my mother’s syncopic incapacity / to convey the fullness of a threat

We have never completely understood poetry. As a contemporary art publication, there’s no shortage of affection, admiration, or affinity for poetry, and e-flux journal has certainly published a few memorable poems over the years. But it always felt like a stroke of luck or a gift from the ether when someone brilliant would send us a poem. You won’t be surprised that this didn’t happen often. But now is the time to change that, and we’re honored to welcome Simone White as e-flux journal’s first ever poetry editor. Simone is the author of the collections or, on being the other woman (forthcoming from Duke University Press), Dear Angel of Death, Of Being Dispersed, and House Envy of All the World, and lives in Brooklyn. We’re so glad that she’s joined us.

The orb begins to break apart, or peel away. I begin to apprehend the thing that I am inside; I see us fall away from each other and the ligature of individuated desire becomes perceptible. The violence of the bind makes possible the path toward breaking. It is the beautiful impossibility of not feeling pleasure in company that degrades and insults us, the degradation’s own fundamental energy, which is matter, thus neither this nor that, which propels it away.