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
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
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.
The man keeps telling me I’m beautiful. /
I still look young. //
He says it like I’ve asked for it, /
but I don’t care. //
For him or beauty.
How did you travel up my country, /
land at my neck, /
complicate the frontier between /
chin and throat? Oh, folly—
One had a ketchup bottle, the other a bottle of mustard, and they were holding them, crotch-level, squirting long streaks of ketchup and mustard on the floor, while we clapped in unison.
