, near-silent backdrop of fireworks, like the city was an ocean with dolphins of sulfuric light leaping above its rooftops. The bear has emerged, I narrated, as the bear approached salmon gulping upriver, with horny, throbbing fervor, a livestream. A janky materiality presupposes a clean network, the youth allegedly rigging old TV sets to reduce their pixelated exposure to gleaming, 3D textures. A little ear, citrus, shriveled, constructed of sugar, promises, in marketing copy, juices that have been squeezed out.

*

A bloodthirsty moon roots around a black sack of garbage leaking dark, reddish streaks on the curb. The cockroaches, uncircumspect, hold their liquored applause. The city would drown beneath a tide of its own waste, a brute fact that astonishes. A logic of scale and heft occludes the labor and machinery that shore up the city against its own dark inverse. The mortgage foreclosure lawyers work in an office above a mostly abandoned mall where on lunch breaks I walk to contemplate the mirrored surfaces of commerce’s hollowed-out cash registers. The city as noun affords no relief to the people who live in and compose with their living its meaningful but unprofitable properties. A wind that annihilates memory cannot annihilate the artificial plants constructing an artificial town square in the center of a vacant shopping plaza, the idea of the commons bordered by two busted escalators and a juice place still pulping oranges for weary commuters. A dark echo, I mean, one’s double, cinching the knot tighter, a collar choked against a willing throat.

*

Accounting to my predisposition for being a conduit, I made as adequate a paralegal as I did a poet. The attorney’s legal advice flows through me, and is not information, but instruction conveyed with obedient tenor. This is the same thing God does a vis poems, in some dead poets’ formulations of the creative act. Another old woman poet’s death felt like a universe flickering out of existence. A librarian wheeled an abandoned cart through a tenebrous hall of graffited, empty, study carrels. At the end of the strike, the strike ends, with glum specificity. The workday hangs its banner flecked with mistletoe and sedatives. The world’s fundamental mysterious nature reveals itself, a skirt hiked up, in a clouded pool of water, in a sinkhole ripped through tarmac, in a squirrel’s gnawed skull, in the trash bag a woman dons to protect against the storm, in the tornado warning that Jill receives but not the rest of us, in the single pulsing beep of a smoke detector that falls again silent, hovering on the ceiling like a plastic halo adorning the concept of private property.

*

To be a small thief tucked in the rigging of a decommissioned naval facility turned hipster retail headquarters. A leafcutter proffering kitschy apologies for her intrusion on the leaf’s greeny duty. A decision to vacate arrives with spiritual clarity, but action requires what a mom calls elbow grease. On day six, each can acquires greater aluminum heft once emptied. The parking tickets stacked up bar entry to the civic arena. Yardwork debris presupposes an allegiance to the workyard, in anagram excess. There is no anagram for anagram, I think Dana said, whose leg bore an elegant, red circle subsuming a black, snakelike ribbon. The plague, I announced, and had to later specify which, with ratlike ferocity, human waste clotting the tracks against which life usually brutally churned. A downed tree branch derailed a train, with comradely congeniality, like a pair of open hands.

∩

Steph Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of No More Flowers (Birds, LLC) and My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions). 

One Poem

from The World Book of Pork Dishes

it’s engaged 
and shaped 
wall washers 
on the payroll
pressing the organ  
elemental wires 
wheels turning 

you want the color 
to mean something 
and the colors don’t 
mean anything 
just stuff 
production happening 

the cattle on that plain 
is long gone 
and the clouds used 
to cast shadows on them 

the sun is no different
one cannot explain
the world to anyone 
when we understand 
that everything is wrong 

the city of new pork  
in the sleep memory 
a kiss in the street 
from the taverns 
by the secret lots 

the past 
is a never-ending source
the aspect of building 
the alter involves time 
high on the rooftop 
thinking about pork 

taxes
military drafts 
major canals 
megafauna dies
rocks that resemble 
explosions 

defense connections 
federal support 
corporate grace
chorizo grease 
a town like any other 

rain
names of streets 
drowned tools
cuddly sea 
the gold foil 
bald on the apple

out with it evening 
go believe 
moronic seltzer 
what question was 
i asking 
drifting off to sleep 

the next time 
i got depressed 
going across town 
valley floor 
seeing the vulture
black crow 
rock climbing rocks 

a tree fell 
every 40 seconds 
across the meadow 
and love 
had to take a chance 
on the southbound mail

hotel memory 
working on the river 
what matters if things are fleeting 
as long as they happened

little by surely 
one whole year 
fizzing whippets
may the lavender hue  
of nothing’s shirt  

the magnificent seven
elemental wires 
absent the frame 
major canals 
megafauna dies
rocks that resemble 
explosives

fumbling for contours 
of new pork 
city from a plane 
high on the roof
seeing none blurry
lights looked 
like candles 

diving through hills
chi chi’s on the way 

red flashing 
lights blue 
flushing lights 
green flashing 
lights red

every single day 
are you 
are you determined 
what was 
the name of the airport 
sedatives 
expedience 

this spirit was in a dead zone 

the whole 
smoke scene 
effectively four years 
name difference 
interior delta 
bruted things
stuff just production 
happening 

i’d gaze into the fountain 
and see her beautiful face 

the little red notebook i had 
with all that writing is gone  

i saw you at the demonstration 
with rain and all things gone

i wonder if things would 
have turned out differently 

if i went out with 
you guys that one night 

twenty minutes 
from mother’s day 

the train 
stops moving

∩

Colin Russell is a poet from Walnut Valley, West Virginia. He lives and works in Queens.

Thirteen Stories

Farther Californias

When I sit in the morning I see across my desk the snow on the desert’s face, it softens the action of Silver’s crutch as he advances, I do not notice the fire until it is reflected in his eyes and the first sound that reaches me is the only sound over his breath, he has limped down the sierra the length of the Sea of Cortez with one word between his teeth: GOLD.

*

Before every hidden airstrip a gaucho pulling on a cigarette . . . behind it, a Cessna below the grains of the high grass.

*

They were a hundred miles down the road to Cíbola when Walsh insisted the party consult the map. I did not know we had brought a map, the road had not changed in centuries and the way was plainly marked. To the left, to the west, descended the steep barrancas, we could not see the bottom . . . to the east gradually ascended the unanimous plateau. For hours we had navigated by moonlight and necessity, when the moon waned to nothing we would bivouac in a canyon until the first crescent shard had reappeared, clouds were not considered likely and in fact along the whole route we had met with no surprises, the fog remained contained below the escarpment’s lip as we unfurled our heavy blankets under the creosote each morning. I saw the waning gibbous reflected in both lenses of Walsh’s dark familiar frames, I could not meet his eyes straight on. With a cavalier gesture he had tossed back over his shoulder the old Kalashnikov on its strap, at the rear the thin Missourian stood still with his gun at the ready, he pointed it into the thicket from which we emerged moments before, he had not proven over the week to be worth much as a scout but on the road he was not needed, the path could not be clearer. From a deep pocket inside his coat Walsh withdrew the creased sheet he claimed was our map of the zone, he unfolded it and pulled it flat from either end, I stood so close beside him that our sleeves were almost touching but in the stark fairy circles, the pointillist swathes between them, I could decipher no information and nothing could be learned from the pale undulating lines . . . I heard the Missourian turn and saw the barrel of his gun point into the thicket ahead of us, the leaves began to shake.

*

The woman on the phone in front of the ligustrina looks into the grass before I can look into the street, the rest of the way home I notice every woman’s fast eyes, up then into the grass.

*

He is not Robinson Crusoe, he does not appear in iterations, every great pirate is a part shadow of Silver. He does not compete with Robert Maitland and does not need to be justified in terms of possibility, there is no retelling and he is not a theme. He is not a situation.

*

The snow brought out her beauty, it revealed her pale makeup was not entirely white. He reached toward the fur muff that covered her left ear and she quickly stepped away, the snow muffled her boots. She told him that he would prefer the blonde, he denied it. They did not notice the men along the ridge below white blankets, they did not hear the signal for the five dark figures to rise out of a drift.

*

In the light of the next bonfire he discerned the unmistakable silhouette of the field linguist, he knew his long coat, he knew the dark outline of the microphone before the flames could be no other than his quarry’s. He backed away into the shadows before he tipped the remaining broth from his bowl onto the asphalt, he started in his direction. It was several nights now he had been dreaming of the researcher and the apparatus that before had filled him with repulsion now exerted an attraction he did not understand. The linguist turned to face him before he stepped out of the dark, he quietly lowered his microphone and removed the bulky headset, he reached with his free hand into the night and said to him in a voice he could not place, Welcome aboard.
Both men inhaled sharply, they listened to the fire and the muffled chatter around it.
They are reversing, they believe, the field linguist said, former accidents. Por supuesto creen que por esta manera se acercan a la verdad, resuelven the structural inadequacies of the many competing images of the truth. Su propuesta es volver a las propias foundations and the risk naturally is the abolition of intelligible speech. The payoff in their theory is a perfect understanding, accessible to all, but whether the truth’s universalization entails progress will remain, para nosotros, an open question.

*

The tail was visible in the rearview mirror as both cars crested a hump but the sunlight on the windshield obscured the other driver’s face . . . lazily she drew her knees up against her chest, she allowed her cheek to fall across his shoulder, he felt the wheel begin to turn beneath his fingers.

*

Despite their heavy equipment they advanced across the road with so little noise that the first sign of their arrival, through the great open doorway, was the play of light on the spears. They may have been assisted by the steady traffic. The head docent rushed to meet them as they advanced up the steps, she was still smoothing her coat when they narrowed their formation for the final push into the hall, the other docents gathered by the columns on either side, they murmured and watched the newcomers but their faces did not betray any sign of curiosity, they only refused to leave. In the first rank a hoplite’s shield shook visibly as he demanded that the woman point them to the marbles, she promised she would comply, however first they would need to speak to HIM, she told them as she gestured toward the gallery. The hoplites in the lower ranks strained and some stood on their toes to see who it was they were to seduce or overcome. . . but the Missourian, in the third rank, had seen him as soon as he entered, by the door to the former reading room he recognized the poise, the shallow eyes, Silver’s traitorous curls. Already he had lowered the shaft of his spear to the cool granite, he alone understood all was already lost.

*

The pioneer, approaching the big cat pressed against the rock, realized too quickly that the tears of the puma were his own. He could no more sheath his knife than the puma could spring for his neck.

*

Every gaucho pulling on a cigarette beside an empty level field is camouflage or advertisement for another hidden airstrip. He will sit and watch the road. When a drone takes off his only motion is to cup his free hand around the flame, he hides it from the dust wafted up in the pampero, when a Cessna lands and the pilot counts him the money he is the one who takes it by the wing, he leads it into the high grass. He sleeps as often in his chair as in the tent and his hat protects his face from the early summer rains. In the hour before dawn he is always awake, he stoops low as he walks the airstrip and weighs each pebble in his palm before he casts it, listlessly, into the shallow culvert.

*

Even the train felt slower, duller, it rocked as though it too were suffering from a chest cold.

*

Under the new moon only his cigarette offered any light, the glow of the city out of the north precluded total darkness but also obscured the stars. If I strained I might identify what I believed was Orion’s Belt but for evidence all I had was a memory tinged by indifference, we huddled under the rocks on the slope behind the beach. Walsh was sitting close enough to whisper to me, our knees were almost touching. When he murmured to himself I could not tease his voice from the soft action of the waves against the shore . . . only when he raised the cigarette and showed the motion of his lips, the pale scar from the bridge of his nose to the turn in his left jaw, did I recognize he was speaking though not to me. At times I believed I picked out a phrase, any word could as easily have been a weak projection from a breaker on the point. The sand at the bottom of my shoes put pressure on my arches indistinguishable from water, if they were no longer dry I could not tell the difference but even now the night is clear, the fog remains to sea. Walsh drops his cigarette and crushes it under the heel of a leather Oxford, it vanishes into the sand. I cannot see his lips but it can only be his voice and now it speaks to me, Are you in?
I ask him to tell me where.
To Cíbola, says the familiar voice . . . several faint silhouettes rise from the iceplant above, they are slow, they make no noise, here and there a rifle reflects a light that has no source.

