POEMS ARE THE ONLY REAL BODIES by Jennifer Tamayo now available in free ebook formats

Read above via Issuu.com or download the PDF here.

December 2013: Year-end news from Bloof

There's so much happening this final month of 2013, we thought we better write you a note. Please view it (with all the links and pics) on our public Facebook page here. (No account required.) 

***

Bloof is publishing Danielle Pafunda's 5th poetry collection, Natural History Rape Museum, and we are currently working on our review copy mailing.

If you think you can review the book for a venue you are already connected with, please get in touch with us at [email protected] and we will be happy to send you a copy. Alternatively, if you'd like to review the book but do not have an outlet in mind, we can suggest a few places that would most likely be open to your pitch. 
Details (and preorder discount through 12/15) here: https://squareup.com/market/bloof-books/natural-history-rape-museum-by-danielle-pafunda

***

We're also happy to bring you Kirsten Kaschock's new chapbook Windowboxing: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts. Review copies for that are PDF, since these are handmade and limited in quantity, but if you publish a review we will send you a copy with our enthusiastic compliments. Details/preorder here and some samples here: http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue13/poetry_kaschock.shtml

These are limited to 100 copies, 20 of which go to the author, and we fill subscriber and preorders first so these go fast. 

***

Next up is Pattie McCarthy's scenes from the lives of my parents, which is currently in design stages, but close to production. We'll be back with more news about that very soon, because believe it or not it's also 2013! 

***

Once the handmade chapbooks sell out, we release them as free/$.99 ebooks, as we just did for Becca Klaver's Nonstop Pop last week. Enjoy that in PDF or Issuu.com format here: http://news.bloofbooks.com/2013/12/nonstop-pop-by-becca-klaver-now.html

Packing by Hailey Higdon and Poems Are the Only Real Bodies by Jennifer Tamayo will be following in their digital versions shortly too.

***

If you somehow missed the announcement of our 2014 selections, here is that news:
http://news.bloofbooks.com/2013/09/announcing-bloof-books-2014-chapbook.html

These six chapbooks join the longer books already on the schedule next year: Elisabeth Workman's Ultramegaprairieland, Sandra Simonds's House of Ions: Sonnets, and Shanna Compton's book-length poem The Seam. Subscriptions for "The Whole Shebang 2014" as well as 2014 Chapbook Subscriptions will be announced in January, at significant discounts. 

***

Thanks, as always, for supporting Bloof Books! 

NONSTOP POP by Becca Klaver now available in free ebook formats

Read it above via Issuu.com, or download the PDF here.

Bloof store will be closed November 11–17

You may still place orders, here or through out Square Market storefront, but they will not ship until 11/17.

Thanks!

We had a fantastic time at Berl's...

 …last week! Here is an article Shanna posted prior to the reading, at The Best American Poetry Blog:

Have You Been to Berl's? 

And here are a few pictures:

Luxury table digs at Berl's

More gorgeous & varied displays

Yes, it is

Many lovelies

A backdrop any poet will ♥

Jennifer Tamayo (+ donut mask)

Jennifer L. Knox

Becca Klaver

Jackie Clark

Ben Fama

Jared White

Shanna Compton

Natalie Eilbert

We recorded audio of all the poets' readings, too. We'll post tracks in the next day or two.

Other upcoming readings!

In addition to our party at Berl's next week, here are some Bloof-related readings coming up soon. Please come out and say hello.

OTHER UPCOMING READINGS

Ben Fama at the launch for his new Spork chapbook Cool Memories in NYC, on Saturday 10/19:

https://www.facebook.com/events/564509420282083/

Jennifer L. Knox at the Literati Reading Series in Binghamton, NY on Monday, 10/21: https://www.facebook.com/events/1427828917436866/

Jennifer L. Knox at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, CA on Saturday 10/26:

https://www.facebook.com/events/425186500920824/

Shanna Compton at Columbia College in Chicago, IL on Wednesday 11/13:

http://events.colum.edu/event/shanna_compton_nick_twemlow_poetry_reading#.UmE5LxaOX9E

Peter Davis & Shanna Compton at Illinois State University in Bloomington, IL on Thursday, 11/14:

(talk with students at 3:30, public reading at 7:30)

http://events.wics.com/Author_chat_with_Shanna_Compton_and_Peter_Davis/283564928.html

Shanna Compton at Dollhouse Series in Chicago, IL on Saturday 11/16:

http://thedollhousereads.tumblr.com/upcomingevents

Sandra Simonds at TYPOFest in Fayetteville, AR on Friday & Saturday 11/22 & 23:
http://typomag.com/typofest/

Bloof at Berl's!

