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We were at the beach, I had been begging to go, to come along, and it was after a long lunch—your grandma wanted to talk to me about the Liberation—that we went for a walk along the coast.
Short fiction from Jacqueline Feldman.
We speak about the nightmarish imagery: lilacs out of the dead land, a heap of broken images, fear in a handful of dust. About World War One, the Industrial Revolution, modernism. Before long it is time to end the class, a lump in my throat, to thank everyone who’s joined in for their cooperation in using the new technology, for all our discussions in class up until now. It’s only when I’ve logged off that I wonder about a context for the poem that we didn’t discuss: the Spanish flu. The virus and the poem, three years apart. I’d never thought of the connection. Idly, I scroll through JSTOR, find a chapter on The Waste Land in a book by Elizabeth Outka called Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. The miasmic residue of the pandemic experience, it argues, infuses every part of the poem, in ways we have been missing all along. Outka’s autopsy revealing the virus spread through the bronchioles of the poem. Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit. A poem burning with fever. Burning burning burning burning burning / O Lord thou pluckest me out. This fresh new pandemic sending us back towards a residue analysis. The cruellest month looming.
Tara McEvoy on The Road, The Waste Land and the pandemic.
Would we spend less of our lives online if the clock on our computers was in the middle of our screens, rather than being hidden down there in the corner like a guilty secret? Or would we just Tweet more about the passing of time?
The narrator of Patricia Lockwood’s new novel remembers lost time in a way functionally similar to a foregrounded clock: her niece is born with Proteus syndrome, a genetic disorder that will radically shorten her lifespan. But instead of a linear narrative in which a millennial realises that life is short and logs off to go and smell some roses, we’re given something more honest.
Sam Burt reviews Patricia Lockwood‘s No One is Talking About This.
I burned everything, even
The art, so called. Don’t panic.
You should have seen the oil
Stain the sky and then rain down
In greasy drops.
A new poem by Nicholas Rombes.
Anyone reading The Radetsky March must also confront the issue of repetition. Like the military manoeuvres that it so tirelessly describes, the novel goes round and round the same situations again and again. This would never happen in a contemporary novel. As the novel progresses, the great Austrian Empire starts to collapse. These military men are losing the whole purpose of their existence, but they carry on just the same.
By Alice Jolly.
Put your Rizla papers, dope stash, tobacco and lighter in the large kimono square pocket. Sling your camera bag over your right shoulder, the raft over both shoulders. Pick up the holdall. Push your feet into a pair of hotel slippers, which sit in front of the bedroom door. Swig back the last dregs of coffee. Put on the mirror shades tucked into the blue chain covering the front door. Struggle to exit as the chain gets wrapped around your neck.
Short fiction from Andrea Mason.
In the mornings, I leave the red house to find my blue car covered in a hard sheet of glossy ice not yet ready to melt. I close my eyes and turn my face away and throw my weight behind the sharp end of the ice scraper as my red-hued lover sleeps upstairs. Something like photosynthesis, like breath or music or grace. Sure, there’s life all over. Life’s all over. Life’s over.
An essay by Emmalea Russo.
He lowers his bottom jaw until he feels tension in his eardrums. He’s a Burmese python, a rewilded descendant of an exotic pet discarded in the swamplands. Opens wide and inserts the first of his Jersey corn-cobs longways in. Clamps his teeth down when the gag reflex says present, pulls the cob back and scrapes the kernels offworld into his mouth. Golden popping rows.
A short story by Tom Laplaige.
Holy fuck! Are you still fucking here? Why haven’t you fucked off already? And fucking hell, aren’t you fucking ashamed of the way your fucking “Firm” treated that poor girl Meghan? Fuck off with asking what skin colour her child would be. What the fuck is that? What the fuck is wrong with you all? Actually, no fucking need to answer that. We fucking know. We even saw you shielding Prince fucking Andrew for fucking noncing. So we know exactly how fucking low you can go and it’s the fucking bottom of everything you abusive bunch of absolute fucks.
Sam Jordison celebrates the British Royal Family.
The poems are taken from a series, Adverts for Actual Hats, in which William Repass and Dan Ivec observed a number of Ivec’s illustrations – all featuring a hat of some sort – and dreamed together prose poems which act as deranged commercials for the hats seen in the drawings. If the reader is understandably covetous of such headgear, they may direct queries via Instagram: @escalator_harrison
In the 19th of the Duos series, new poetry by Dan Ivec and William Repass.