∩

Chapman Caddell is a writer in London.

Three Poems

Humble Papal Funeral

I could no longer listen to the deliberation which was my first symptom. I was here first which is a way of saying I was wrong first which is a system of knowing. New systems emerge to know which happen to be retreads and remasters of earlier systems but are shiny enough to warrant a second gawky glance. I was shining myself up in the bathroom to earn third and fourth gawky glances when I heard the system come on. I’d heard it before of course. Discursive fuzz. Pieces of elastic thought insisting on themselves. Faulty accounting out loud. Checkbooks posing as first impressions and people posing as Sports Utility Vehicles. Which sport? Which utility? This had to be the start of a deflationary spiral I thought. This has to be the end. I’ve grown cynical of certitude. There are new certificates blooming in the mouths of checkbooks. They loom and gawk and glance. Something is burning for this. Every room I’m in now. What you smell is what you know. I can smell your mildew from feet away. I know how heavy the bag was you punched to earn your latte. Sweating out the dye in your Wahoo jacket. Wearing the jacket anyways. Another room burns. 

Anhedonia 

If what you want is love you are still the enemy,
you have not yet thought through clearly what that means.
On the gender selection screen I mark omnia sunt
communia. Depressed people’s kindness tastes 
like backwash you have to learn to live on. I spent the 
last decade sewing camouflage for my enemies. Even the situation
couldn’t believe itself. The hors’ d’oeuvres were granular.
The grants stagnated after the palatial estates caught wind.
Every house eavesdrops on the neighborhood. What if your
neighborhood was a stranger’s favorite spaceship? What if
your angle was right? This grief has become self-congratulatory. 
Which is a way of saying I am alive I am alive I am alive I am alive.
A redundancy we sell to the highest bidder. What is the minimum 
survivable wage in Northeast Ohio? Yeah let’s make it a dollar less than that

With Your Back Against the River

What the state calls political violence
will become the state. New age
of your old boss. He’s apologizing 
somewhere for the sun rising. 
Somewhere else for the sun setting.
I think our lines have gotten crossed.
In fact I’m sure there were better ways
to say what we didn’t. Breaking through
the line, one body after another. One body
proves to another. I have to see the end of this.
I have to see the end of this with you.

∩

Brendan Joyce is a poet.

One Essay

Minor Arcana: Swords

I was afraid of my feeling. – Sarah Manguso

Ace

The famous art critic comes to school to give a talk. She asks three questions:

What do you see?

Why are you seeing it?

What does it mean?

Like the moment in the dawn when the streetlights turn off, which is the moment right after I look up and realize they’re no longer necessary.

2

I don’t always mind a blurry thing, but sometimes clarity is good.

What will come into clarity that could have been kept blurred? Do I want to see it straight on, and at what risk? What if it’s painful, do I want the pain? Want to be in control, want to lose control. To keep out and to let in. To trust the other enough, or pretend to trust, in order to learn to.

How do people DO this? I wonder. What is reasonable?

3

I cry so hard, sobbing, hiding from my kids in the bathroom, or quickly wiping away tears when they enter the kitchen. I force myself to eat, though it’s hard to chew and swallow. Whenever I manage to eat something, my stomach aches. I live for weeks with this knot inside; I lose seven pounds.

4

I’m done remembering, or I want to be.

Which leads me to stop before I begin. And then I begin again.

L. writes to me while I’m at the beach: I wish for you a healing message from the water. But there is no healing message from the water in Mississippi that summer. Instead, a toxic algae, the kind that makes people sick, blooms, and we can’t swim, and the kids become ill.

5

R. texts me one morning, two days before I am to visit: Can you assure me that L. and I aren’t ruining your marriage? My heart starts to beat very fast. Eventually I respond, I’m pretty sure it’s my desire to live a fuller, happier life, taking my needs seriously, that’s ruining my marriage. Later I write to her, In fact I can’t honestly reassure you of this. I joke that she’s a bad influence. I ask if she’s trying to break up with me.

But that sudden flare rises from my gut, as I have in fact wondered if I’m under some kind of spell or illusion. I buoy myself, try to feel triumph and joy, to pay attention to all the good, yet there’s always this undercurrent of guilt, shame, precarity. That there will be winners and losers. That if I don’t reassure everyone that everything is okay, I’ll lose them all.

6

An acquaintance speaks of wanting protection. They say it in the form of a blessing before dinner – from what? I wonder, but don’t ask. One friend tells me he wants to protect his loves, how love for him is in part about protecting the other. I disagree, I tell him: love challenges. And yet for years I’ve held back in order to protect my spouse from me – and to protect myself.

The fear is not that I’ll fall from the edge of a great height, but that I’ll throw myself off.

I touch the feathery milkweed seeds, pull them out, toss them up, and most of them fall right down, but the wind takes a few higher and higher.

7

We talk for over three hours, a very difficult talk about our relationship. S. says he feels trapped. I say I have felt that too, and sometimes still do. It gets late, after midnight, and we attempt to go to bed, but we both struggle to fall asleep. Eventually he gets up. Eventually I sleep.

Then I have his recurring dream. We’re in a cabin surrounded by woods, and we think there’s a bear nearby. We see it – it’s small – we assume the mother is close. I want to leave the cabin, the small bear’s now inside it, and S. and our son are also inside, trying to get out. Then we’re all outside. I see the bigger bear, the mother, stalking S., but from above him, on a hillside, while he can’t see her. I worry she’ll charge, but we escape.

When I tell him about this dream, he says, Yep, that’s the dream. Haven’t had it in years.

8

I drive past a sign in front of a church – it’s been up for months. “There is no fear in love,” it says. When my friend and I pass it together, we sometimes note what a lie that is, or how it shames people, or how it could encourage self-doubt, if one does feel afraid. Intellectually I can understand the idea that if one gives oneself over to an all-encompassing love, to God or Spirit or Nature, if you believe that is there, then you have nothing to fear. But I don’t feel that way.

In some images the woman stands alone in the mud, bound and blindfolded, loosely. She’s on the shores of nightmare and desolation, but she could release herself.

9

I hear the whistle of the train I’d thought briefly – it had flashed – of throwing myself in front of, about six weeks ago. That kind of thought hadn’t occurred in years.

What if my kids one day read this?

Then I’m in the complete darkness of the James Turrell room, Hind Sight, where even after ten minutes I can’t see my hand in front of my face, and even after ten minutes I can barely make out a dim light, as if at the end of a tunnel, but so dim that, in fact, when I look at it directly, it seems to fade. It’s best seen peripherally. To look straight on blurs the image. I spend most of the time wondering if the light I see – though you could hardly call it light – is there at all.

10

Given that the result is, I feel broken.

Given that the result is, Not now, maybe never, I don’t know…

Given that the result is, I have said no.

The end of the story is, I thought the story was over, several times.

The end of the story is, a year passes, two years pass, three years pass, four.

In the end everything means its opposite. The story has not ended.

Instead of a story, instead of an ending, something else shifts.

And again.

Again.

Page

You are dear to me, L. writes, in the beginning. The situation, he says, calls for step by step honesty and attention.

“Dear” means “regarded with personal feelings of high estimation and affection; held in deep and tender esteem.” Synonyms include “beloved, loved.” To determine his feeling, I study the words.

Builder of webs in the pit of me, who is me. Is it?

Knight

In the dream I tell my father it isn’t any of his business what I do in my marriage. This makes him irate. We walk away together while he responds angrily.

Someone says, You can’t be married and have other lovers! You can’t be married like that!

Queen

Nearly every person I’ve loved deeply, I’ve loved through language. Through reading them. Through hearing their written voice.

“Find your fear, then go there.” A sentiment I admire, and I tell S. He disagrees vehemently in a way that seems indicative of a huge difference between us.

King

I wanted to write tonight about what I’m identifying as a crisis of self. The knots in my stomach spread, tensile, overtaking.

At the same time I like when L. makes things difficult for me – up to a point. Blocking the desired thing. Whatever that delicate point is, that cliff-edge, that line, I like to be pushed toward it.

We kiss both cheeks, and then a tight-lipped, closed-mouthed brush on the lips. I put on my backpack, my handbag on my arm, and walk toward the station door, pausing to glance over my shoulder to see L. a last time – a little surprised to meet his eyes as he sits in the car, watching. I hold them for a second, then turn, push open the door, and leave.

---

Notes

This essay’s epigraph comes from the book 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso (Graywolf, 2017): “I wasn’t afraid of what I would do or what would happen. I was afraid of my feeling.”

“Ace”: The author and art critic quoted is Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

“9”: James Turrell’s installation Hind Sight remains on view at MassMoCA.

“Page”: These definitions and synonyms come from the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Queen”: The full context of this quote, from Carly Milne’s introduction to the anthology Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography (Carroll & Graf, 2005), is: “A wise person once said to me, ‘Find your fear, then go there.’”

---

∩

Melissa Dickey lives in Western Massachusetts and is the author of Ordinary Entanglement, Dragons, and The Lily Will.

Three Poems

Landscape at Gennevilliers

In the field where the ordinary gets reincarnated,
I keep scraping the smoke into what limits me.

This isn’t my intention, but it draws me near
the coercive quality of smoke,

so feels like another charm on the pier
that gladdens one through life.

In this way I achieve a spouse and a hut,
and can go naked to visit the fridge.

The field is oil-paint of course with flies stuck in it.
Eventually, it becomes a mud pit the size of Texas,

which then is optimized for production of dirt oysters.
In the hut we peel our clothes

and think we’re sewing the world back together.
In the field we’re flies stuck in oil.

In the Country After Lunch

It’s summer, Suckers, and each grape warps
while here I hide in the house hiccup,

where we thump out the same pleasantries twice.
You say, What’s wrong? I say, What’s up?

Come afternoon, we melt like paperwork,
our perfect way of thinking something else.

Electrocuted cattails, for instance;
whether or how to ford one’s life.

Then go on, go on, uncounted.
Be like the scam of beauty,

a lemon unsliced,
a good neighbor to yourself.

The floor, how it floors you,
how it reaches up to roast your feet.

I get to be this cloud because this is my porch.
I’m able to say this is cloud enough.

Here, in the next episode.

It seems to me this will sell
and that is all I care about.

Image May Contain:

Universe, Space, Comet, 
Outer Space, or Planet. 

This string-like metonymy to suggest

how an ice cube might exist.
And the language’s promise to shoot that gap: 

Businessmen given 
businessmen enough, 
given businessman haircuts.

*

How it feels on my forehead
like orange oil on a finger.

The provincial nincompoop’s teal shorts. 
A nod beyond class annoyance.

So that the morning gets a second chance—
Morning glory. Glory morning.

Molecule across the smartboard of the living
in the emergency of living. 

Watermelon grown.
Some tragedy inflated farce.

*

Holiday, heart monitor, half-fogged 
magic 
leaking everywhere. 

Month the door shuts well.
Gator in Chicago pond.

*

And what happens 
already happened
by the time I think.

The creeping installment,
gigantic once I’m torn into it.

Night pulled up like an onion.
At any rate, yours.

Yours, in the thrill of misgiving.
Yours, in frustrated lamp light.

Ain’t doing nothing.
A fruit close up.

∩

Jack Christian is the author of the new chapbook The Road from Versailles to Saint-Germain, from Factory Hollow Press. He writes goofy reviews about eating and drinking in Minneapolis on his substack Day Dates.

