with reverence

or from the old Norse, kept in check

frightened, restrained, disciplined, fit: ave

Is she a faceless woman using a bidet and chamber pot

I hire a man to build me a house.  His name is King.  “G is silent,” he says.  “King,” he says.  “Kin?” I ask. “King,” he says.  “I can still hear the G,” I say.  “No you can’t,” he says.  “Kin?” I ask.  “King,” he answers.  “G is silent,” he says.

Watercolor infuses a layer // of transparence into paper // moving it one step further 

In the United States, the so-called democracy that still controls the West, black slavery had become so huge a phenomenon (there were more than 3,000,000 slaves in 1860) that it took a bloody civil war and more than 800,000 dead, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to achieve its legal abolition. And this abolition allowed such strong discrimination in every domain and such deeply-ingrained underlying racism to persist that, today, the “black question” remains a sort of unhealable wound in American society, even though the President is “black.” This is how “black,” precisely during the economic and military triumph of the “Whites,” became a despised epithet, an ineradicable stigma, for humanity. 

Roland Barthes, “The ‘Scandal’ of Marxism” and Other Writings on Politics (Seagull Books, 2015), translated by Chris Turner. 

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A  sequence by Dada poet Hagiwara Kyojiro,
from Death Sentence (1925), translated by Sho Sugita

In one of the few short prose poems (not quite two pages) in this book, Borzutzky writes, “I deserve to be dumped into the sack with the other sick bodies.” This self-flagellation is, of course, another performance of the poet becoming human—the valorization of guilt—but it captures the dilemma of the stakes Daniel Borzutzsky has raised for himself over the past several years and books.