We're planning a little celebration & reading at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop! Here are the details. Hope to see you there.

Jackie Clark • Shanna Compton • Natalie Eilbert 

Ben Fama • Becca Klaver • Jennifer L. Knox 

Jennifer Tamayo • Jared White 

Wednesday, October 23 at 7:00 PM
Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop 
126A Front Street
DUMBO

Jackie Clark is the series editor of Poets off Poetry and Song of the Week for Coldfront Magazine. She is the recipient of a 2012 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a contributing writer for the Rumpus, and is the author of Aphoria (Brooklyn Arts Press) and four chapbooks: Office Work (Greying Ghost Press), Red Fortress (H_NGM_N), I Live Here Now (Lame House Press), and Sympathetic Nervous System (Bloof, 2014). Jackie lives in Jersey City and can be found online at nohelpforthat.com.

Shanna Compton's books include Brink (Bloof 2013), For Girls & Others (Bloof 2007), Down Spooky (Winnow, 2005), Gamers (Soft Skull 2003) and several chapbooks. A book-length speculative poem called The Seam is forthcoming next year. 

Natalie Eilbert's poetry can be found or is forthcoming from Tin House, West Branch, Guernica, Spinning Jenny, Devil's Lake, Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives writes in Greenpoint, New York, where she is a founding editor of The Atlas Review. Her chapbook Conversation with the Stone Wife is forthcoming from Bloof in 2014.

Ben Fama is the author of New Waves, Aquarius Rising and the artist book Mall Witch. He is the co-editor of Wonder. His work appears in the Brooklyn Rail, Action Yes, jubilat, Notnostrums, LIT, Poor Claudia, Denver Quarterly, Maggy and on the Best American Poetry blog. Bloof will release his chapbook Odalisque in 2014.

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and several chapbooks, including Nonstop Pop (Bloof 2013) and Merrily Merrily (Lame House 2013). She is a PhD student in English at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, NY. For more information, visit her blog Pomo Expo.

Jennifer L. Knox's new book of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, is available from Bloof Books. Her other books, Drunk by Noon and A Gringo Like Me, are also available through Bloof. Jennifer was born in Lancaster, California—home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Space Shuttle. She received her B.A. from the University of Iowa, and her M.F.A. in poetry writing from New York University. She has taught poetry writing at Hunter College and New York University. Her poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series (1997, 2003, 2006, and 2011) as well as the anthologies Great American Prose Poems, From Poe to Present and Best American Erotic Poems. Her work has also appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Fence, McSweeney's, and Bomb. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Jennifer Tamayo is a writer and performer. She is the author of Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes (Switchback 2011), the chapbook Poems Are the Only Real Bodies (Bloof 2013), and You Da One (Coconut, forthcoming). JT serves as the Managing Editor at Futurepoem. She lives in Harlem. More on JT can be found at www.jennifertamayo.com.

Jared White's chapbooks include This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me (Bloof 2013), Yellowcake (Cannibal, 2009), and My Former Politics (H_NGM_N 2013). With Farrah Field, he is co-owner of a small press bookstore, Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, and parent of a baby, Roman Field White. jaredswhite.blogspot.com

RSVP at Facebook.

Preorder sale! NATURAL HISTORY RAPE MUSEUM by Danielle Pafunda

$13.00 + free shipping is a savings of $4.50. The book is officially out in December, but we'll have copies in a few weeks and begin shipping preorders by early November. Preorders help us fund the printing. THANK YOU.

NATURAL HISTORY RAPE MUSEUM by Danielle Pafunda from Bloof Books on Square Market

“It feels good,” says Danielle Pafunda, “to conduct the world’s violence on the page. It’s my response to violence without doing or incurring much violence. It’s how I navigate through it.”

