Poetry
The Pleasure and Satisfaction of Living
after Denise Riley
Since there is still profit to be made from none,
Then I who will tread lightly
On my own head without realizing
And you who will empty out money from
Form without caring or realizing and
I who go about my day
Beating down like a sun or a factory,
Without knowing or caring or realizing.
And so we do, and we go about
Those shadowy things and their things
A battery a fulcrum a stack of sheet metal
We go between the light and the night
A Personal Assistant a MALM bed frame
We have no plot, we are completely
Ungrounded, nothing but dependent
And changeable forms of praxis
There are still wild berries bitter but edible
And root vegetables generally disliked
Turned on their heads without realizing
There are still people who do not want to
Know what they want, there are still
People who like me know how
To earn enough money to reproduce
Themselves but don’t want to reproduce
Themselves that way or this way
There are still clients and patients and colleagues all
Waiting for their moment in the sun
Beating down like a sun
Made of chocolate and dreams and automation
I feel desperate to show you a category
But there are still people who have none
I feel full of impersonal compulsions
But it must differ it must be unique
Advance on the hill of implacable concepts
A loyalty day a demand for free speech
There are those of moralizing aspect
Keen to point out our consistent defeat but
The meagre turnip the meek rutabaga
Can’t be the only impossible vision
Go about your day as you really are
In the growing gulf of dying stars
There are still people who like a long arc
Or a long march or a long day on your feet
Appear to turn unfettered yet there they are
And there in action still is the moon
Imitating its own waxing and waning
making it difficult not to commit arson
I resealed the box that made you better
There are still people locked out of it, thus
I reinvented the loaf of bread
There are still tactics like this roaming free
Contributor
Amy De'AthAmy De’Ath’s most recent poetry publication is On My Love for Gender Abolition (New York: Capricious, 2016). She has written a number of essays on contemporary poetry, gender, and value-form theory and with Fred Wah, is the editor of a poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air.(Banff Centre Press, 2015).She is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King’s College London, and is currently working on her first critical book, Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary Feminized Poetics.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Surrealist Collaboration: Poetry, Art, Literature, Ingenuity and Life Itself
By Mary Ann CawsFEB 2022 | ArtSeen
A stupendous exhibit. I wont put an exclamation point there, for that punctuation would be repeated, excessively. Here is a fine example of what a gallery can do in an exhibition if the focus is on a specific kind of thing, in this case on an historic collective and collaborative art-making activity, repeated differently as an off and on ritual event.

The Strength, Suppleness, and Beauty of a Body
By Adolf AlzupharMARCH 2022 | Music
The agadirthe collective granaryof music is made of songs and compositions for embodiment. Arooj Aftab, Julia Adolphe, and Layla McCalla are three musicians who contribute such music to the agadir, aiming to revive human life.
A Study of the Body
By Candice ThompsonJUNE 2022 | Dance
Five rectangular screens hang down like stair steps hovering over the stage of Jerron Hermans VITRUVIAN. Extending in a diagonal line, each screen displays the same drawing by contemporary artist Chella Man. A big nod to Leonardo DaVincis Vitruvian Man (c. 1490), the image depicts two superimposed sketches of Hermans body. In an obvious departure from the classical image, the body is drafted as a quick sketch with legs of differing lengths that push past the circular frame, and shorter arms that fail to reach it.
Judith Braun: My Pleasure
By Robert R. ShaneMARCH 2022 | ArtSeen
Reticulating patterns of black acrylic on unstretched, bare canvas become stages for scenes of angst, pathos, and tenderness in Judith Brauns exhibition My Pleasure.