The Detonator: The Best of BOMB Magazine

Inner Resources

It feels good to love our country.
We must not say so. I’m divided by a love
of our millions of brilliant inventions
and how I’ll dumbly sniff and rub each one
until I’ve figured out how I can use it for that
other thing. Just like a brilliant inventor I too
have a body so I know everything’s invented
to pleasure a body. I was born to this country
and all of it was entranced by my tiny fingers
and then I learned where I could put them.
Before I was born there was sniffing and rubbing
and it formed a tiny unity. Already it was getting
too big to call by one name. It was becoming
a collection of purposes. Which is like calling the sky
a collection of purposes because stars exist.
This is why I write little notes to myself
reminding myself to take all the notes out
of my pockets before sleep. The notes say look
at the sky and when I remember to do it I feel
very American. I feel American when I want
to be able to rub up against what I’m pretty sure
is that planet. Planets exist. They hold the names
we gave them inside them like a breath. I need
to remember to look up the names of the planets
I’m seeing. I’m fairly certain of what I’m seeing.
It’s too bright to be anything else.

This edition of BOMBlog’s Word Choice brought to you by poet Laura Eve Engel and artist Coke O’Neal.

At the Clinic 

We are admitted at once, of course. There is a long line, but we brush right past. We are serious, it seems, more so than others. I wink at you. You laugh. On the walls all the laughs are painted in a baroque fashion, which means as gilt dolphins. You and I despise gilt dolphins, of course. Of course we do. The man who is waiting for us has drawn up the papers. “You are prepared to do this?” “We are,” I say. “Most definitely, we are.” “At least I am,” you say. “I don’t know about this joker.” You laugh; and this time someone rings a bell to answer you. It is just the man laughing. His laugh sounds like a bell that is being rung elsewhere. “If we weren’t ready before we came,” I begin to say, but the man shakes his head sadly. He holds up a sign: NO MORE TALKING. And then it is time. He leads us to the beds, the skin of his fingers as soft as candles. It is in another room, quite far from where we were, but we don’t begrudge the distance. We are happy about the room. There are fine tall windows, which you point out, as if it matters. I lie on one pallet, you lie on the other. You take my hand and laugh again. You laugh, I laugh. We are laughing, and he injects us, and we are laughing more. It is so funny. Don’t you remember, in that place where we last were, that thing that … At some point, you become quiet, and I realize: you have died. I try to turn my head to look, but there isn’t any of that. No turning of the head. No turning of the head, no hand. The hands aren’t doing anything. They aren’t hands. The sound of the bell comes again, closer this time. Closer and closer. I was remembering something, about someone I knew. I was …

—Jesse Ball in BOMB’s latest installment of Word Choice, art is Sophie Jodoin, Small Dramas & Little Nothings, 2008

Car Music

Why don’t you just say one of your prayers,
she sighs on the way to the airport,

passing through the Virginia hills,
something hidden and dazed in her look

like the singer’s corrosive voice
smoldering out of the radio.

When we stop to stretch
in a grove of dark pines

she looks like she’s trying
to remember something

standing beside the fender
and bending the wing-mirror over,

daylight the color of tapwater,
silver-gray like the sky.

I look okay in this type of light, she says
no one can see my crow’s feet.

I can’t decide if she’s flirting with me
or trying to pick a fight.

What if I tell her I’m not afraid
of her midnight rages and vanities?

What if I give her these skinny violets
and say get back in the car?

—Joseph Millar in BOMB’s brand new Word Choice, with art by Nader Ebrahimi

SHOVEL GIVES INTO ITS NAME

          “Shopping without money is a
          challenge with the cameras.”

                                   —my mother

               why are you trembling dear one
      my president has come to free you

                                                    hair flying at
                                       bullet’s impact
                                       the shooter’s beautiful
                                                    crooked teeth

          argued up the evolution of
                         borrowed faces to
                                          angle potent

                            my pregnancy dream told me
                          not born but evicted

                 length mopped over later
                 operating a forgotten bell

                                         Venus stipulates a
freedom not to be dismissed or
   every grip weakens
                             smell it to
                             see it
                             a joint groans inside its
                                         flesh casing

             “have sent it
                   inside” means
                 thinking deeper on it as
                              other waves
                       proceed through

                               we cannot train
                           ourselves to feel less

                                                               a silent
                        misuse of the ordinary until this
                        moment cannot stand
                                          on its own

                              each failed attention
                                      sent stinking
                              pulling your ass apart in
                                                   your sleep

                                  no beverage
                                    eliminates the
                                               hunger
                                               ask our
                                    kicked-open
                                    bartender as we
                                                    bend from
                                    the ceiling with
                                    a fresh ocean-catch
                                                      aftertaste

                                watch through a
                          hollowed-out bone our
                                 perfection of
                                   brutality as
                                    efficiency

                       suddenly lacking
                                    courage to
                                      steal every
                                             day’s larder

                     emptying pockets slower
                  does not bring us to a
                            new sense of
                       where we left off

                              aggravate over our
                                     dumb scratch the
                                     dead can I
                                   promise you

fixed gaiety
stiffens and freezes
her face in a
constant beauty
queen smile
stuck in a
mask of joy
one face
the opposite
of a hidden
one

—excerpt from Wanda Phipps’ poem 16, from Silent Pictures Recognize the World II, art by Sarah Walker. Featured on BOMBlog.