The fifth poetry collection by Danielle Pafunda, Natural History Rape Musuem centers around an unnamed speaker and her intimate/adversary, the fuckwad, in pieces interrupted (or violated) by their boxed-in titles. Further interrupting this narrative are a prose sequence and a menagerie of objects/animals/elements borne as totems by the speaker—a lump of coal, a stingray, a cord of wood, a wolf spider, an earthworm, the fly. The volume culminates in four linked essays on the subject of pain: The Bid for Pain, The Manner in Which Pain Becomes Me, Pain Beak-Pecks a Figurine, and Extraterrestrial Painsake.

Exploring the more grotesque corners of the Gurlesque aesthetic, in Natural History Rape Museum Pafunda ventriloquizes through the unstable identities of her characters to create creepy tableaux that resemble—despite their vivid, violent excesses—the world we know. 

Danielle Pafunda is the author of Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books, 2013), Manhater (Dusie Press, 2012), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press, 2010), My Zorba (Bloof Books 2008), and Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in three editions of The Best American Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in Beauty Is a Verb: The Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Books, 2010), and Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting & Child Rearing (Fence Books, 2007). She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wyoming.

Revealed! Cover design for Natural History Rape Museum by Danielle Pafunda

Over the last few days at Facebook, we've also been sharing some of the concepts we nixed, but had fun playing around with. Here are a few of those: 

Based on a Riker Specimen Mount box

MoMA-style art placard

"The Institutional Look"

Peter Davis on tour with Kate Greenstreet & Adam Clay

   

We can guarantee every single one of these readings by this trio will be amazing.
Pete will be packing copies of TINA and Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN
Saturday 5 OCT 2013

4 pm
Peter Davis, Kate Greenstreet, and Adam Clay 
Kazoo Books
2413 Parkview Ave

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN
Sunday 6 OCT 2013

3 pm
Peter Davis, Kate Greenstreet, Adam Clay, and Derrick Austin
Nicola's Books
2513 Jackson Avenue
Westgate Shopping Center

NORTH MANCHESTER, INDIANA
Monday 7 OCT 2013

7 pm
Peter Davis, Kate Greenstreet, and Adam Clay
Manchester University
604 E College Ave. 

MUNCIE, INDIANA
Tuesday 8 OCT 2013

7:30 pm
Peter Davis, Kate Greenstreet, and Adam Clay
Ball University

COLUMBUS, OHIO
Thursday 10 OCT 2013

6-8 pm
Peter Davis, Kate Greenstreet, and Adam Clay
OSU Urban Arts Space 
50 W. Town Street

...AND MORE CITIES COMING SOON!

Announcing the Bloof Books 2014 Chapbook Series

Alberto Seveso, "Dropping" (via Colossal)

We are thrilled to announce that the following chapbooks will be published by Bloof, chosen from among the submissions to our 2013 Open Chapbook Reading Period in June. 

Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! by Daniel Borzutzky

Sympathetic Nervous System by Jackie Clark

Conversation with the Stone Wife by Natalie Eilbert

Odalisque by Ben Fama

The Failure Age by Amanda Montei

Little Uglies by Dawn Sueoka

These chapbooks will be joining the three longer books already on the schedule for 2014. We will be posting more about these forthcoming chapbooks each day this week, so stop back by for details and excerpts.

In addition, we would like to recognize the following outstanding manuscripts. We had a very difficult time narrowing our selections down to only six. No doubt we will be seeing these works from other presses soon.

Aaron Apps: The Percolation of the Blood
Julia Bloch: Chromophilia
Sarah Campbell: We Used to be Generals
Laura Carter: After dusted moon: intimations
Lisa Ciccarello: or incident
Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney: The One about the Unheimlich
Susana Gardner & Joshua Ware: from Rough Spring Sonnets
Cecily Iddings: Liked It
Ginger Ko: Prairie Lighthouse
Krystal Languell: Shadow State
Tony Mancus: Relevancy
Daniela Olszewska: Thirteenz
Michael Robins: Square Etiquette
Meg Ronan: The District
Gregory Sherl & Joshua Young: Some Love
J. Hope Stein: To the Musicians in My Ceiling Fan
Maureen Thorson: Weave/Print
Kevin Varrone: The Collected Letters
Melinda Wilson: Footage from the Feral Earth
David Wojchiechowski: Yours, Best, Sincerely

And we had several manuscripts withdrawn because they were accepted elsewhere! Congrats to those poets as well.

We appreciate every submission and understand each of them to be a statement of support and enthusiasm for what we do. THANK YOU.

