Pick a scab, strike a match, write your shit, see what sticks. Joe and I are stomach-bugged of hearing Blue Lives Matter in the fugging Buffalo News. Toilet flush. Night shift. We’re poets in an Erie County holding pattern crushing books and suffering from cereal consumption. We’re looking for the word “common” buried somewhere in the word “economy.” We’re secretly locating “weak points in capitalism’s metabolism,” but then pumping more contaminated content back into “the burning manifold.” We’re coworkers dumping our excess text on pharmaceutical execs and selling the runoff as running commentary. The group chat is in ruins. They’re headquartered in an excavated Taco Bell, rolling around in eggshells, coffee grounds, and packing peanuts. Because that’s “the job”: being force-fed to oblivion by polymer deities, purging listicles in purgatory, and when Joe’s prose gets pristine, rise like an army of the dead. Fugue and Strike by Joe Hall (Black Ocean, 2023).
