These three poems by Jacob Grossfeld exist somewhere between the destructive editing of a turpentine burn and an improvisatory cut-up technique. Playing with sound, permutation, antiphony, and illegibility, these poems address the COVID-19 pandemic (and its associated social ramifications) through an aleatory recurrence of language and rhythm…
by: Jacob Grossfeld
Flint Fugue
I breathe to ache, ache to breathe
Breathe in the ac/he the bulbous nerve
Sp(l)its the trans/fugal hinge and we burn
Our aching lips to breathe, cov/er your burning
Lips we can no/longer breathe this burning
Air it beads in/anti-euphony it trickles
Trans/fusions of cirrhoses it sands our teeth
to splint/ers and sc/raps of driftwood tissue
This air negatives like a lenitional cancer it fro(s)t(h)s
like burning caulk an arrhythmic aching beads
Like ritual b/rine we trickle into the helios/cope
Our lips our lungs stripped/burn with abscesses breathe with abscesses
the centripetal spill/age the hairline fricative
Of the burning air, the laryngitic ache of breath in
The blue black notime the squilgeed indigo o/f
A suspend/ed second a sec/ond second in
Which we breathe this burning air
The Telephone Book
Smash the glass the air pocket sieve
Distends in the humid schizophrenia
We wet our craquelure hands we hold
Telephone books and typecut a poly-
Tone in the plywood
We murmur in the modular block with
Wet hands the water scabs in our ears
Like a trochaic stutter a sealant salivating
Off the plywood onto the pulpy over-
growth we spit sonatas under the tongue
Of the mossy aerosols that choke us a
sharp, white rope
The rotary blear of jointed motion of
Incumbent motion against the adipose
Cumulate Jesus with wet hands raised in
Why worship with finger trap interbleeding
We crawl past Jesus past the gelatinous
Hooves made from telephone books he
Would if he could but he doesn’t
A domino serigraphy of open palms closed
Fists an iterative infinite flipbook motion of
Colliding Color we bowed the gravitational
curve
We clapped the cyclical spring(ing) until
The epidermal debris circumscribes itself
Traveling Debris
Decline into a current of anonymous structures
The fungible with/out function, the water tank built
Around water the surface crackling black
Commanding only an iterative difference, a juxtaposed
Minutia of punchy imperfections
The slushy moisture of heat, the frothy turbulence of acidity, the
Way the black rain runs around the concave wall losing
Volume
A cicatrix of complete anesthesia, gash of deterioration
Spits toothless along the wall of sculpture
The sulfuric erosion of hacked rock, bleached steel
Splits stencilcuts into woodgrain floodlights
We all compose the tableaux of stasis, the appositional
Circuit the anonymity of crackling black
The swallowing grout of silhouetted words tripping
The abdominal flutter of the foreskin tongue
How you see Me, How I see
You
Jacob Grossfeld is a poet living in Brooklyn, New York. A recent MA graduate in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, Jacob currently works in music publishing and management for classical composer Philip Glass.