Four Poems

X

past the third stone page 
resisting geologic futures 
written in stone glyph
the glacial theory of time 
escalation is so like tidal
refining processes edges of 
clay bed older than any glacier
laid the template and those
smaller rocks slotted in like land fill
upon the jelly roll soil horizon
slope gradient of loose sand w
those naked little trees
mound curving like a buzzcut 
saw a hand scooping its nails
and pulling out little rockslide 
canyon dirt road rising the ocean
view is a little v in the corner 
green picked out all the bald
patches peopled land plasti-
chrome ice field existence is
disputed maybe it was some
parallel valleys repeated paleo-
lithic gravel shoreline the sea 
got to work on that smoothed it 
out mythological landforms w
local evidence compelling only
to locals land filled until it’s long enough
to be named 

XII

land was a crude sketch 
at night becoming clay
land released into 
proto working waterfront
post glacial real estate
didn’t look like scenery
and clay was highway
pulled out and packed under 
paint was mixed from
blue clay and milk
the color of houses 
enough clay to make bricks for 100 years
industrialization put an end to it
burned clay to a red earth red

XXI

Tectonic halves spread 
Reentered south of the south like a stage 

Size of the great glacial leak
absorbed radio waves and telephone 

Bones and teeth in the continental shelf
I cant reach down there but they wash up glistening 
like tiles like little tiles 
Reproducing thoughts 

Using one side as a knife 
And sort of grabbing onto 

Had become so helpless 
Waylaid past the point of efficiency 
Barely legible throughout this whole thing 
This stampede

Pantomimed like tissue
Knew how to turn it on Dont mind all that static
takes it own size
Like any imitative 
object in space

Fabulist really 
imagine saying you invented a form
more like it traded into you for space
and placed an ornament on your finger 

and close beyond
low level residual glacial lake
Fingered a jug 
under the holster 
and burned a cigarette on the flyer 
like a residual glyph

XXII

So blown inside 
the full slip face 
Not adjacent 
Would not betray a system 
of expressive verbs 
so seeing 
Devastated into holes so surround ing
Marked it here
dreaming 

So much unlike in the seeing
Reversed sure 

low energy deposit moved differently 
made different things
Formed in rhythmic sets
Enriched by modern description

Even ledge on an architecture 

Sediment chain dense to light
Whatever is too large will be transported 
or left behind

∩

Liz Falco is a regional poet from Provincetown, MA. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in bethh, Farewell Transmission, Looky Here Magazine, antiphony, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (as Liz Bergman), Cape Cod Review, GROTTO, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, NO WAKE, came out in December 2025. She co-hosts Morning Shift at Looky Here in Greenfield, MA, where she now lives.

Five Poems

AT HOPE CEMETERY

the obelisk sea

the evergreen trees

the dead leaves

the empty hydrangeas

the obelisk sea

the evergreen trees

the dead leaves

the remaining red and yellow in the distance

the evergreen trees

the dead leaves

the remaining red and yellow in the distance

the hilltop inn

the hospital

the bend in the highway

the red orange yellow leaves left there

are popsicles, are like hydrangeas

FLOWERS THAT GROW IN THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBSTONES

sleep electric wizard

I hear a train cadenzaing on the night plain

deadlifting through a field of voam

a lineman for the county

making silent worship to the earth 

FLOWER PHASE

the ideogram for gradual is

water cutting stone

the Appalachian Range ends

in the Scottish Highlands

tulip comes from turban

ever since I learned the name

I see them everywhere

I see tulips everywhere

see forsythia everywhere

see tulips everywhere

see forsythia everywhere

see daffodils and daffodils

just arrived     the irises

in Pangea hardwoods covered the world

do you hear a black bear in there

in Hubbard Park where Winter St turns around

THE GARDEN AT THE START OF SUMMER STREET

pink   

phloxes    

white    

hydrangea 

arises

the promise

of vacation

returns

only to promise

summer

ends   

SNOW DUNES

Digital display
Ancient parkway
In a rush

Ambient country
More ambient than country

Booming Adirondack sky

Beautiful blue
Like you

Yellow bands and branches
Pink splashes

That sun sets
Overflowing winter

Switchgrass

Says the lake’s moderating influence
Is the ancient sea’s

∩

Josh Barber Josh Barber writes the poetry review A New Measure. His work has recently appeared in Aphor, Boxx, Vat, Poetry Nightly, and the Tabloid Paraphernalia & Addenda Series.

One Story

In the Wilderness of Sinai

Levi sat in an old diner waiting for his breakfast to come out. He was smoking and scraping up eggs. It was a long week waiting for the end of the world. The face of God had turned away from him. He was alone again. His rabbi in Boca Raton was worried, said he should stop trying to get hired by the Company. But it was the only thing Levi knew how to want—professional advancement. After his girlfriend left him, he sought out sex clubs with seedy reputations. He tossed ones at girls rubbed down in glitter. Miami bored him. There was nothing behind the women’s facade. At work, there was always more to discover. Another chemical compound behind another chemical compound. He paid his bill and got back in his car. The sun cascaded down on him, beads of sweat turning into little waterfalls down his forehead. His shoulders were a little burnt from the light through the windshield. He hated wearing a white wife beater but it was too hot for anything else.

            Driving down the Overseas Highway blasting an old Nirvana CD from his brother, Levi tried to make sense of his job prospects.

            The Company had called him and asked him to come down to the Keys. They had a special lab there out in the swampy-ass ocean of nowhere. That’s what the hiring manager said anyway. Levi was surprised he was a man. The professional-sounding masculine voice told him to show up on November 12. They would pay for a hotel since it was remote. Or he could opt to stay on the island where the lab was. A boat would take him in the morning and he could decide before the last ride back at four. It sounded like an eat-the-rich situation. He wasn’t sure it was the kind of gig he would ever escape. His last job fired him after he was accused of “inappropriate speech” in the work place. An expletive-laden report on his programming team’s progress.

            For so long, Levi wanted to be the kind of company guy everyone praised. Focused, determined, beloved. But he was too intense. All the brushstrokes of his paintings were visible. Any new project he turned on stank of his desperation to look good to the higher-ups. No one thought he would be able to make it beyond the lower-level programming jobs. It took him years to master all the languages. Even Python puzzled him.

            His hotel was in Key West. The Company booked it for him a few weeks ago. All expenses paid. They encouraged him to contribute to the local tourism industry since he opted to stay there. They preferred for the locals to like them. In the morning the boat would come and take him away, he had a whole evening to enjoy however he wanted. But they knew what he was going to do. The low crackling voice made that clear.

            It was a strange phone call. Not one he wanted to repeat. Levi almost wanted to tank the interview so he could say he tried his best and go back to his normal life. Something like his last job. Algorithms, robotic programming, nanotechnology start-ups that never worked. The last one he worked on was called Dragonfly and involved trying to make the tiniest drone he could. They kept throwing money at him until it was clear he was trying increasingly bizarre tactics. When they found him reading the Zohar on the job, they fired him. That was what sent him back to Miami. His brother mocked him every morning about being the rich as fuck jobless one their parents were more proud of even though his brother was the one with the stable job, wife, and two kids. Youngest child privilege.

A few hours later, Levi pulled into the hotel parking lot, lit up by tropical neon and decked out with offensive and obnoxious little tiki gods. That wasn’t even local, just a mistaken migration. He waited a few minutes before going on in, smoking another cigarette and getting the lay of the land. The sun was almost completely below the horizon line. He hadn’t been out this far since he was a kid. A stray cat wound its way across the gravel to him and mewed. Brushing a fly aside, he leaned down to pet the scared little guy before realizing the creature was gnawing on his shoe. Levi lightly kicked it away and walked inside to get his room key.

Talia was the name she gave him on the phone. He doubted that was her actual name, but didn’t press. The TV crackled across from him. The girl’s photo still glimmered on his phone. He wasn’t sure what to say despite having done this a few times now. Just accepted the rate and tried to gauge her interest over the phone. Sometimes he read sex worker reddit threads, looked to see what they did and didn’t like in their clients. Every once in a while, on a break from work, he’d crack open an IPA and smoke a black American Spirit while reading one of their memoirs. Always memoirs. There were one or two real stylists, some theory-heads, but he wasn’t sure what to make of those. He preferred when he could look down at the book rather than holding it up to the light like a confusing academic article.

            When she finally knocked an hour after his intake call, he was spick and span. Showered twice. Smile. Let her in. The room was grimier than he was. Couldn’t be helped. He wasn’t the proprietor.

            “Hi,” Talia said low, quiet, breathless. It was good, Levi thought. Not too overdone but it got the point across.

            “Hi,” he said. “Levi.”

            “Talia. But I guess you know that. Do you have cash?”

            She was all the way in his room now. There was no need for violence, but he wondered what it would be like, to not feel remorse. That was his problem. The guilt. Textbook nutcase with a cushy job.

            He gestured toward a stack of hundreds on a table.

            “You still want five hours?”

            Levi nodded silently. She walked over to him as if in appreciation and started fondling his shoulders. Rehearsed, choreographed, yet mostly natural. He was analyzing her performance. Rating her moves, how aroused he got.

            It didn’t need to be efficient. In fact, he gave points if she surprised him. But that almost never happened. He knew he wasn’t special, he was just another connoisseur and she was an amateur. No matter, in Key West there was no reason to be the best.

            She moved rhythmically, slowly letting his dick slosh inside her, not quite hard enough to do any damage. The dull wet feeling didn’t do much for him. Not that it was her fault, he was swimming in too many unnamed feelings. That always prevented him from finishing. Talia tried to pant and whine to speed him up, scooching up and down on him faster as she touch his bare chest with her lacy little fingers. The red nail polish was just starting to chip.

            If only he could fake it. Could pretend it was a dry one. But Levi had some dignity anyway, wanted to try and bare with her for the ride. She was going to try until he told her to stop or the time ran out.

            “Wait a second,” he said after she squeezed her breasts in front of his foggy gaze. “Can we pause?”

            “Sure,” she said. “That’s fine, yeah.”

            Talia demounted and Levi realized he was fully flaccid.

            “You ever fucked someone who’s uncut?” he asked.

            “Is that what gets you hot?” she said, putting the gum in her purse away again, ready to be done with him.

            “No,” Levi replied. “I just wondered.”

            “Most of the guys around are circumcised, sure, but not everyone. I’ve had a few.”

            “Did you like it?”

            She shot him a weird look and he swallowed it whole, digesting her ire with ease. He didn’t look away or say anything else.

            “Sometimes.”

            They still had a lot of time, at least two hours, and she had a feeling he was a big tipper. Her glittery emerald lingerie lay neatly folded on the one chair in the room.

            “Why are you here?”

            “Job interview.”

            “Are you Rob the Doll’s new keeper?”

            “No,” he said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

            “Do you know the story though?”

            “Yeah,” he said.

            “Creeps me out.”

            “Want to have a cigarette outside?”

            He wanted to kill time. Careful not to think about the last time he saw Riley. She was back in the Bay probably, unless she went back to Omaha after her surgery. Poor thing. She wanted him to take care of her before he fucked it all up.

            Talia took out her own pack and lit a Virginia Slim. He laughed at her without thinking. She didn’t tell him to fuck off. They stood silently watching the few stars they could see blink and the ocean waves curling against the shore. He heard the cat mewing before he saw it again, crawling across the gravel towards them.

            “Hi little guy,” Levi said. “Should we go get him cat food?”

            Talia took another puff and looked down at him on the ground with just a hint of annoyance.

In the morning, Levi drove to the synagogue a few blocks away from the seaside motel. Amid melting palms and mandrakes, the old stone building stood majestically, a beauty, he thought to himself. Since his mom passed he’d only gone to temple a few times, usually only for the High Holy Days. But he was right back where he always was, feeling small and hopeful. Maybe salvation lay beyond the door. He’d been around too many Gentiles, all goyishly trying to tell him about their stance on Middle-Eastern politics without prompting. They felt guilty in a way he never did. Only the thought of avoiding services made him break out in a cold sweat. Those people over there were only dimly related to him. His mother was a fan of Edward Said and Real Housewives, the weirdest there ever was. She wanted to kiss him goodbye every morning as he went off to his Catholic school. “This is the melting pot of America,” she said. Her mother was Ukrainian and her father was Irish. They met in Brooklyn before swiftly moving down to Florida and Anglicizing their last name in the late seventies. She gave birth to Levi late in life, saying it was a blessing from the Holy One. All of this he swallowed with a grain of salt, wishing the palimpsest world she outlined was the one they lived in. Wished she gave his world more order, meaning.

            He was going to meet a rather obscure Kabbalist, one of the few known practitioners in Florida. It was early, only five-thirty or so. The boat was at seven. Plenty of time to discuss the possibility of a Tzadik ha-Dor.

