three love poems
On the eve of disgust we took the bosses
by the hair and dragged them straight
into an induction furnace. We got high
off the fumes of former grievance,
then passed out naked listening to Sun Ra
& his Arkestra. Their heat kept us warm.
idyll ii (after cops)
The police are still murdering black comrades
in their cars, conjuring their suicides,
the kind of evil that poems can’t stop.
We shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking
this isn’t so. We should hate the police
before, after, below, beyond the poem.
idyll iii (after theorists)
What should interest us now, I think, is the process
of liberation, not the imagined future in which
liberation loses the referent which is the condition
for our imagining it. So, before you get evicted from
the orgy of totality, take a shit on your professor’s car
and call it ‘the fruit of impatience with theory.’
Dominick Knowles
Dominick Knowles is a nonbinary poet and Ph.D. candidate, as well as the poetry editor of Protean Magazine. Their dissertation focuses on Cold War U.S. poetry and imperialism in Latin America. Recently, they have published poems in Paintbucket and marlskarx. Their article, “Jupiter Against the Lightning Rod: Literary Form and the Grundrisse” is forthcoming from Bloomsbury’s Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series.