‘They are superbly and viscerally unreal / and I feel their living drive’
‘Our errors evolved into nature.’ Translated from the Burmese by ko ko thett.
‘Even astronauts describe / our air as thick enough to slice / and spread on toast for breakfast.’
‘His sheets smell of formalin. / She feels as if her insides // are outside her, in a freezer.’
‘The wet in the air is like signal anxiety: life is about to / change.’
‘I am lying in the foetal position on a beach in the east of England.’
‘So tight he whispered / from beyond the haze, thrusting until she was no longer a part of me.’
‘Do I have the heart to drink a glass of cool Coke?’
‘You can’t control your face / The Empire has over-reached / Expressions // Have become flags’
‘Another kind of people hobgoblins / the minds of little men.’
‘Fingers twirl / composite stems whose colour / twist rock-candies, snake-ladders / precious yellow, less-rare green.’
‘Music needs silence / more than silence needs music.’ New poetry by Rae Armantrout.
‘Every day, I see a monstrosity in the kissing hole.’
‘I have never been in love / with so many variants of nothing.’
‘I will etch visas on toilet paper and throw them from a lighthouse.’
‘how can all the pressures of surveillance / fail to describe me?’
‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’
‘Her / Secrets play on continuous loop, // Like a B-movie.’
‘Never laid a snare for nothin. / Never caught a bullfrog. Broke / my slingshot wishbone, wishin. / Never had a smoke.’ New poetry from Amit Majmudar.
‘history was speaking, which hardly ever happened to me’
‘light plays on the planet / long enough to tell time’
‘Narcotic, / unworldly, a toxic doctrine / of undivine retribution.’
‘Things didn’t remember their names and I have begun to forget them’
‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’
‘Do you think I can get to heaven / with zero balance and a virus?’
‘Your promise has been extracted like the cow-horned remains of molars long-soused in a Diet Coke marinade.’
‘ “I got lost in my life” / which may or may not be / misheard.’
‘Haven’t you noticed people / are different since then?’
‘I walk away from you / without glancing back, in case you see in me something I don’t.’
‘noce, the heart—the nut that gestates the tree of veins.’
‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’
‘My celebrity accumulated like a kidney stone: / children, pets, even some corvids recognised me’
‘the bell / was ringing from the chapel, they were there / expecting her.’
‘The opposite of simply sitting about / in your head, like an egg in eggshell.’
‘So the young girls, / cast as naughty young girls from the Acropolis, / left – / just with some things missing.’
‘Outside deer are nowhere to be seen and inside / the radio spectrum fills up with sorrowful little packets of data.’