            It wasn’t like Levi believed any of it. He just wanted to talk with someone who had beliefs beyond science. The stuff of life beyond life: the aftertaste of spirits.

            The rabbi had emailed him beforehand. They would speak for only twenty minutes. A short time to get to the bottom of things, but maybe he knew what Levi was really after. An argument. That would work well too, if he didn’t put up much of a fight, it would confirm his own take on things. Life and loss and the whole damn thing. His father used to talk a lot about Catholics with clenched teeth. He hated their conviction and ceremony, the strange deification of Jesus. After Levi’s father converted he was all in. Ready to fight the savior himself, just come down from the cross and throw a punch.

            “Hello Levi,” the rabbi said at the door. The old man led him into a small study cluttered with papers. “Have you come to try and make meaning out of your life?”

            Levi sunk into an old wooden chair. The room was full of stale-smelling books and diagrams and the one window was shuttered. Stones peered out from behind the small amount of space the bookshelves didn’t cover.

            “Maybe,” he said. “Can I smoke?”

            The rabbi gestured. There wasn’t much meaning to it, but Levi lit up anyway.

            “What do you make of the Tzadik ha-Dor?”

            “Why? What do you make of him?”

            “You think one’s alive right now?”

            “No, not necessarily,” the rabbi said.

            “I think he is. Or, if he is, in the sense that anyone could be the messiah if we put our minds to it. Save the people.”

            “You want to save God’s chosen people?”

            “Why not everyone? With science even. Easier that way.”

            “I see. So you’re a humanist, not a Zionist.”

            “Not a Zionist. A scientist. I work in nanotechnology.”

            “So what you’re saying is—”

            “Yes,” Levi interrupted.

            “That you think you’re the Tzadik ha-Dor?”

            “In a sense, yes.”

            The rabbi laughed and laughed.

            “Then I think we’re done here. I think we’ve covered the meaning in your life. Maybe there’s too much instead of too little.”

            He stood up and gestured for Levi to head to the door.

            “I’m about to have a job interview.”

The rabbi nodded, oblivious.

“Something called Project Nazareth.”

            The geezer’s eyes narrowed.

            “You’re going to regret this one day. You could have had a nice long chat with me and instead you chose—” Levi looked at his watch, less than twenty minutes even, hardly eight. “Eight minutes with the Tzadik.”

            “Mmmm.”

            Levi walked out and headed toward the dock, ready to meet his maker now that he felt confirmed in his righteousness.

***

The small motorboat took them across the clear blue water without incident. It was already heating up despite the early hour. Levi smoked the whole way, saying nothing to the two sailors who seemed to be punching below their weight. They mumbled softly about the weather to each other. He wondered if they read Hemingway on their off-time. Real men. Not the kind of financiers and gamers he worked alongside, they let their shit go online paying for webcam access to their ex-girlfriend. Boys and men were not so different in Levi’s estimation. One side of the spectrum just had more money for wish fulfillment. Men were sometimes even more envious. At his last job, Dragonfly, his co-workers all got blasted afterwards on the boss’s Cognac and Japanese whiskey. They even mixed the two into a feral potion. A bachelor bacchanalia.

            Men love corners. They love towers. Playing cards and broken glass, numbers ticking on a screen, projections, the image feedback loop. The slight slip of lacy black panties. Hints of debauchery, a misplaced word spoken in desire of fortune or lust. Desire meant one thing: scoring. Levi knew this because he felt it too. But he felt the desire to be the best too, to have one over on the others. That’s why they couldn’t stand him at Dragonfly, they knew he felt—or was—superior. A tower.

            The sailors didn’t think about gender so illustriously. They dumped Levi on the shore, a small rickety dock. No questions. There was just a job to be done.

            No one greeted him on the little island. There was a giant steel compound surrounded by a few smaller huts. Like Gilligan’s Island with a power plant. Wisteria and palm trees overran the brush. A few banyan trees loomed in the distance, maybe there was a lagoon he couldn’t see. The water was hysterically blue like a postcard for heaven. As he cut into the lush green he started to spot the flowers. Not all of them were instantly recognizable, vicious pinks and reds and oranges. Hibiscus. He knew that one. Birds twittered and chirped away, some pecking against wood. It was far more vibrant than in town, the neon and tourists cutting through any flora and fauna there actually was. He thought of his conversation with Talia and wondered if she made house calls. She wouldn’t care much about the surroundings. Or maybe she would, glad to get a break from the brown mucky of cheap motels and gray alleys.

            “Hello,” a voice called from somewhere behind the thicket of flowers.

            “Hello?” Levi said.

            A man in white appeared as if out of nowhere.

            “I’m Christian. We spoke on the phone last week.”

            “Yes, hello,” Levi reached out his hand and shook the older man’s grip. He was probably reaching fifty. Moderate build, no real muscle mass to speak of, wearing black work boots and a disheveled lab outfit. Bald, because, of course he was. No one with that much intellect worried about their hair. Levi wondered if they shared the same indulgence in the world’s oldest affection. He wanted to stop thinking about sex, but it kept coming back, like a hamster wheel. All his meds were in his backpack but he didn’t want to lose the upper-hand and dig into it now. The interview had begun.

            Slowly they made their way through the plumeria toward the big metal dome. Levi didn’t spot anyone else as they walked. There had to be others for a project this size.

            “If you accept this job, you’ll stay here with me. Could be a few years, could be decades. But the work is that important.”

            Levi didn’t ask why. He already knew why he had been chosen. All his bones vibrated in alignment at the thought, wet and sticky on his thigh like triumph.

            “This is Project Nazareth,” the man in white said. “We want to use some of your ideas in order to do more precise surgery.”

            “To help people?”

            The man hesitated, unsure how to clear the egotist’s doubt. “Yes, to help people. Everyone, really. You see… there’s a problem. We’re headed toward chaos. Everyone will eventually evolve too much too quickly.”

            “Evolve? Like, Darwinianly?”

            “Yes,” Christian said. “People will grow things they have no use for.”

            “How do you know this?”

            He shrugged. “Charts. Projections.”

            “You have a test case, don’t you?”

            The scientist smiled. “Of course.”

            “Show me,” Levi said.

            “Gladly.”

Lights flashed on and off all around them. Green, blue, yellow, LEDs of all colors. Steel poles jutting up like pikes. Long beams overhead rigged for the show. Scalpels, surgery tables like Messianic crosses, syringes, and what looked like medieval torture devices. Levi was just waiting to be shown leeches. Hisses and smoke purring from large machines producing very little output. Things trying to produce smaller and smaller probes. Clamps and retractors and suture packs avalanched off long metal tables. A giant saw caught his attention. As he walked over to it, he came across a pile of animal carcasses. Waste. Sheep mostly. Cattle. A pig.

            “We want to get to both rats, so we can prove we can do this on the tiniest of scales. You see, we’ll have to be very precise.”

            “Larger than a cow?” Levi quipped.

            The man was standing in front of a table with a single human arm.

            “What the fuck is that?”

            “Not a cow.”

            “What is all this for?”

            “Like I said. People will soon—and in some cases already have—grow things they have no use for. Look at this.”

            The man was already wearing gloves and a long white apron. It was pointless, as he cut into the forearm blood spattered everywhere, on clothes, on the table. He was careless. This was just a butcher show.

            Levi looked closer. There was a tiny thorn with its own nerves intertwined with the arm’s actual nervous system.

            “What the hell?”

            Christian put everything down.

            “This,” he said, throwing away the apron in a bin, “is an angel disease. There’s no official known cause or origin. Could be alien for all I know. They named it that cause they think it’s Biblical. I’m not so sure.”

            “The coming of the Tzadik…”

            “Hm?”

            “Nothing,” Levi croaked. “Doesn’t matter.”

            “So, before such a nightmarish plague becomes a pandemic, we’re trying to create the tech to deal with it. Top secret, privately funded, of course, though the government occasionally stops in to see how we’re progressing.”

            “How many people have it?”

            “Right now? Less than a dozen a year. In the next few decades? Who knows.”

            “How long do we have?”

            “If we hire you… I’d say no more than twenty years. Probably less.”

            They stood in silence. Levi was contemplating the pure strangeness of this. The nearness of it all to the spiritual.

            “So what’s next?”

            “I’ll let you stay the night. Meet the others. Eat with us tonight and we’ll see how you get on. Of course, how well you work with others is also a factor.”

            “Of course,” Levi smirked.

            “This doesn’t scare you at all? And you’re convinced?”

            He simply smiled in return. Had he not been waiting his whole life for the end?   

A soggy bowl of root vegetables sat on the cherrywood table before him. Levi ate a few bites before looking at the guests around him. Four men and one woman. They drank their green tea quietly. No one seemed ready to break the ice.

            “Just tea? You don’t have any liquor?” he jested.

            “We try not to have too many stimulants,” Christian said.

            “Right,” Levi said.

            “I could go for a drink actually,” the woman said without looking up from her plate.

            “And you think that would help you work better?”

            “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I just think it would be nice. Don’t you ever want something purely for the experience it offers?”

            Christian looked at her, bewildered, waiting for more. But that was all she offered. She pushed the veggies on her plate around as Levi watched. Was it evil to be sure? So soon? That she was the one?

            In his mind’s eye Levi saw a whole kingdom. He would kill all the dybbuks and demons and ghouls his grandfather told him about. Through science, not the Torah, and even then maybe G-d would have to bow down to him. This wasn’t a conscious thought, about G-d bowing, but it loomed in the back somewhere with the heavenly host Levi thought he commanded. The egotist didn’t think he was capable of blasphemy or self-deceit, only truth. The blanket that covers all else: vicious honesty told with a straight face. He couldn’t know if he was lying. That wasn’t in his nature. The stories that resonated with him were of Moses looking out over Israel, not the time he struck the rock and was punished not to see the new world he set up.

            The woman had moved on. She was almost done eating and was talking to another man. Asian, mid-thirties with a buzzcut.

            “How long has this been going on?” Another man said behind him. He tried to listen in to the dueling voices.

            “A few weeks, a month, I don’t know,” the other said.

            “And they’re for sure giving us the funding?”

            “Yes, they are. We can build a real hospital. A cover.”

            “What made them change their mind?”

            The other man made a physical gesture that Levi couldn’t make out.

            “Good. Good, okay… We should tell Christian. Maybe we can finally move bases. Fucking hate the Keys. A hurricane every other day.”

            “God’s plan.”

            They laughed. 

            Levi excused himself to go out and smoke. He didn’t want to sit and listen to the cloak and dagger politics of the pharmaceutical industry. Whatever they had to do to keep the lab running was their business. He was just coming to do whatever it was that needed done.

            The humidity seized his body. Even just walking out and sliding down against the wall he was sweating bullets. This wasn’t where he would’ve built a lab. But maybe no one bothered them here. Clearly it was all very top secret. He would have to lie about what his work was, why he was in Florida. There wasn’t really anyone to tell but still. His parents would hardly ask. They just wanted to be rid of him. They’d secretly wish it was farther away.

            He took out his flask and gurgled at least a shot’s worth of hot liquor. Everything was fried. Anyone else would’ve left it behind, said it was impossible, a farce, a secret cabal. He loved exclusivity.

            She slipped down beside him against the steel wall, crouching in the weeds. Sea roses and dandelions flowered in front of them. Without asking, she took his flask and sipped before passing the whiskey back to him. Still very beautiful, Levi thought.

            “I hate whiskey,” she said.

            “Well it isn’t yours.”

            She smiled at him, the crinkles around her lips appearing like small fissures of time.

            “I’m Mira.”

            “Levi.”

            “Ah.”

            “What?” he said, surprised at her tone.

            “Christian said he was bringing in a young guy from the States. That’s you.”

            “My mother is Polish. My father’s Irish.”

            “Were they born there?”

            “No,” he said. “Were you born outside the US?”

            “Yes. I’m here on a work visa thanks to Christian.”

            “Where are you from?”

            She cringed a little, moved slightly away from him in the breeze.

            “Should I make you guess?”

            Levi laughed. He liked her.

            “Please, God, no.”

            “India. But I’ve been abroad most of my life. Scotland, Australia, Sweden, Denmark. I’m a very cosmopolitan woman. I grew up watching Jeopardy with my dad while he worked at a nuclear reactor during the day.”

