Two poems from THE MURMURING GRIEF OF THE AMERICAS by Daniel Borzutzky
Which Hedge Fund Owns the Sea?
We Are in the Future Now!
I dreamt I was baking an apple pie and in the dream I woke up and you said: Your dreams are so good I can smell them.
They shot some _____ last night. No one knows how many _____ died. We are saddened by this senseless loss of _____.
When I speak to you sincerely, it may seem like I’m talking about mercy. But everyone knows that in Chicago “dying” is not the same as “dying.”
What does capitalism have to sell you that you haven’t already sold to yourself? (sic!)
I was thinking about the old cliché: the one where the starving man peels off his skin and eats himself then gets indigestion because he ate so fast and didn’t drink enough water.
Whiny journalists always asking questions like: How many people died here yesterday? How many corpses did they burn?
Revolution or brunch? Not as simple as it sounds
They say it’s okay to enjoy things when the world is exploding. I’m not so sure I believe them.
The police state-austerity-surveillance-machines stopped spying on themselves when they realized the only step left was to report their own bodies to the censors.
And the bureaucrats sing: We are in the future now! We are in the future now!
I don’t really care for any of the years, decades, or centuries. I don’t like states, countries, or nations. And I’m not a fan of time, religion, justice, culture, literary movements, schools of painting or philosophy, “the commons,” “the archives,” semantics, rhetoric, politics, the ego, the id, the public self, the private self, oratory, syntax, or grammar, among other things.
The history of this road is Massacre A then Massacre B expansion peace treaty truth reconciliation resurrection Massacre C then Massacre D rhetorical guilt legal challenges truth reconciliation hypocrisy Massacre E then Massacre F. Period.
You can have an inspiring “studio session” in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom in Amherst for $300 for one hour, or $500 for two hours. Or two people can rent it out for $400 for one hour, or $600 for two hours. Food and drink must be left outside the room. The door will remain open. Staff will be present at all times.
At Sophie’s Choice: Custom Gifts and More in Niagara Falls, you can buy a maternity shirt that says “Expecting our first lil’ Pumpkin.” At Sophie’s Choice Shop, an online retailer servicing Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, you can buy makeup and fake eyelashes. At Boutique Le Choix de Sophie in Alma, Quebec, you can buy “everything for your wardrobe from head to toe.” At Sophie’s Choice Clothing, an online second-hand shop from the uk, you can buy tunics, strappy dresses, and fashionable outfits for the office.
When he said I was “asleep at the wheel” what I thought he meant was that I was “sleeping on the side of the road” which I thought of as “dying on the side of the road” or even just “sleeping on the side of death.”
Best Practices #1013
She pulls out her passport and the agent says your country no longer exists
We tread lightly over the broken bones so we won’t cause them to explode or decay
He wants to know the name of this atrocity so he can classify it among the previous ones
We dig deeper into our faces to find the acceptable calculations that might alter the course of history (is it too soon to embellish the dead?)
Time passes Nothing changes The hours become worse and worse
There is a militarized frontier in your face and you cover it with the sixty-four digit code that all the miners are searching for
We can’t advance until we know the name of this period of infinite gestation
They need to build a system whose death leads to the most efficient form of regeneration
We rebuild the means of production and when we run out of resources we call the toll-free hotline and ask for a resumption of the oppressive policies that have destroyed us for so many centuries
I’m so tired I could sleep on a barbed wire fence is not a sentence you want to say in certain contexts
I’m sorry you think my body reminds you of a South American vortex whose name you can’t pronounce
If the city would explode a bit more politely then we might be able to attract the sorts of entrepreneurs who can finance the futurity of our misery
I mean what is the first thing you think of when you encounter the spiritual transgression of your body in a tunnel between the absence of time and the hypercirculation of capital?
There’s a name for this experience but I’m not allowed to mention it
The child barking in the tree signals to his neighbors that the tourists are coming with their guns again
The game ends when they recolonize the natives and force them to speak to the wrong god in the wrong language
The new hemisphere appears on the horizon no one is there to authenticate it
What nation-state controls the sun and the moon? Which hedge fund owns this sea?
We are in the future now but time keeps glitching and the earth keeps quaking backward
You’ve said this before this kidney does not have an owner
When the war ends they will refine and perfect all that they learned by accident
The most effective ways of reducing the population will become best practices taught at schools throughout the nation
The system requires the authentication of the sacred body that will never appear
The disappeared body is sanctified and soon the tourists will pay to see a non-fungible replication of it
The rehumanization of the population repeats itself first as parody then as encryption
Did you hear the one about the metaphor that was a metaphor for a metaphor that exists outside thought and language?
He wanted to kill some time but instead he killed some villagers
Tough break
In the future with proper guidance he’ll surely make better decisions
The Greeks and Romans had a name for this
The foot that despises its slipper
Take a break from the news
We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven't read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
The author of "Off the Books" discusses how being a parent has made her a better writer and the connections between structural racism in China and the United States
Myriam J. A. Chancy, author of "What Storm, What Thunder," on why we need to dispense with reductive narratives of Haitian "resilience" and "impoverishment"
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.