SUPPORTED BY UNITED AGENTS The White Review Short Story Prize is an annual short story competition for emerging writers. Established with support from a Jerwood Charitable Foundation Small...
you’ll be the war and I’ll be the war-torn and I’ll be underground resistance printing pamphlets on sugar paper...
(This work is an extract from a longer poem of the same name)
This is a site for production This is a site for presentation
What is to be produced? What is to be presented?
This is a site for the production and presentation of a particular kind of subject
A subject marked by its pursuit of liberty, by individualism and collectivity, competition and cooperation By the sophistication of its speech
This is what we do with our comfort
This is what we do with our plenty
You are watching me, and I begin to watch Rather than using the gift, I reflect upon it Cobwebs2 Among the cobwebs, there, gathering in the corner of the doorway, a form persists, a tool, a silence, towards cleaving, carving, separating us from one another politically, aesthetically, socially, so that we may create a demand for these things we make, that appear here, that we do not yet have a name for
Minds are bending to the shape of this walking stick
This is a violence that can be overcome
What stick or stone is at hand to jam this twentyfourhour self-improvement, self-understanding, self-actualisation and total education? 3
Imagined public space
imagined public law
and in the air
experience and habit float…
experience, he says, is the way through danger4
I wait for Him to come
And I am nothing outside of this
While waiting, I swim,
stalk the interior
One way to move through the world among many
I surround you in my way of moving, my becoming –
monotone address, edge and end
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes
2
Two words –
equality and equivalence
these are frequencies in the expression
of chronic fragmentation and chronic totality
I didn’t want to individuate
and now I am nothing
but a self-interrupting whole,5
a memory full of holes
haunted by the unpolitical
Someone said that this is where our obsession with voice capital V comes from And that listening instead, is grounded in our experience of the sacred It is our
after Mahmoud Darwish Why is a boy an exclamation, and why are his dead a period?, why do...
shed coral scales
& sunrise In England, the inside
is ashen She touches tangerine flowers,
when a woman
exiting her home in Camberwell cries,
go back to where you come from, as if
she carries still the scent
of dragon-fruit I swallow
cherry stones I flower
your abandoned garden
in my belly, to carry in me the whispers
of all your lost colours I dream
in shades of lilac Sometimes
my tummy hurts