            “And your mom?” Levi found himself wanting to know more in spite of himself. His upper hand, his swagger, was faltering.

            “Oh she stayed home most of the time but she was a great concert pianist. We had to excel. That was how we got to see the world.”

            “And now you’re stuck on this little island.”

            “It’s not so bad,” Mira said. “I get to see what a little runt like you is made of.”

            She took his flask and walked off, downing nearly the whole thing in the process. Funny, he realized he didn’t even care.

            The voices inside died down as Levi walked around the grounds. It wasn’t a huge island, he traversed most of the expanse in an hour of wandering. Planes jetted overhead every so often, the leviathans of cruise ships docked in the distance. The sky purpled and faded into strata of indigo and ink. The palm trees and brush made it hard to work his way back toward the beach in the darkness, but he did his best to make it to the docks. There was only one vehicle. A small motorboat presumably for emergencies. The grime of the sand irritated his feet. He wanted to feel clean on the beach and instead felt a growing shrill voice in his mind. Fuck the summer.

            The last time he spent more than a few moments with his feet on the sand he was high out of his skull on acid standing next to a hooker he hired and subsequently refused to touch. No real reason why, he just didn’t feel like it. He liked that it made her nervous. Them in public, the electric green rush to the brain. In the end she walked off with her heels in hand back toward the mainland. He stayed on the beach until the sun rose and said a prayer, a blessing for the new year.

            That was a little less than a year ago. The year had been fruitful. It led to this.

***

August 13

Unbearably hot. Of course Christian hired me. What else was he going to do? I’m sick. Have been the past few nights, nauseous and gassy. Grotesque. He keeps coming to check on me, which is nice. Only asked about Mira once. She was busy working on her end of the deal—which Christian won’t tell me about for some reason. Annoying. It’s all very smoke and mirrors here. It’s only been a week and already I think of bolting sometimes. Not seriously, just the idea of leaving. Taking a flight to Toronto, Tokyo, Thailand, anywhere but here and this heat.

Christian says I’ll get used to it. He keeps bringing me concoctions. Smoothies and bowls and broth. I try to get it down but it’s shit. I want to be free of this mortal coil. Or whatever. Keep thinking of this girl Carly I used to know. I paid for her first abortion when we were in high school. She told me she only fucked me cause she felt sorry for me. Why her? I should try and phone the rabbi again. Haha. That’d be a laugh. He must hate me.

They say we’re going to try to start in earnest on developing smaller saws next week. I guess it’s one of the most important steps.

August 14

We went to a techno concert in Miami last night. Christian, Mira, and Qiang, who keeps telling us to just call him Q like a James Bond character. He’s the one who wanted to go. He said we should enjoy ourselves. Mira was excited by the idea of going out before we started in earnest, she said it was going to kickstart the process for us.

I didn’t recognize a song for almost an hour. Just drums and bass. I asked Qiang if this was something he had in China and he laughed at me. “We have everything.”

Eventually they played a Janet Jackson song sped up and remixed. I knew it from driving around with the radio on and the hot wind blasting, bright sky up above. I teared up and had to turn away from Mira. We were all on a lot of ecstasy. I kept re-upping until I was bleary-eyed and almost drooling and Christian and Qiang took me outside to lay down on the gravel outside the warehouse. It was pitch black and we could barely see the stars.

“Back on our island we’ll see a whole canopy of supernova,” Christian told us.

I wanted to to tell him I looked forward to it, but I couldn’t move my lips. They were incredibly dry and my tongue stuck to the bottom of the my mouth like an earthworm trapped in dirt. I nodded. Qiang said I needed some water and gum. He was talking about the advanced surgical technology he worked on before being poached by C. I wanted to ask more, it sounded interesting, like something out of a science fiction novel, but he assured me he was just here to help double-check our work.

Eventually Mira came out to check on us. She asked me what was wrong and then made fun of me. She said she was always cleaning up after some sloppy white guy in a club. Apparently her ex was a doctor, a Czech who moved to the states in the nineties.

“He was a drunk though.”

“Tough,” I said—immediately realizing how awful of a thing that was to say. She smiled softly in the moonlight. I wanted to kiss her but she put her hand firmly on my shoulder and made sure I kept laying down. Then I blacked out. Woke up in a cold sweat and resolved to do less next time. We start soon.

August 15

Tomorrow. Officially.

August 18

Since we’ve started I’ve barely had time to write. We’ve started the mechanics of a prototype. Qiang keeps looking over my shoulder and telling me I have to work harder. I don’t know what to tell him. I’m doing my best. Besides, isn’t Christian my overlord? Apparently in October the major funder is coming to check in on us. XA Holdings. They mostly work on biotech. I can’t find anything out about them on the internet but it’s not like we have good dial-up out here. It’s the dawn of the new millennium and I can barely hold on to the outside world.

At least the computing power is good. I was able to check a few calculations, look at things on a screen. Mira’s in a different department. An entirely different project. Related, C tells us, but he won’t say more than that. Disappointing. I was hoping to see more of her. Two nights ago a few people drank on the beach and told dirty jokes. I didn’t join. Mira wasn’t there and Qiang went to bed early. He’s funny but disciplined. Doesn’t want to get too involved with the others after the night out. I get that. I hope we make some progress soon. I know it’s too early to be anxious. That doesn’t matter. I want to push through. Show them what I can do.

I thought about The Dybbuk last night. It was a play my grandpa read in Yiddish to me as a kid. He made me watch the movie too. A dead lover is possessed by the titular spirit. I don’t remember it very well. Maybe I should read it again, just to have something to unwind with. Reminder to ask C if we can get books here. I wonder what my grandpa would think of me now… My mom would be happy I was taking an interest. But she hated superstition. Thought G-d was love. I’m not so convinced. I think G-d is power, exactly like we’re doing. Wish these notes were more focused, more helpful. Too tired to show any calculations or work things out in this little black notebook. It’s only for emotions and reporting. Later I can go back and see how they effected me.

August 19

Heard a few people talking about the logistics of the Angel Disease. Foolish of me to think morality wouldn’t play a part in this. But they wondered who got it and why. If both humans and animals can get it—can it be based on something people did or did not do? Or is it truly random? I listened to the debate, it felt like hearing the rebbe talk about old midrasnhic arguments.

Who are we curing? Why? I suppose the thought is if it comes for one of us—that is, a human—it can come for any of us. There was a thought from one man that perhaps it infected people who had previous surgeries. Maybe they were weaker and more susceptible. Someone seemed to think that would make them more of a candidate to fix, because then their body was more fungible. Is that really true though? It seems like lore all the way down, madness commenting on madness.

August 20

2am- Made a minor breakthrough today. Can’t write in here, need to go back to the lab.

4:30am- Going to bed. Will try to write tomorrow.

August 22

Obviously I left it for a few days. What can I do but laugh? We did it. We figured out the specs of the saw, the technology to make it nearly infinitely small. Now we have to figure out the physics—how to get it to move in the way we need, to cut at the time we want it to. Mechanisms and movement. The two hard m’s. Qiang was helpful. We really got going after we figured it out, rechecking numbers and hashing it out, testing out theories on each other for what was to come. I think it was a major breakthrough after a minor one. Good sign.

August 23

Slow day. We presented our findings to C who had some doubts, but he was ultimately on board for a test run soon.

September 1

Well it was a bust. I should’ve known. We’re back to size again after thinking we knew how to do it. One good thing though, I’ve had more time to talk to Mira.

She came over to my hut a few nights ago, must have heard how badly we’d fucked it up. She wanted to talk about her work at first and then realized I was wincing. Wincing. I don’t know about that but that’s what she said. I told her I was fine. Besides it was good to hear about her research. She didn’t tell me anything real or important—just some vague stats, some equations she was working on with her team.

“I didn’t know you were the head of your team,” I said.

M laughed at me.

“You really are just a pretty face,” she said. “You haven’t done any recon have you? About the others?”

I said I didn’t know why I would. She dragged me out of the room by my hands, ending any possible flirtation and taking me out onto the beach. We made our way through the undergrowth into the moonlight. The sand was incredibly soft. I wasn’t expecting it. “Virginal,” M joked. I almost asked if she was but I thought better of it. Thank G-d I was sober.

“Were you raised religious?” I asked.

“A little. I read some of the Upanishads and Vedas when I was a kid. But my mom liked telling stories more. Things from the Ramayana or Mahabharata.”

“I’ve never read them,” I said.

She laughed. I liked making her laugh even if I didn’t know why.

“You don’t always have to reveal your ignorance.”

Nothing else happened that night. We went back to our own beds. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. I thought about watching porn, but didn’t. Wondered if I could talk to C about calling someone onto the island but by the morning, drenched in cold sweat and guilt, I decided not to.

When I was really young—and I have no memory of this—my grandma tried to come and take me away from my mom. She said I was possessed by a dybbuk. That I was already acting like a psychopath. No one told me until I was eighteen. My mom let it slip late one night when she had a few too many glasses of wine. My dad wasn’t there for some reason. She clung to him like a shadow, but not then. Not when she told me.

September 5

We’ve been busy again. Keep hitting on something close to the right equation to keep everything together when it comes—but not quite. Just not quite. It’s incredibly frustrating. Qiang keeps telling me we’ll get there. Mira doesn’t say anything. Still won’t tell me what she’s working on. Christian says we should get something up and running before XA comes. He’s stressed. He’s not good at hiding it. I think that C would like to envision himself as a wizard, but he’s kind of a klutz. He falls, he stubs his toe, he doesn’t really seem to get the math as much as the rest of us. He’s supposed to be keeping us in check but when he comes over to look at our whiteboards he just nods and says “Good, good… keep going.” As if he doesn’t understand any of it. Don’t understand why they, whoever they are, would pick him to spearhead the whole thing. I’m not saying it should be me I just know I could do better. That’s the whole thing: even when I’m not firing on all cylinders I know that I’m better than the rest. Except M. I’m not sure what her deal is. She finally told me a little more about what she does but it doesn’t make sense in the greater scheme of things. She’s creating a chemical compound from horseshoe crab blood. I said there weren’t any horseshoe crabs around that I knew of. She smiled and took me to a little lagoon that was crawling with the little beasts.

“C thinks we can find another way to heal the infection.”

“Their blood?”

“Yes. We already use it in some medicine.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Hopefully you’ll never need it,” she said.

I hope she’s right. I hope the work we’re doing is all in vain.

September 14

We have a date now. October 3. Soon. XA will dock and we’ll show them what we’ve done with their investment.

October 2

They arrived this morning. A day ahead of schedule. I haven’t written because we’ve been too busy. We have a prototype. We think the equations work. Enough. I don’t think it will be as exact as the specs call for but I think the loss of blood will be minimal to the subject. We haven’t seen what they brought with them yet. A dog? A cow? A bat? I’m not sure. C knows. I’m sure of it. But he won’t tell us. Mira has been under wraps too. More like underwater. Every time I see her she’s furrowing her brow. I think she’s worried. But there’s a part of me that thinks if she can find a chemical solution we should focus on that instead. A nano-saw is… Not that I don’t think we can do it. We were just so far away at the beginning. There’s so many problems we don’t know we’ll encounter. I want to be optimistic. I am optimistic. We will deliver the project tomorrow.

October 3

Notes on Subject:

-A small dog. A terrier maybe? They say they have three infected subjects. We will test our work on each.

-The saw went in with almost no visible blood. Q says a good sign.

-The imaging shows a puncture in the lung caused by a growth. A thorn? Impossible.

-XA is represented by three men in suits. Silent. They watch the surgery closely. We manage to get the thorn removed from the lung and then go in to repair the pneumothorax. Dog dies in process. (I am not the surgeon. If I was, maybe the dog wouldn’t have died.)

Notes on Subject 2:

-A surprise. Another. A few hours later. This time a cow. A larger canvas.

-This time the cow was growing two wings out of its back. Again, impossible. This feels so Biblical. “The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; against them he will thunder in heaven. The LORD will judge the ends of the earth.” We are weeping in his silence.