See also: 2013 Chapbooks
See also: current chapbooks in our store

Nearing decisions! Open Chapbook Reading Period update.

We've narrowed the pile down to about 30. 

Which is way too many to publish, alas.

One more round of rereading should settle it. 

Thank you for your patience. 

Goodreads Giveaway of My Zorba

Goodreads Book Giveaway

My Zorba

by Danielle Pafunda

Giveaway ends August 15, 2013.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

We're back

The BLOOF store is now reopened after vacation. You may also order from our new store at Square Market, if you prefer.

Thanks for your orders while we were away. We're working on getting them out now. 

The new printing of Jennifer L. Knox's THE MYSTERY OF THE HIDDEN DRIVEWAY is now in stock and a new batch of A GRINGO LIKE ME should arrive later in the week. Everything else (except Jared White's sold-out chapbook) is in stock as well. 

& catching up with other news…

We're continuing to read the chapbook submissions from our Open Reading Period in June. So many delights! 

If you missed Jennifer's new poems at Lemon Hound, check them out now: 

POETRY READING: FRIED CHICKEN AND WAFFLES

The writers get zipped to the gigs
on golf carts like white blood cells
to a wound. But who among us asks
the hairlipped immigrant slopping up
spilt beer with a unwringable ragmop,
“Where does it hurt—you, of no nametag?”
Plastic butter packets and syrup over-
flow their waffle wall levies. Voices at the
mic are lower with holes in the middle.
Arms in the sex poems, lithe and cast swan-
neck shadows on the nowhere white bedroom
walls. Friends, picnics, white café lights. Tits
are swell and come in twos.

(Read all three here.)

Publishers Weekly also reviewed BRINK by Shanna Compton last week: 

"[T]his third volume is all sorts of breakthrough: in two restrained sequences and two sets of wild, outré, funny stand-alone lyrics, Compton does as much as anyone yet to represent the way her youngish people live now, the alterable, friable, quizzical, digital, comical voice of a plugged-in, sexed-out, and reluctantly but unmistakably political cohort."  (Read the rest.)

New orders on hold till August 5

We're closed next week.

Any orders received by today, July 25, have been shipped.

Orders received July 26–August 4 will be shipped beginning Monday, August 5. 

Thank you.

Bloof Books is now part of Square Market

For those of you who prefer Square Up to PayPal for secure online shopping,  we've set up shop in the new Square Market. These books still come directly from us. Thanks, as always, for your support. 

Review of PACKING by Hailey Higdon

"From publishing collective Bloof Books comes Hailey Higdon’s Packing, a small chapbook produced in a numbered edition of one hundred copies. […]

"Higdon’s poems almost have the quality of what Andrew Suknaski called “loping, coyote lines,” composing long, conversational lines that extend out against and over the horizon. Higdon composes sweeping poems that set entire scenes and scenarios, conversationally writing observations and monologues in an intriguing exploration of voice. […]

"There are entire worlds hidden and buried deep within the poems of Hailey Higdon." —Rob McLennan

Full text of the review.
And there are a few (very few!) copies left here.

This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me by Jared White: free electronic edition

You may also download a color PDF via ISSUU.com (under the share tab here).

Update: You may also download a b&w PDF from us here.

These PDF and ISSUU editions are free (and freely shareable).

Update: The Kindle edition is available for $.99 via Amazon, here.

Update: The EPUB version is available for $.99 via Smashwords here.

Submissions are now closed

Thanks! We can't wait to start reading these.

By rough count, we received approximately 150 entries. As determined by first names, the gender distribution is 55% female and 45% male.

We also had a couple of withdrawals for chapbooks that were accepted elsewhere. (Hearty congratulations to those poets!) Those were not included in the count, but would not have changed the percentages.

Catching up!

Thank you all so much for your enthusiastic support of all of our 2012-2103 books and chapbooks. We are thrilled by the response, have sold out of subscriptions for the year, and can't wait to bring out the rest of this year's books and chaps.

So many orders and overlapping releases have put us a little behind on the handmades, but we are catching up as quickly as we can and expect this to be the last week of the slight lag.

If you have placed an order for a subscription and not received a package containing Nonstop Pop and Poems Are the Only Real Bodies, it is going out in the next two or three days. UPDATE: All orders have gone out. There's also an exclusive handmade sampler in there, available only by subscription.

