Poetry
Levis Straus
When Tel Quel’s darling entertained
Jackbooted sons & daughters of
The Emperor of Opera Hats,
Louis Napoleon,
At the Socialist salon
In ’68,
His razor wit guillotined
The thinking from the feeling part.
Constructing a frequency chart I found
The words most often employed:
Langue, bouche, l’invisible
Lacan, libido, & repetition
Which in super-maoist semiotics
Seems to mean
Something like “rehearsal” as
The fiasco of ‘05
Was a dress rehearsal for
The reversals of
’17.
Below, the rabble & the paving stones
Inherited the street
While the Head of State ascended
Loudspeakers in the trees,
Choppers from a cloud
Or disappeared into a maze
Of plexiglas visors, shields.
Behind teargas barricades
My Fulbright days &nights
Overflowed with manifestoes,
Flesh-tinted pinups
Of revolutionary whores & heroes,
Color photos of napalm
& the atom bomb
Until I couldn’t tell ground zero from
Vagina, ear or anus
As I confessed, in a weak moment, to that prick,
Von Kramm,
Famous paperback & talkshow advocate
Of electroshock therapy
Gentially applied
In the defense of the aggressive tendencies
Of homo capitalismus, who is,
From my perspective as
Participant-observer in the race,
An innately nasty creature
& a human worm.
Years later,
Doing fieldwork in the Adirondacks
I discovered a Puertorican pearldiver
Flash his firehose – ca-rum-bah!
& on day reading Honey & Ashes on the can
Began an on-the-spot investigation into
The morphology of the hand
That blows the nose
& the hand that wipes
The shitty grin.
Contributor
L.S. AsekoffAskeoff has published two books of poetry. He directs the MFA Poetry Program at Brooklyn College.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

CATHERINE CHRISTER HENNIX with Marcus Boon, Part 2
By Marcus BoonOCT 2020 | Music
This is the second in a two-part conversation with Swedish mathematician/poet/composer/musician Catherine Christer Hennix. In the September issue we talked about the ontology of music and the significance of drone-based sounds, and Hennix introduced the idea of the sonic shrine.

Enlightened Aesthetics: LOUISE LANDES LEVI with Raymond Foye
MAY 2020 | Music
Poet, musician, and translator, Louise Landes Levi was an original member of Daniel Moores fusion orchestra and experimental theater troupe the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company in Berkeley, in the late 1960s, where she played alongside Angus MacLise and Terry Riley in outdoor productions that included Balinese gamelan, Tibetan ceremonial instruments, actors, puppets, and chant. Four decades later, Levi continues to practice this tradition in her own way.
David Levi Strausss
Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication
By Hovey Brock
OCT 2020 | Books
David Levi Strausss Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (2020) asks the fundamental question about the Trump presidency: How did we get here?
inSerial: part eleven
The Mysteries of Paris
by Eugène Sue, translated from the French by Robert Bononno
SEPT 2019 | Fiction
The following scene transpired in a brilliantly lit salon draped entirely in red. Rodolphe, dressed in a long dressing gown of black velvet, which further augmented his paleness, was seated before a large table covered with a rug.