-Q looked over my shoulder so I’m starting a new page. Warning.

-Massive bleeding out. The wings have deeper roots than we thought from the scan. A thin, thin line down towards the cow’s heart. Massive rupture. Two surgeons going in.

-The cow almost lived, but at the last minute one of the two doctors nicked his heart.

“Let’s take a break.”

Notes on Final Subject:

-What the fuck

-No. No. Okay.

-C brought in his kid. A human subject.

-There’s so much blood. Something went wrong, somewhere in his skull something burst. Q is trying to help the on-call surgeon find the source of the bleeding. The two horns were connected to his brain stem somehow. We weren’t precise enough at all.

-Crimson just flowing from his eye sockets. Why?

-His eyes are hanging from two filaments, just dangling…

-C is crying. Yelling. Screaming. M is trying to calm him down, give him a sedative but he’s refusing.

-There’s nothing to be done. We failed this child. The tech isn’t ready and XA is going to withdraw. C is hysterical like a mother.

-God’s plan, C says a few hours later. We sit in silence.

***

After a few days of confused silence, Christian told the assembled team they would not be shutting down. He was going to start pouring in his own money. Levi didn’t know how to take it. He felt it was ridiculous for XA to withdraw in the first place. This was their pet project. Mira said she was out. She couldn’t stand it. Levi shot her a confused look that was meant to signal more than it ever possibly could.

            Project Nazareth was entering a new phase and no one knew if it would yield anything. Of course their leader wanted to make sense of the senseless. They all did. But mourning had to give way to something new and this felt like more of the same, a protracted recklessness rather than a rebirth. But that was what Christian said over and over as he ranted and raved. “Nothing has changed. The plan is the same,” he said. Mira left in the middle of the night, no goodbyes. Qiang kept stealing glances at Levi, the fearful furtive kind, like they were working for a mad scientist now rather than a controlled surgical expert. Levi always knew the end result of this was madness. At best, a new plague, at worst, death. Senseless ruptures and blood pouring out of eye sockets in front of them. The sheer volume of liquid had surprised him. He wasn’t a real surgeon, that was true, but it seemed excessive. There was something about the new attachments that was bizarre, to him at least, they were using their host’s blood supply. They changed things inside the body’s system. What exactly they were changing remained to be seen.

            Levi tried to keep his head down and work. He started drinking after work with Qiang. Whiskey, Miller High Life, whatever they got from the main island. They didn’t cross the water very often. Christian moped whenever they left and he wouldn’t go himself.

            As the months passed, Christian continued to debase himself. He was quiet. Never mentioned his kid. Complained about headaches. Started yelling at everyone to keep working, to push the project further. Even though XA had withdrawn he continued to find funding in strange places, a hodgepodge of new age weirdos, fringe scientists, and Cassadaga mediums. The rations the crew was given turned more and more simple. Some of the people Levi used to see around the island vanished overnight—presumably they quit without notice. He understood. It was a grim project. The birthplace of a new kind of death.

            Follow the chutes and ladders. Each week Levi thought he drew closer to the source of the equations that haunted his dreams. An ouroboros, he told Christian.

            “There’s no end and no beginning.”

            “It’s just math,” Christian snapped. “Figure it out.”

            They kept eating in silence for a while until Levi asked Christian what he thought was even doing.

            “You know,” he said. “For the cause.”

            “Are you not taking this seriously? Do you not see where this is going?”

            “I understand we’re fighting a disease, one that is imminent, yes. And we’re doing everything we can. But you’ve already driven at least three scientists away and your own child—”

“Don’t.”

            Qiang walked into the little lunchroom. He walked over and sat between them. Didn’t say a word, just made the space. They needed to know they were being watched, that civility still ruled.

A new countdown started. Just as soon as they’d gotten XA off their backs, Christian convinced them to come back to the island. A new trial by fire. A new crucifixion. The shadowy figures only gave two weeks notice, though apparently Christian had been begging them to come back for quite some time.

            Their leader had taken to posting little notices on their lab doors. He was rarely appearing in public anymore. When the mad scientist did, he berated them on their progress. Said they had to make up for lost time and lost bodies.

            Levi wanted to contact Mira. The loss of her body felt the most painful. The curves, the sweetness, her dusky gravel-filled voice. The timbre of it turned him on in retrospect. At night she was the one he thought of, not any of the sex workers he used to hire or ex-girlfriends. They all became one mush of pussy but his peer was different. He wanted to call her. Find her number somehow and tell her to come back, just for a visit. That was unlucky. She was probably right to leave when she did—Christian was only going to get worse. But he was going down with the ship too. This was an insane opportunity. One that would likely not recur. There was no one to tell really, no one would believe him. He hardly believed his own eyes. Mira would understand.

            The young egotist walked over to Qiang’s lab to check up on him. The visitation was happening in less than a week. Qiang was playing a Talking Heads CD and drinking a beer while eating some leftover noodles. The lead singer screamed and wailed about power lines as Levi sat down on a rickety chair.

            “How’s it going?”

            Qiang shrugged.

            “What?”

            “I’m worried about Christian. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

            “Sure but… isn’t it what he hired us for?”

            “Yes…” Qiang trailed off. “But still.”

            Flies buzzed around the small wooden hut. A lantern blinked above them. On a desk were dozens of notepads and books, journals and notations. Levi remembered how he’d kept a journal for a while too—until the death. Then it all seemed futile. Better not to remember.

            “I think we should get Mira to come back.”

            Qiang coughed up his noodles, somewhere between shock and laughter.

            “She’s not coming back.”

            “Why?”

            “The kid? Not to mention…”

            Levi arched an eyebrow, just enough to signal his interest.

            “You don’t know?”

            “I don’t know if I don’t know because you’re not saying anything yet.”

            “One of the other scientists… made advances.”

            A gut punch.

            “Did she say who…?”

            “Yeah,” Qiang said, “one of the other guys who left along with her. Ryan or something.”

            “Ryan,” Levi said, tasting the name in his mouth. “Fuck.” So it wasn’t him she was worried about. That was good at least.

            “I mean she was one of the two women here so… I guess something was bound to happen.”

            “Did she say what happened?”

            Qiang shook his head and took another slurp of his food.

            “Do you have a way to contact her?”

            “No. I don’t. I wish I did.”

            “Okay,” Levi said. “I’ll leave you to your meal in peace.”

            As he walked back through the brush, he heard a piercing cry. There wasn’t any large beast immediately around him but still he hurried back to the dwelling he called home for the past few months. Still, the cawing continued. A flock of angry birds. Something annoying but harmless. No weapon formed against me shall prosper and every tongue that rises against me in judgement shall be condemned.

He sent three messages the next morning. One to the rabbi, one to Mira, and one to the sex worker in Key West. Christian helped. He thought it was an incredible plan—if it worked.

            “You’re sure?”

            “Of course,” Levi said. “I always am.”

            “We have the capabilities, it’s just a matter of certainty.”

            “I can do it.”

            “You’re sure you have it nailed down…”

            “Yes.”

Cheerleaders lined the laboratory. His two weeks were up. Time for the big show. The nutty Kabbalah rabbi, Mira, and some girl alongside the esteemed members of XA. Christian was whispering to the scientists. No one was close enough to listen in. Qiang stood in position, waiting for the next step in the process. He’d followed along closely, had a dozen conversations with Levi but still worried the little stunt wouldn’t work. If they had multiple plans of attack, maybe, but Levi was hedging his bets on his new-found skill. He thought he was the Messiah, God’s gift to the experimental medical community.

            Levi entered with the first test subject.

            “Redux time,” Qiang said under his breath.

            Christian shot him a look as if to say that was in poor taste, and it was. He knew that. But so was all of this. They should’ve just gone home. Something about the way Levi had talked last night, his voice racing over every word like he was on speed. But they knew each other, this was just what he was like when he got excited. When he thought he was conquering death. Grim to realize that, to remember what they were doing, Qiang thought. Trying to stop the reaper’s quiet wrath.

            Levi was decked out in a surgical gown and slim white mask. A black cap over his small head, wielding protractors.

            “Hello everyone,” he started. “Don’t worry, we have two surgeons on hand. But this isn’t all for show.” Mira looked nervous. He looked her in the eyes as he talked. It didn’t take that much money to get the three of them in the room, but he was going to enjoy his money’s worth. The rabbi and the girl looked skittish. They wouldn’t meet his eye. Probably thought he was mad. He was. “I will be performing the surgery,” he said, gazing down at the rabbit on the operating table. “It’s important I think we acknowledge why we failed last time. It should’ve been one of us up here operating the nano-saw we made, not one of the surgeons. In a way,” he laughed, “I am the one true surgeon. The inventor. It’s harder to work something after being taught secondhand. Of course, if something goes wrong, they’ll step in. We also won’t be operating on a child.” He knew that he had to appeal to his shareholders if he wanted to usurp Christian’s place in the company. To be Christian he had to be a believer. Calm, collected, cool, charismatic. The last part was the hardest. Levi was a natural asshole. Even he knew, at least when he was lucid.

            The first surgery began. This time it went off without a hitch. Almost no blood at all. Just the tiniest dribble of crimson left on table. It took just a few minutes. Everyone clapped. It was a quick show, almost a trick of the light. Everyone had been very careful. There could be no mistakes, so there weren’t. Levi smiled behind his mask.

            “How,” one of the men from XA asked, “did you get ahold of specimen with the Angel Disease?”

            “Great question. Christian? Do you want to field this one or should I?”

            Christina was shaking as he stammered out something about variants.

            “You may know that there are variants. If you don’t, you will soon,” Levi took over. It was strange, this confidence coursing through his body. “Christian has some side experiments. Things he told me about after you left. One of them is a little… a little zoo. Where he tests how contagious the Angel Disease, or Diseases, really are. We know less than we think. It seems to be something akin to the common cold. We don’t know exactly how it spreads but it does. Not everyone around will get it, but almost like it’s hereditary, it mutates those around it. Inspires similar growth. Human evolution gone cancerous. Maladaptive.”

            Mira nodded at him. He moved on.

            “So when the previous subjects were here, Christian put them in the zoo. These new subjects resulted from the contamination.”

            “So we could all be… infected?” Qiang said.

            “Unlikely. It rarely jumps to humans.”

            “But it did,” the man from XA said. “Last time we were here there was… a human subject.”

            “Yes,” Levi replied. “It’s horrible. But that child wasn’t so far gone. We could’ve… if the nano tech was where it is now, we might… might have been able to save him.” Christian was hysterical now. They couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.

            “We won’t be practicing on a kid,” Levi said, “but Christian has brought me what we needed to work on the most. Someone who has been completely taken over by the Angel Disease.”

            “Excuse me?” The man scoffed.

            “Please,” Levi said to the surgeons.

            “Levi?” Qiang said. “What is this?”

            “I didn’t want to implicate you.”

            “Where the fuck is this zoo?” Mira said, coming over now, frightened by the possibility of escalating nefarious deeds.

            “Downstairs. Just below us,” Levi replied. “Can we clear Christian?”

            “You mean… take him outside?” Qiang asked.

            “Yes.”

            “Sure, I’ll do it.”

            Once they were outside, the surgeons brought in something nearly indescribable.

            “Our angel,” Levi said.

            No one else saw salvation. They saw terror. It stomped in on two feet, wings bursting out of scabby pink skin. Dirt and grime all over its hide, horns and warts and boils. Like something out of a Medieval plague.

            “What the fuck…” Thalia said. “Why the hell did you bring us here? To see this?”

            “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We will do what we can to save the beast. This was once a pig. A little one that ran around—that’s what Christian told me anyway.” Levi was going to show them he could kill a messenger of God’s wrath. He was the Tzadik. He had come.

            The surgeons used chains to lug the daemon to the table where they used tranquilizers, struggling to penetrate its horn-covered hide. The steely scales wouldn’t allow for most needles. Special-order. All thanks to Christian before his lunacy devolved.

            Once the creature slumbered, Levi stepped up and touched two of the nano-saws, so small no one could even see them. He walked back over to a little control panel with a camera. That was the whole point, part of what had gone wrong before—the camera’s accuracy lagged, the curvature of the saw was off. Too many mistakes, too many things getting nicked that shouldn’t have. It’s a delicate area after all.

