Prolit

a literary magazine about money, work, & class

don’t take just anything                                        take everything
                            take the days & their                 scrambled
              nights                the shut valves of               judges
& their           unanchored                             mouths
           a dance of                 inverted teeth            & fish
hooks /              our walls                          punctured &
           cracking               your mouth punctured &
cracking /          here, take this:                       everything
           & deicide:                      supersolid backdrop /
deciduous drip of death & dice                             what else
                                                       that & this endless            dredging,
                                          parse the                           gathering
                            miasma &         tell me whether                 the orthography
                                          will hold /                          all i am is
sound &                                        sorry i thought                  that was enough


                                                                                                   silence in darkness
                                                               & in the dank quiet                                    a music
                                                                                                   echolulled into this              unrun
                                                                                                                                       republic
                                                                                                                                                      nothing but
                                                                                                                      restaurant & riot
                                                                                                   murmur &                                 murder &
                                                                           further than                           before     this is a
                                                                                                  future / sutured                       daylight
                                                                          a graft of                                                    daylight
                                                  for this here
                                                                          counterparatactic insurgency this bellow & bluff
                                          & i’m not talking
                              about                                  nothing no
         i’m talking             about it all & then                     some & then the sun & then some
                           the grass
                                               & the collective redistribution of rain & that’s
                    the difference                                                                                        between success &
      an elevator                    between a felled tree & its deathcrash between
                           a graveyard                                                                                       & a forest


Mathilda Cullen

Mathilda Cullen is a poet and translator. Her books include "Trace Happenings" and the forthcoming Collected Poems of Ernst Toller. She runs marlskarx, an anti-press dedicated to publishing queer poets of the left, and Prolesound, a podcast and archive of contemporary leftist poetry and poetics.