This excerpt from Dave Brennan's Poem to Kill a King has been paired with a coat composed of high-definition screens as featured in Jonathan Anderson's 2023 Loewe menswear show. Juxtaposing pixelated scenes of nature with 'living' oatgrass-sprouting garments, Anderson holds up a digital mirror to ask: can a simulated landscape evoke the same feelings as a 'real' one? In a world where the line between suffering and 'monetizable content' feels increasingly blurred, Brennan's poem of sores and "sorge" (see Heiddeger) reframes biology as relentless scrolling. Existence trapped behind screens.
— Paul Cunningham, Editor
From Poem to Kill a King
refrain of wounds and sores
the poem has a chorus
thin and nervous, self-consciously nuded
body painted
to resemble wound or open sore
chorus of multi-legged models
fake dying on the set of a crap show
Death to Firewalls
pilot episode, scene 1: in a dark alley a minor character attempts to upload code from
his phone while bleeding out from an open
mind, neoplastic
coherence, no central player, no reality, show
him what is not
adjacent data
improvised mosaic of broken
gorilla glass and self-conscious models painted with sorge
dying on the set of a fake
lyric poetry
strewn with wounds and sores and small rips
from which everything might spill
dark swallow
he will give them nothing
he will give them only grief
he will give the same unknowable
poetry over and over
or he will give money
he will give understatement
he will give them every
voice but his
voice echoing into verisimilitude
painted and emaciated
scored
open
an improvisation on the impenetrable or
what everyone will not say or
the street corner scroller or
rubbing salt into
sugar he loves this hate
loving it against death, goodbye
language
Dave Brennan lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Headroom in Hell (Spuyten Duyvil), as well as A Cyborg’s Father: Misreading Donna Haraway (punctum books), A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit (Bateau Press), and others. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Lana Turner, Conduit, swamp pink, Tyger Quarterly, The Midwest Quarterly, ANMLY and elsewhere. He can be found online at fckyrbookclub.substack.com.
