Construction
Can content be your dinner
dropped down from above?
Go on, break in
This house is ours now.
There’s an artificial distinction
between
catching the ball as it rolls & rolls toward you
and getting rolled right over
Flattened
Try and catch it all
Catch the threads of production
Try and weave
Try and collapse the roof on this thing
The concept of an individual
loaning herself to structure,
a feint that keeps on concretizing
Let’s crumble it up
Grab a bit from the wall
a friable fistful and make yourself a new home
In the exclusion of other possibilities
this will always equal that,
Go on, annihilate the same social history
that would do this to us.
The Word Fire
Start with
a common word-exchange economy
two languages:
one essential, the other immediate,
and map it out from there
Say firs and have an absence of fire
Say language destroys the reality of things with
pure
abstract power
Turn off the hose.
Then replace the real absence with some ideal presence for a change
It’s a step anyway
The words keep disappearing but we can make a
a physique to fill with fixes
Raze the world to make it mean
unspeak the world to make it seen
Detach us from being
so we can go ahead and speak ourselves
The blanks will represent undoing’s undoing.
Rebecca Kosick is a poet, translator, and associate professor of comparative poetry and poetics at the University of Bristol. She is the author of the poetry collection Labor Day (Golias Books 2020) and editor-translator of Hélio Oiticica's Secret Poetics (Soberscove Press and Winter Editions 2023). Her next book, Detroit's Alternative Press: Dispatches from the Avant-Garage is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.