Regular orders are also going out, in the order they were received. If you placed an order for This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me before we marked it SOLD OUT, don't worry, it's coming. (That only affects two of our most recent subscribers.) UPDATE: All orders have gone out. 

Poems Are the Only Real Bodies is officially moving from preorder to available, woohoo! We can't wait to hear what you think of this work by Jennifer Tamayo.

Peter Davis's TINA is also now available everywhere!

As always, direct orders are most beneficial for us, but we also appreciate your support of our independent bookstore partners like Farley's, Powell's, Berl's Brooklyn Bookshop, Vouched in Indianapolis and Atlanta, etc. If you must order from an online retailer like Amazon, look for our own Bloof Books listings there, beneath the Amazon listing, where we discount the books a bit to offset the shipping. Every buck we make goes right back into the press, and our authors are paid for their work (when we have time to catch up on the paperwork, another thing on the desk right now). Anything over and above the cost of producing the books is spent on travel and expenses to readings, renting bookfair tables, etc.

That's the news for now.

Oh, and you have 2.5 more weeks to send your chapbook for the Open Reading Period (details in the post below). We'll start reading in July and will announce the 2014 chapbook series no later than September.

June is Bloof's 2013 Open Chapbook Reading Period!

Packing by Hailey Higdon

This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me by Jared White (SOLD OUT)

Nonstop Pop by Becca Klaver

Poems Are the Only Real Bodies by Jennifer Tamayo

Bloof will open the month of June for manuscript submissions of poetry chapbooks. All manuscripts must adhere to the requirements below, and be submitted electronically between June 1 and June 30, 2013.

This is not a contest. There are no fees, no judges, no bullshit. Manuscripts will not be read blind. This is an open reading period.

We will choose at least ONE but as many as SIX chapbooks to publish in 2014.

If your chapbook is chosen, you will hear from us via email. If not, you will be notified of the selections when we make the public announcement, in September 2013.

Books will be done in a limited handmade run of 100 copies, then released electronically thereafter. 

Four of the chapbooks chosen in our 2012 open reading period are shown above and have been released : Packing by Hailey Higdon, This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me by Jared White (sold out), Nonstop Pop by Becca Klaver, and Poems Are the Only Real Bodies by Jennifer Tamayo (preordering). Two more are forthcoming: Pattie McCarthy's scenes from the lives of my parents and Kirsten Kaschock's Windowboxing. Bloof chapbooks are also available as sets in our annual subscription packages (which have sold out for 2013, sorry).

Guidelines  

1. Read a couple of our books, or at least look up the poets and read some of their work available online.  While we are theoretically open to reading any style of poetry, we certainly have preferences and even biases. Familiarity with the books we have already published should help you decide whether your work is a good fit. That's different than saying we are only looking for work that looks just like what we have already done. (As if!)

 
2. Bloof is a collective press. What does that mean? Read this post about "The Way We Work."  Basically  it means if you publish with us, you become part of the collective and will be expected to actively participate in the press, including activities and events beyond the scope of your own book. Do not submit to Bloof if you don't think that sounds like a whole lot of fun. That post also explains how you will be paid, if you publish with Bloof. 

3. Manuscripts should be typed, in English, consist of up to 30 pages of poetry, and be formatted in a sane, easy-to-read manner. The work should be unpublished in chapbook or book form, as a whole, though individual poems may have appeared in magazines, etc. Please include a list of acknowledgments, if any.

4. Collaborations are acceptable, with the participation of all collaborators. We are not looking for translated work at this time.  

5. Include a cover sheet with name, manuscript title, mailing address, and email address. It is unnecessary to include this information anywhere else, like page headers or footers.  

6. Number the pages in the manuscript.  

7. Cover letters are OK (since we are not reading blind), but we'd actually prefer to see Chapbook Proposals. How do you imagine this chapbook will look? Do you have any design or artistic skills you'd like to incorporate? Would you enjoy helping with the assembly? Are you interested in particular binding styles or materials? The final design will be a collaboration between Bloof and the author—and obviously we are constrained by budget considerations—but for the proposal, if you have a vision, describe it to us. Maybe we can make it work. (UPDATE: To clarify, it is optional for you to bring your own design or illustrative skills into play here. If that's something you'd like to do, explain. If you have any other ideas about the book, beyond these few examples—like, you want to create a downloadable soundtrack or send each purchaser a custom tea mix or guerrilla-distribute your author copies in significant public places or whatever—explain those. In other words, you can submit just a manuscript...or a manuscript plus these sorts of ideas in a concept/proposal.) 