            Everyone watched the saw winding through the organs of the pig-creature. The rabbi got up as if to leave but Levi stopped to give him a look.

            “Pay attention,” the man from XA yelled.

            Levi smiled like a ghoul and got back to work. There was no point of course. This thing was too far gone, transmogrified into a pustule of puss and thorn. But he cut the horns out from the nervous system—or at least a few of them. They’d spread all over, changed the pig’s natural DNA.

            When he finally stopped and looked at his small crowd, they were astonished. He almost bowed. Then he turned around, whipped out a bigger surgical saw and started hacking off the wings. Whole. Blood poured out, the nodules were little horns connected to the very fungal-looking wings. They were limbs. Useless. Couldn’t do anything. The stench was awful. Everyone gasped. Mira and Thalia walked out. The rabbi grimaced. But the man from XA was pleased. When Levi brought a portion of the wing over to him, he took it.

            “I think the infection continues to mutate. Wings are its natural end point. That’s why you call it the angel disease, isn’t it? Well. I found a way to stop it. If we catch it early enough.”

            “Yes,” the man said. “You did.”

            Levi locked eyes with the rabbi. The old man stopped in front of the young one. The idealist waited for a compliment, to have proven the mage wrong. Instead, he spit in Levi’s face and walked off without saying a word. Such hostility. When the judgement came, he would not be lenient to the elite. Pay day had to come eventually.

∩

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, GQ, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, among other outlets. Find her @emotrophywife. Herculine is her debut novel.

Speaking Into a World that We Will Eventually Not Inhabit: On Christian Wessels’ Who Follow the Gleam

Christian Wessels, Who Follow the Gleam, University of Massachusetts Press, April 2026, 108 Pages

The potent moments in Christian Wessels’ debut book of poems Who Follow the Gleam, to me, are the ones that feel like the speaker has morphed into a future, past, or radically other form of himself right before our eyes. “Sympathetic Magic from the Black Forest,” the first poem in the collection, stakes its claim on disorienting rearrangements of repeated units: 

Because every green cloud has a season,
every untouched pool, a spell
for the untouched season, because every

Season has a green spell, untouched
by daylight 

This passage adopts elements of chiasmus to heighten the sense of a priori logic to the opening spell. The statement about the green cloud is presented as the pre-supposition for a resulting statement. Such a statement is delayed indefinitely. Rather than fulfilling the premise of the because-statement, Wessels generates the feeling of rhetorical order through chiasmus, which also allows me to sit with limitless extension rather than itching for resolution. As the poem’s title suggests, the logical feeling that stems from the chiasmic reversal of the sentences is a little mesmerizing. It asserts its own power by invoking a memorable structure. 

Sympathetic magic is magic that’s performed on a proxy object like a voodoo doll. Throughout Who Follow the Gleam, the speaker undergoes many proxy-fications. In “Sympathetic Magic,” the speaker perceives his own spirit outside of himself after having difficulty breathing in the forest. The doubling is disturbing, but it also points to the heightened stakes of language as a site that proves our interrelation. Later:

When I bruise my arm, apologies,
your arm is bruised.

This voice is an imitation of me, body and voice
When I speak your mouth moves

It may be our mouths that move in response to the speaker’s words as we read. It may be the speaker’s uncanny double, risen out of the ramblings of an oak. It may also be one of the many addressees who populate the speaker’s world. The poem’s transmission from the page to our bodies may not be that different from language’s traversal from the world of the dead back to us. Death is a surface or screen across which projections and doublings occur, and the thickness at the center of the chiasmic structure feels like an apt representation of that screen as well.

The death screen/mirror reflects the speaker’s sense that he is speaking into a world that he will eventually not inhabit, even as he channels and communicates with poets who have passed from this realm. A ghostly way of inhabiting the present might be one way to characterize the paradox of writing. Wessels’ way in Who Follow the Gleam is attentive to potential for revivification in the remnants of the past that we encounter in this life. In “Our Snail,” he translates a family member’s retelling of a long bedtime story about an anthropomorphic snail that her father improvised and reiterates the tension at the heart of storytelling itself. “We needed our snail to make it to Leipzig” the speaker remembers, but as the story goes on, she discovers that the fairy tale could not satisfy her desire and be accurate:

‘The snail never left
and neither did the people, that’s how
our town began, with that crowd . . .’ By that
point in the story we knew he had lied,
or at least imagined that parts of our shared life
were not true. . .’

And as the poem concludes, the speaker remembers her father:

‘we listened to our father
improvise. He sang in the church choir.
He never spoke about refining gold.’

The work of refining gold (which by now sounds a little magical on its own) is a version of the story that the father did not see as a story, in the same sense that poets might overlook the here and now in search of a poem or story that could satisfy an elevated, yet inchoate, desire. Though there are often voices from the annals of history here, the poems manage to find enchantment in the contemporary domestic reality of delivery errors, potty-training, and yardwork. “These modern notes/ and tones were stolen/ eons ago,” Wessels notes, and it is clear as he ferries language from various points in time, the tones come from somewhere beyond the chronological demarcations that separate our sense of the modern from the classical. The feeling of enchantment is not delimited by history or our unfamiliarity, and that is a remarkable achievement across Who Follow the Gleam.

∩

Tobi Kassim’s writing has been published in The Volta, Chicago Review, The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, Chicago Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by Undocupoets, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Cave Canem. His chapbook Dear Sly Stone was published by Spiral Editions.

Three Poems

Numbers

My eyes are wet with faith today.
My eyes are wet with lizard pee
and faith. And faith falls like hard rain
through the clouds of my language.
And faith falls down like lizards peeing
through the hard rain of my days.
It’s like my days are what I’m faithful in,
and I’m the rain that’s falling hard
through language, through the grass
that grows on God, or the grass
that grows like language on
the rain inside my eyes—
which we both know is lizards
peeing. Which we both know is faith.

Vitamin Face

His cause of death was “envelopes.”
His ghost looked nothing like him.
His hands were full of loose-leaf tea.
Blood on the riverbanks, blood on the oceans.
There were tire marks inside his brain.
His office was painted a glandular yellow.
He liked to eat “gorilla dust.”
Blood on the barbecue, blood on the fuses.
He was bald as the blue August sun.
He only listened to music in April.
He knew I would not miss him.
Blood on the garden gnomes, blood on the moss.

I Am a Dentist

I eat teeth.
If I am dating you,
it is because I want your teeth
near me at all hours.
My bed is like
one of those racecar beds
that children have
except mine’s
shaped like teeth.
I am fabulously wealthy.
My wallet leaves
bite marks on my butt.
I have many dark tattoos
of historically-significant
molars. Yes…
Come over to my mansion.
It smells like health insurance.
We’ll have dinner.
Bring your teeth.

∩

Lloyd Wallace runs Poetry Nightly. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Annulet, the Cleveland Review of Books, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh. You can read more at lloydwallace.com.

Four Poems

The End of the Long Streams

east branch

Call it Superfund Quay or Arbitration Inlet
names are remorse’s ornaments
the science fiction to demonology pipeline
watchwords at the end of a long dissolution
Still these symbols work their shame
the old fashioned way: through dream
Little Dresden and Dimes Square
disgrace chases a strange endocrinology which chases
the Golden Ratio which chases the bed
installed so hopefully in the cosmopolis
Two feet are no match for a fractal coast: wrong

english kills

Flowering tree entelechy or on this planet spring
The hillside heavy with mausoleums drops
down to the embankments and pocket parks
Paulownia trees twist up from
the glue boom’s imperial runoff
Aftermath ecologies traffic their catalogs
of generative affliction the same way
people have for generations: to give description
something to do
A fine mist of prallethrin over the inlet
You choose grief: you have a fondness for buzzwords 

whale creek

Across the water is Bristol Basin’s ballast palisade
The microphalluses of Hercules
After the Blitz bits of the city were made
to weigh down the Allies’ ships
The empire’s unwavering will to expand still
made a Little Bristol: another decoy city milled
into the excurrent middenly: are middens good?
Do they symbolize nascent abuse?
Or do they show us innocence: beaver dam alluvion
Decoy and reversal: their anagram camouflage
fools the cycle into restoring one fate to the next

the turning basin

So what do some conchologists do? Precision syringe squirt
the ideogram for profusion on my schism-soiled apron
That shall be the primeval forest you start from scratch
But first one more punishing flight of metacognition
The Fire Island salt holly drinks from a freshwater lens
Wallace’s Night Heron: wobbly juvenile: its archival aliveness
from Nightsoil Wharf: Cologne Gulch: so you say: Jim Cantore
our bard of disaster: it’s time to mash the lanternflies into
a sweet-smelling paste: this truly is the Irradiated Riviera
and here just above the high filth mark it will be a dragonhoard’s
tidy nativity scene that changes the nature of osmosis

∩

Peter Milne Greiner is from Otis, Massachusetts. He works on Governors Island. 

Three Poems

[The emblem of society was called ‘conscience’]

The triumph of the nick is the unconscious fantasy
    of those who scratch

a blandness of dinner in Herr Heimlich’s studio
    restructures his genome

since my purpose is to partake in legacies of thought
    how dreary should the derby

this dissolving writ should be like a bald eagle
    with ketchup on its talons

a spotless glass tumbler in the blink of an eye
    between the nothing before and after

begin again: Would you die to satisfy yourself
    in some verifiably perfect literature

an inner England scrumming like a fraternity of indents
    tripping over themselves to outrun stupidity

a stochastic twang, echoing in the toilet bowl
    of world literature; sunspots on stippled hands

for a while, I thought this vision a mermaid, a fragment
    so obscure—the breathwork of uncle junk

bracketing an inner racetrack with a jungle gym
    at its center, a pressure cooker called succor 

*

I thought, taking the perspective of nature
    there’s nothing objectively wrong with plagiarism

then was lanced, scalded, and buried
    half-alive with my twin, a bisque figurine

aside from the family romance, I was a brother
    in other respects: That is, no man, but chickenshit

unceremoniously promoted to the status of guy
    a Daruma doll in a bentgrass school

how is a solidly built Anglican like toiling
    in a world map of unfilled stars

marching in wool shorts toward abandonment
    and belly scritches, bewildered

promoting the works of one who said, “The sky is
    falling,” begetting a circumstance

dubbed believing one’s own two eyes, who later
    dragged a filthy Swiffer in Albuquerque

heroism is an import from thinking—what started
    as an amusement metastasized

what was then called an innocent gaiety
    takes the social form of authentic narration

kisses: We once thought them fortifications
    in our stand against the caprices of time 

*

Thought their sentience unflagging; wanted
    our innermost names beaten clean out of us

but this is prosaic—a letter dictated by a bourgeois
    nonentity with unclear seriousness

a fold dividing astrology and psychology
    on which werewolf graffiti dangles

and up which the memories of babelike jarheads
    have hoisted irrational naval colors

she called them glamours, the duplicities
   of the psyche, but could identify no tradition

from which the name had arisen. I wished
    to gain wisdom from recitation but found there only mind

whining highly, dim as a bulb in a broom closet
    until it was time to stand and applaud

we begin as gluttonous swine, and end, if we’re lucky
   guitar picks in a junkshop dish

we begin as crosshairs and end, if we’re lucky
    overlapping fabric straps forming the seat of a chair

[Fisherman and shepherds]

String a line between two cans and let the language trot
  out a ubiquity mussed by demolition solvents

that’s that vertigo I felt when we got truly lost for the first time
  near the beginning of the ropes course in the dark

wood next to the PepsiCo campus . . . it was more extensive
  than I had imagined and also more haunting, and less barren

a certain Dan in our group had just come from church
  and took it upon himself to lead a kind of demonstration

there was wetness on the black stumps; a hush was filled
  with the drilling of a chipping sparrow, an adolescent male

exhibitionist, being one who was secretly never housebroken
  a survivor of too many nights in the life of asbestos

an expression of life shot vertically from a canon
  whose parabola basically describes the trajectory of public favor

such was the sutra of that demonstrative bird, and this
  is the last thing I’ll say about it: If you get a chance

to press your face into the feathers of a chipping sparrow
  smell its discontinuity with description, especially

this one, so senseless I should probably strike it
    from the sense record before it becomes my writing 

