Thomas Cook

Skinny Dudes

The taffy comes hard when you are too handsome for words. Luckily, I also can’t face the fact of my insincere stance toward mental health with anything more exacting than “bisexual playboy” at the fore of my thinking. It keeps the free library free. A big for instance being Austin, or Colonus, wherever buying a good pillar is still a fair way to settle a dispute over land with the hassle of obfuscating talk. I once ate shrimp in the loneliest strip mall, the vans arriving only every three weeks with new products, and this was not a popular dish. There was always the hotel microwave, which universities buy secondhand.

Hallucinating Cheeks

The data, unchecked, can make the day merely tabular in the workbox of the mind. There is also trappedness, a hearthrug of what’s wound around the coated greetings of the best and most lasting people in the building. Best has less to do with extraction than survival, of course, these days, and I was after all able to find one of those little paper cups with pop-out mug handles into which I can mete out the contents of my thermos. Do I pivot, or remain facing the questions I pose to myself, diffusely but persistently, questions embedded in the lines of every notebook page I see? Rain calms overnight and leads to the bright day. Machinery is small, humming in corners of the earth.

Decent Orange

The international success of Daft Punk’s song “Around the World” will warrant more attention in the future, wherever that may be, just saying, considering all dimensions and dimensionality of the entire thing, that thing being the subject of the song or the existence of electronic music in general, depending on how you peanut butter wolfed the backstage passes to harp molasses turn out to be. I was there. I was there, and I could do the damage, or I could reproduce amalgamations, but who has that interest? I could eat beef, or I could escape on cool cheese. How am I meant to dance in the hall of the finest high school (be waxed) before the axe came down? Origin stories are difficult, especially in the case of cortexes, though I exhale, imagining what I could have done with momentum ten minutes past the buzzer; if you don’t believe me, continue to lie to yourself, a poem for the millennium in which you were found.

Thomas Cook lives in Los Angeles, CA and Galesburg, IL. He is an editor and publisher of Tammy and Tammy Chapbooks. A special feature of his recent poetry is forthcoming in Quarterly West.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.