IT GETS HARDER TO FUNCTION IN THE WORLD
life is so much more bearable when you’ve got new music
but I’m starting to not even like music
I don’t have an accent
*you* have an accent
I have become partial to all kinds of distortions
which is how it begins pretty soon
I’ll need an outlandish array of sexual props to [anything]
once I had a fear of waterslides
and my wife was raised by white supremacists
as difficult as that might be to believe
I like when this desperation comes to the fore
particularly in my friends
but this isn’t where I envisaged things ending up
just as I never envisaged hiring out bouncy castles for a living
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SAM RIVIERE co-edits the anthology series Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives, and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2009. Faber published his debut pamphlet in 2010. His first book is ’81 Austerities’ (Faber & Faber, 2012).
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Learn more about Sam Riviere:
Author Website
81 Austerities
S/S/Y/K
He sang /
like a gas station on a black summer night.
you stand a long time /
by the creek, then /
feed it two pennies, /
one for you, one /
for the love /
inside you that /
you can do nothing /
with or about.
A talisman against the agony /
in his knees and hips //
for which he was taking /
black-market fentanyl
I greet your gliding flight O wings of death / But there are other signs too
realizing that the horizon is a line constituting an intersection between at least two systems, the inner and the outer one. Between an observer on the move and the roads within the landscape ...
the story / the two white women will not retract, despite the fact /
that inside each story we tell another writes itself
the intoxicating ministry of dusk, the anchor of daylight lifting, sheets white / like a freshly crushed pill, // the vortex of the body and the clap of the / coral tongue...
Before we go any further, I want to publicly acknowledge //
that I love every person in this room. I mean it. /
We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love /
each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except /
Harold
I tithe 10% of my new underwear to my future /
self, the one who has fallen in love.
Along one river fell /
all the luck in the world.
