Gorilla Fingers in Flickering Sodium Vapor (ROUND 1)
Scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Let’s workshop this poem about catastrophic misidentification, delayed comprehension, and the almost unbearable recoil from grief into reprieve.
Gorilla Fingers in Flickering Sodium Vapor
Brown schwag, brick bud flat as a flower in a bible, passed through a doorknob hole—
hands alive within the boarded rowhouses of Chambers Street (90s-era Newburgh),
each stoop gone to rubble, still felt unreal to us as we drove home across the Hudson.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
