ISSUE 01: STATE(D) VIOLENCE
ABOUT
GEOFFREY OLSEN
Geoffrey Olsen is the author of Nerves Between Song (Beautiful Days Press) and six chapbooks, including Neck Field (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2025) and In Sleep the Searing (forthcoming New Mundo Press 2025). He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
not everyday / psuedo anti-touch
surgically inserted, bleat this breath
flat, unmarbled light, ligament tissue
flat white paint, packed surface, poetics of solar
accumulation, hiding in shade, blazing vantage out-narration
screen pauses in the era, helicopters at dawn tracing
Americana, utopian scientism, long accents on
squalor duration, durative inscription bests value:
labor systems improvise words just
ahead of knowing, submerged in the tank,
narrative pretense, ducking behind the concrete wall—
taught by antitank rocket, hand deployed under
red triangle, peaks stellar fumes, clown floats in
satellite, different for earthbound turtles
diaphanous, shielded against bodied opening, swims
an ether lent into blissful pause, tempted
to watch dust whirl in drought-wracked field, wrens
offer mode’s poetic: start from touch’s undoing—
too sharp at higher register, known to move in
that action out of the still reach, stasis bleeding
emergence then cellular paced as shattered wood,
yellow tape in the bare branch: meter of corrode
piece that parses the decay, lengths of swim tendon
surging this leaf rot smell spaces Americana vector victim,
pleasure which renders attention in depth and void,
solar and surface pitted, rift: it scrapes attentive
it lives along length, felting fabric cover
not what is said to thee, flattens, begins anew
total habit recharge zone in cop language
stops short of sense in shearing, culled vocables
enjoin algal law, enraptured in foamy fungal future
and the profit tendered from moldy and collapsing wall,
cellular collapse, spit in the breath, civic smell-mind
narrow arbitrage went through the purple bruise
a spinal clarity disallows pause for attention, for
tension’s disavowal, sanctity, lift on stilt, insurance-less
a worker’s mass accident drawn in spring against
the acrid gleam cellular laptop consuming fiery ailment:
purports noise, but it’s a material confluence not conspiracy
limits of sentence, sketched breaking, following other arts—
cleaving to circuit—this speech clambers, fills the archway
highway chrysalis amber memo meant between
lucid line, broken father, and failure to ask the reader to render
flaunting coherent forest, an overcharged vintage