Glaring

Glaring hurtles its reader deep into formal consideration’s command center, framing every punctum with queries of relation and autonomy. This text is a world where a title may hold as much as its referent, where the next work might begin inside its predecessor, where theater is stripped down to its circuitry and the charge within the performance of all language is laid bare. Benjamin Krusling’s nuanced graphical grammar is ecstatic in its quiet powers, and its scaffold of structural freedom finds tender affinity with the work’s overarching action—experimental reportage on explorations of an expansive interior landscape cracked open with softness. Throughout—heralding interiority and form—are a flickering bouquet parade of the unpaired insisting on their wholeness as is, insisting on their celebration as self. The work is ripe with fracturing’s urgency to show the ways of new wholeness, and blackness shines everywhere like slivers of light. 


—Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves

I CRIED THEN I WAS UNABLE TO GO FORWARD

if I’m walking in an urban situation I’m usually walking with someone

we on our own huh even if I make it early

 

if I’m in line any line                  then , a disentangled grid

equals a local battle

 

at the supreme north face drop for example        

inside a shirt or sneaker, time circulates

 

you know they locked in the first 25 people in the first gate ?

and everybody else in the second gate

and beyond got a number…

 

you know security is out here trying new procedures every week

 

in an urban situation , I’m usually walking with someone and shake

I need a bite of chicken and we make a careful decision

about a hat or costly tonal shift

 

we don’t usually get that right

we’re not healthy so the situation dips to slow possession

 

can you tell us about the numbering system how it’s working

that’s not wrought that’s good

that can be hard to think through ?

 

I’m usually walking or waiting with someone       

increasingly conscious of the barrier

 

an example of no flowers or shrapnel                 

we’re insulting the line from beside it

 

it’s just people that wait in line from time then from there

they give me my stuff then they eat

soon we all eat ? just thinking that doesn’t make sense

 

I was going forward after all I was planning

to buy an expensive shirt not co-sign the situation of the street      

 

I did that and I didn’t                 then I was walking suddenly

 

with someone very different

to heaven , on a mule

Spurious !  

( Helene Johnson  

           my dream of heaven was an ice cream factory , but it

echoed blackface heaven from a few minutes earlier . & all wishes ,  

          brained on the marvel of televised limbo where production

assistants line up lights and vanish , drag social pain into procedures  

           that taste great on camera . ( people ! in that sense ,

reviewing memory produces artifacts , long static renditions   

           of blackface ( ? heaven ?  so they try to shred the Bush

years with vocal runs . it’s a room with floor to ceiling mirrors &

people spread their arms there  

            to sing to place the face at the center to tell the world

childhood is sweet though it tastes like power over ,  

            though it tastes like pistachio . these are eyes I make the

world so careful with . long static . long talk . well , you say you

want a strong feeling .  

            have one  . or someone will think you’re withholding .  ( in

your tight t-shirt . tight tight tight . in your canada goose and gloves .  

            it’s like fed logic . depression-fighting escapism . childhood

is so sweet , they say , as they go house to house killing on a thick

recursive loop .  

& their faces drip , they’re wet with effort .

listen up

excess is advancing , this inhibition could go again , my obligations shake

off the leg like a tumble of lint . I’m a stable

cultural accident , brain blockchained to the

police

station as I walk to the co-op and back , a unit

of shook economy , a culture , tended ,

for the driftless Midwestern thought

tank . break . black moonlight break

black window .

we owe each other a yes . we will win , for we have no other option .

we want the energy of high design to lift

debris from our hearts , to call our fathers on the

phone , make them stop

this barbarous oiling . but there’s only us

here , not consolation . etc .  I’m iridescent

in the university office , handing intellectual property to the

moderate secretary , salaried ,

so supportive , then a word from my heart

sweeps oxygen into me ,

then a worm in my heart , then ,

trust , attention ?

in the club one night the song I heard was only broken glass

then I knew it , I was sick , I said I’m sick , I’m up , I am

millenarian amoxicillic blues

                        very missing caramel : very ugly sundae , hostile

can I help you from a man in a suit at a building downtown . but , 

we’re under a similar heel .

                        I’m a vandal , the grid is on ice with my common

plantings . no machine can make me whole .

            in the DC summer , I was devastated , that fire  

brought lines to my face ( BD . and workers  

                        in these liberal fits and patterns  

on the same page of quote pragmatism . I’m a black American taxpayer

                        but when I woke from my dream

of jogger shopping , I was still in this world of enclosure , with

                        the coast in me , the climax . then I think : the police

are strong with this one . it’s drama . everything’s getting cloned .

                        and in the New York summer , I was devastated .

                        and in the Cincinnati summer

I was devastated . and in the Iowa summer

 

            -— but not to fix it ? the zoo paid my grandma a lot  

to leave her home . that old blue house  

            was barely even blue as it fell off the side of the road .  

                        when you think of peace , you’re sick , my friend .

                        your face is lit

with the revolution’s problems .

                        as for me ,  who loves to not suffer , I’m bathed in

                        the brilliant lights

of attention where racist painters craft a stupid response:

                        the circus is returning , with bells and bombs on ,

calling on us all to carry that cold to the subway and home .