*

I have moved to preserve the integrity of a chair
  when I could not preserve integrity of my own life

there would be a respectable inefficiency, renaming every iota
  of experience “windfall number x,” etc., a trophy wanting

that might set the stage for a personal revolution, or at least
  provoke the destruction of a few street signs last night

here, I should pause to add that in a quest for renewal
  we are permanent beginners; our stories become hinterlands

in which lost boys, repressed, but roaming ahead,
  bowl over a fastidious man in a hat, winding him

there he dances, there he dreams, reposes, and also blinks
  urinates frequently, and flinches when another dog barks

Regret is this man’s name. He once planned to race, fast as hell
  to every outpost in need of a detective

but let’s unzip the stanzas under which he camps
  that he monitors for holes in case of rain

I like to tramp in his little main area, a ragged yard
  where it smells of filth, and in my memory a red Kong bounces

in my tramping, I am like that man; though I am not that man
  we are similar mainly in our thinking, deeds, and attire 

*

I am less fond of his other area
  where a furious wind whips the tombs of his exes

in theory, one can kick back there and unwind without fear
  of starring in any clip or seeing one’s name in print

one placard reads “Tess,” and who was that? A bomb
  threat who reorganized pleasure on the level of possibility

before steady work held any appeal, Amsterdam was their only plan
  —he looks back now and wishes to descry its allure

damn! he really does—but that wish is only a common disease
  one must treat with an herb like calendula

then stifle to death with an ode, then kick and kick, even after
  it has already been kicked to death twice today

I just want you to remember with me the exsanguination of desire
  that always follows a good roll in the mud

walk through our ages with me, as in a crazy timelapse. Gaze
    on our aging while nibbling popcorn and feeling silly

for outsourcing the proper experience of aging to a machine,
    a narrative machine, in this case an idea

borrowed from the technology of cinema; then make the animal image
    of dotage, a naked head inscribed with certain immutable laws

[The crippling involution of ‘nature’]

Through many enervating nights I’ve turned my camera on,
  often after a helping of sherbet and a round of tangrams

light is beginning. It is beginning to dabble in foundering
  Light has its seven irredeemable faults, Rebecca

brings water to a simmer. And what comes after
  in the teleological narrative of water, heat, and time

happens after nightfall, in defunct train yards
  beyond the yards shown on government maps

where you sight a mole person’s last graffito, a message
  lost to sun and air, but this sober tag still functions

being a bug in the student portal where a tuft of hair
  might grow, a catkin on one branch of atrophy

in summer, when the Irish gap years clump
  on balconies, make blood pacts on San Pablo

and even in winter, when school was supplanted
  by the tempo of shooting stars zipping up the mild sky

we must study the gravesites that are our first impetus
  for denial, from which Western culture gains particulars

we must steep in the gardens of Palestine, especially after
   night has fallen, and wail in key of the living 

*

Chugging rivers of Constant Comment furtively
  so as to mitigate the effects of last night’s bender hopefully

gathering information from a muddy puddle that reflects
  my self-images, each of which comes apart so easily

Sunday in the downhill race—my heteronomy lags
  behind my neighbor’s, whose morals forbid learning

then his tensile rigging suggests a dungeon below
  learning, where the distant cries of fallen warriors undergo

archival mitosis, their long journey toward mewling analogous
  to the homing of vampire fangs toward a fair neck

really, it was a best practice developed in a feeling mode
  by starlight beings who mostly dwell in a whirring spacecraft

they wear their lowland pelerines like ordained killers
  of peasants used to do; their laughter shakes their toes

there is a simple logic to the address of their distant bosses
  it amounts to a tender letter to every fallen intellect

I did not know how our own suburb in time stirred
  your memory, arousing your hate like a low fog over a lawn 

*

Most of what I imagine is gleaned
    from an urban legend with its seed

in an old war song, a festive song
    the fruit of a commoner

is spontaneous mutations
    of balladry, that common

 source that is like a salt lick
    —bitter, enduring, almost nutritional

raunchy—one can’t predict that
   exchange: Endless hammering

 in the street for pure melody
   one hangs tight, receptively

like a monarch touching down in a bar
    his wings broadcast a midlife crisis

then, “splat!”—some punk
    asserts the natural order

the diorama we look to
    for entertainment

sick me on these beers, that I might
    remember to never go home

so long as exultation
    can still take over from me

that high arrives to help us both
    stomach a night of self-immolation

at the end of which, dawn
   will be shot, stuffed, and mounted

beers, help me forget the real war
   is not logomachy—

though the integrity of each stable
    dialectic, especially self and state

depends on its virtual battles
    mind being a march from “I was”

a proposition of solidity
    across a beating “I am”

through military
   ashes “I will be”

then a single tulip raised up
   like a blood blister

on the barren season
    —all around

the air raised up a searing falsetto
    from a prior stillness

∩

Parker Menzimer is the author of the chapbooks Aion’s Ribbon (Inpatient Press) and The Links (1080press). With Maxwell Paparella, he is co-author of Towpath to the Interior (The Double Tied Press), a braided cinquain diary. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Annulet, Prelude, Tagvverk, Works & Days, Second Factory, and elsewhere. His writing has received support from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He serves as Public Programs Director at the Poetry Society of America and, with Terrence Arjoon, coedits the print magazine poetry2.

One Poem

from Mountainscapes

[squander nightfall abandoned...]

squander nightfall abandoned to snow whirl

reversing grave leveled city, vista cynic nominates near trim

drone observed position, picking out circling star light

refused, left the gaps to air in silences, routine turn flotilla

gift of forgetting each immediate sensation

as caustic notes, chemical fields clamber again up rough vocab:

unify or organize drawing back to the ascent, animal body rote

walk down street routine at quote dawn, trained on reference

not giving enough: planar basis for what it would mean to accumulate or forget

left to the eroding wash, current flows down this street in crisis,

formed without vision, thought pacing that spans rests,

trilogy of dying, rapt to curtain mind

while in these nearness gaps fruit unexplained phenomena,

docile thighs, delight delimits aging surface, root tensions

surface spoiled in rippling figments of attention

consequent militancy glares not historic from that gaze of skull’s capacity

nightmare thought of the reserved bullet, poems pending placid

rippled disturbed back in time of collapsible torment, gap in thought

defers pending atrocity, each with what gives own grave diggers

perception caught light between blades of grass, between scorched concrete

schema spying near desolate, that murmur in my activity and struggle

borne as intensity left at depth, gardens of humor

running tangent, turned plaintive call to neoprene veer

sharpening waste excreted poet solvent, salivating recession

dingy, diminutive, debited: nothing that continues over the length of wave,

of pulse, acrid and distant fumes, dissipating, searching from the middle

flesh and verb, not about food, to be food,

need void resource blanked out moment of life,

ground zero consuming bloom

read for outside, then sectioned, urged to extend

shipping networks, corridors, embargoes equal blockades

warfare via limits to calories, weapons of pure extractive desires

referencing empire so need to draw it out,

a long sequence: arterial sentence, vein glib depth oxygenate

spent a few days home exhausted from work, not separated

transport and my labor and this accumulation

fed and bloodless, though pulse affirms outer realms of mind

not anarchy, crows over buildings,

freighter into hurricane to shove off time, recording

transcript repeats “noise”, no light to last moments

rendered as sound, grieving image

rapid eye movement: stall this pace / pulse

normal remembering death’s vast blank, encouraging one

to be acquainted with darkness, parasympathetic system responding

to the dark, pulse slows in flickering dots

not there bodies sparking not image but the complete and total

center overwhelm

nothing nothing as near to a new rapturous aural open

agony line-by-line left breathing open palm to coax wavy surface

leading means accumulated plink plink of thought surface under

the bubbles, charge running along rare earth metals, I attempt

to visualize route of extraction, invisible circuits surging across ocean

value is in speed, warped steel short fracture driving

two songs against each other, into the mistake that is this velocity

little space for breath, for understanding edge, writ limit

divulging spelled divot, wanting not to follow dot dot lines

left turn, coast view rotates around me, memory meaningful

food in course of this, or food prices, stuffed classes starve themselves

as body control, asymptotic arc, things they feel are theirs

possessed by calamities they ensue, raging at them each fracture

they press there with us in the pulse we wield

in space line noise drip follows instead clarity prosaic mistake

imprison mantle, draping paths round road cord surge

protecting identify pleased within communal circle, clasp struggle

near ideas stop and start, FPS feed, flickering image as read

belief bread give flicker hand gesture, crossing century

sorry for mind map, anger molecular fuse, wind and pavement

weather ambient engine drone, collapsing angles of sight and sound

waiting at the harbor, unceasing food obligations merits supply

not that I caught freeze or my labor, urgent call

militant dispersal obedient, open Joan of Arc,

germ of agriculture

winter clear beats dear message to me plopped aura

where you read gummed and situation

halt stigma placid undercurrent

you take active as greed form

super majority warm broth

left to memory, intonation blocks extending era future fusion

heart of if blank stand-in leverage gales burst stationary

render or accumulate or gather in the inner shadow of pulse

of repeating the station and street of devastation, depopulated

garner grim calculated walk pace, stopped before glowing

stationary explication, dulled motivation,

sprung practice after thought

you build opal resource gathering impart

left of impact site, sorry for the trash that lingers

direct, pulling in the ask, the scattered and uncomfortable

edge of such awareness, more than forward

open floral mind given those you bring and belong

clarity’s mistake, dense awareness entering an open space

between buildings, register caution and watch for reflections in windows

quote “civilizing mission” relays brutality, open effort gains currency

peace harrow tunneling workers given sacrifice leads

heart need, opens again, under soil: subterranean clear focus not

sound space, waiting in dark, as prep for the death we give

light in oppose, never left to bend, shadow falling along this rock

shadow extends outer expectation florid, waiting to emerge

known cresting silence, three points angle in people’s judgment

cosmic green reed surround participating swamp static

cause is caught in struggle vocab, dream light through reeds

stationary property meant hearing within confused gray wash

rainbow stolen “civilizing” circuit horror

vendor shipment loop

built with these hands, working under bass pulse, status

music, folds finance, back waiting at treeline, pulled

into future violence, observance, after sitting with people talking

about what? creases here, rows in fields, canopy, waits in sun

dry aura winter flow, dry pool winter, careening between

the space you want to hold over us over renewed

beat, clear sense of need and how to hold onto it through

tidal wash, dipping under the surface of dream

sublimate value, what I wanted then for others, line of the shore

rising form line left, on the wash of desert hiss, closed

taken as touch, field in nuance

parade bargain, roads that merit

a graven melody in backwards, rustling undergrowth motion

paces walking went through own practice, dialogue back to mind

reverses format, serrated thought running along pavement

these structures, built or for bad hoard,

clamped on noise

to themselves in or for darkness, spirit basis and currency

benefit of system stowed in speech barreling forward

road forecasts emptied nothing reaper on a still nest

cast commodity over living current

urged instant stellar

spoken thrice, figure along stretch of road flickering light

muted non-metallic vivid overtones, went bird cloud

turn in breeze, image by mass of cars

spoke to people

stall, gather ambient, roar of echo,

buildings turning sound back to us

mass scene descends, wide view, moving in fear repeats form

massacre, its a ton or brown exceeding the gray over the scene, men

blue vigilant passage we follow, led under root and dirt

please communal repeats ends, graft breaks fictional light,

scorching light under a rose abrasion, circulating cold,

asked frequencies, aura equals thrum without a pulse

left abstract, dodging ruin, all of this west from theft

left to anger, priestly, descending on celebrating mass

left to the twelve, circulate red, frame as crane

bringing vision downward

falling away from eyes, where you see no meaning or difficulty

systematize glandular focus: memory eroding built streaming future

let it continue along what the film stops or starts

∩

Geoffrey Olsen is the author of Nerves Between Song (Beautiful Days Press 2024), and many chapbooks, most recently Neck Field (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs 2025) and In Sleep the Searing (New Mundo 2025). He lives in Brooklyn.