8. Manuscripts must be saved as a PDF and submitted electronically to the email address in the sidebar. Save the file with your last name and title (or partial title if it is long) as the document name, separated by an underscore. For example: Knox_Mystery.pdf 

9. Simultaneous submissions are your right. We ask only that you promptly let us know if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere. 

10. Bloof collective members are invited to read and discuss submissions, per their availability. 

11. Any submissions that do not follow these guidelines will be automatically deleted. It’s fine to ask a question (same email address) if something is unclear, but if we can tell you haven’t read the guidelines completely, we probably won’t answer. We’re very busy...and about to get a whole lot busier. 

 *(Since our list is still rather small, also consider the HEHF archive via the store page, to check out some of our older chapbook and broadside projects. You might also take into account some of the books Shanna edited for Soft Skull Press: Danielle Pafunda's Pretty Young Thing, Maggie Nelson's Jane, CAConrad's Deviant Propulsion, Daniel Nester's God Save My Queen, Wanda Phipps's Wake Up Calls, Ronald Palmer's Logicalogics, etc.)  

Bloof in Milwaukee & New York this weekend!

Saturday in NYC, Jennifer & Shanna will be reading as part of the St. Mark's Poetry Project reading during the HOWL Festival. Find us on the North Stage (Beatification Station) at Tompkins Square Park, Avenue B & E. 9th Street. Reading starts at 1:00 PM. Details here. Full festival schedule here.

Saturday & Sunday in Milwaukee, Peter & Danielle will be running the Bloof table at the Midwest Small Press Festival. Stop by to say hello and check out all our books, including our limited-edition handmade chapbooks. Details here. Full festival schedule here.

And Saturday night as part of the festival programming, Peter & Danielle will be reading with BJ Best, Karla Huston & Cathryn Cofell at the Cocoon Room in Milwaukee. Details here.

Dear Bloof Friends :
Thank you so much for the April poetry month fun!
It was really wonderful to participate in this writing & reading with all y'all.
yours,
Pattie

Props

Oh we were the featured blog yesterday at the official headquarters of NaPoWriMo. Thanks, Maureen!

5 of Wands

A lot of shuffling
but just one card
today

It’s a jam sesh
or a jubilee
or a war

They might be
bayonets or long
rain sticks

It’s gonna be a
struggle no way
out

LadySphinx
Volcano
Phoenix

riddle
eruption
rebirth

Nobody likes
to see their
own pain

played out on
the flat surface
of myth

Style Power

reading how you only become a body
when the tools of the law begin
to exert themselves over the flesh
that then becomes your body

Cat Power singing
at the same time
never give away
never give away your body

and build your style of being
out of thrifted jean jackets and
duct tape arrows pointing up
busk and bask in the underbelly

clothes might still foil
the strongarm of the law

Synoptic

I float high above
the used car dealership
a giant helium balloon
animal on a rope
batted and blown

I can see for blocks and blocks

But I can't see you

[I blew up a bed]

I blew up a bed
next to the TV
and slept

the afternoon away
not a bomb
an air mattress

I blew up a bed next to the TV
and listened for explosives
I was far from The Danger

I was an official telewitness
On TV no one had slept
no one was an American anymore

what rights did they have
the threat was out there
the threat was in here

the threat was
thumping inside
my chest

stay home vs. shelter in place
show of force vs. tender classmates
thermal camera vs. death wish

the ways these things go
the bloody botch
the half life of the tweet

he was the bomb
vs.
the bomber

I won't divide up the world
into those who want to find the links
and those who want to sever them

because you see how I'd be guilty
but you get my point
we have words

and touch
and what look like
different bodies

no one is knowable
but we've got skin
that scrapes and bleeds

we have no
armor
most of us

it's a miracle
we stay separate
and unscathed

we made all these
things
with sharp edges

shake a hand
say thank you
say happy birthday

it's a miracle these
Saturdays of honey-
light parties

and no one bloody
on the floor

precarious

not like walking
on a tightrope
but like walking

to the mailbox

I was far
from
The Danger

I rarely feel safe
or I almost always
am