Jeff Alessandrelli

One day above Paris Two big airplanes were fighting One red the other black While the sun’s eternal Plane flashed at the zenith

...

Golden Verses

“What! All is sentient!”—Pythagoras

---Gérard de Nerval

Man, free thinker! Do you believe you think alone

In this world in which life bursts forth from everything?

Your liberty employs the strength you have within

But the world is absent from everything you own.

Respect in every beast a spirit that is true:

Souls blossom in Nature, in each flower petal;

A mystery of love lies sleeping in metal;

For “all is sentient!” And all will impact you.

Beware in the blind wall the gaze spying on you:

In the heart of matter itself, a verb resides…

Take care not to put it some impious use!

Often in dark being there lives a God that hides;

And like the nascent eye under its lids, unshown,

Not unlike Duchamp, she believes that chess games possess a fierce beauty.

“When you look at Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, you know it’s beautiful, and it’s the same in chess, except you need more knowledge to understand it,” she said. “You need to know how the pieces move to appreciate the beauty in front of you. It’s a hidden beauty.”

A Short History of Who Wants What—

Jacqueline Waters

So you eat off these plates, most nights, for years.

You got them at IKEA, or they appeared in your cabinet,

inherited from one roommate or another, and each day

you spoon food onto and off of these plates, wash them,

dry them, put them away.

One day you figure out you can take one, press on its

circumference, gather your strength and just ball it back

up into clay.

And then what?

What do you do with the clay?

Hurl it at someone, laughing lightly like it’s a snowball

and you’re a fun mischievous person, and winter’s

everywhere and the stars are flickering.

But it’s not winter and you’re not light.

You throw your ball the way you practiced, you turn your

I want Something Other than Time

--Lewis Freedman

My way of proceeding

in which I no longer hear

the voice aside from its echo

might’ve become banal

even to me.

Like my incommunicable remains

form a barricade against unity

but this time it’s not news to me anymore.

My tie bares a picture of death for the whole

office to see but it can’t even be called

death b/c its significance has been abolished

(it’s a tie).

It’s a window that, having withdrawn entirely

from the outside it had asserted itself for

centuries to separate, now conceives of any

situations as an enlargement of “every place

is in another place.”

My foundation has become my modesty

offended by my living mouth.

There’s nothing clear to the dare

I feel in Nietzsche’s words,

“I am dead b/c I am stupid.”

Horrible.

But now at least

the page

The Tycoon—

Michael Bazzett

I was filling out the application to be a tycoon and I was being

careful with my handwriting but then I got to the section

on references and I wondered exactly who could speak best

to my latent tycoon potential. A minute later I found myself

on the phone with my mom. Hey Mom, I said, trying not

to sound like a pale weakling but more like a young tycoon

in need of a casual favor. No, she said. That salutation wasn’t

exactly a Yes or No question, I observed calmly. I could feel

her shrug into silence. I can tell from your voice that you

need something, she said, and the answer’s No. Is Dad home?

I asked. He’s waving the phone away as I speak, she said. I’ll

Cruise

–Molly Ledbetter

In fact, our capacity for innovation might ultimately be the thing that truly distinguishes human writing – particularly the literary kind – from AI. “The whole point of an LLM is that it’s trained on existing language. So it’s always retro,” says Stockwell. “I could get an AI and say ‘write me a short story in the style of Virginia Woolf’ and it’ll do a decent job. But what you can’t say is ‘write me a story in the unique style of the next great, serious literary innovator’. It couldn’t possibly do that.”

That’s because, once again, it lacks the social environment, and the body, that give rise to characteristically human motivations. “Why does somebody do something new in an art form like literary writing? It can be out of annoyance or irritation with what’s gone before. Or it’s because somebody sees things in a different way than the run of the mill, or sometimes just because people are antsy and wanting to do something different, or a little bit crazy or isolated.”

"He wanted to paint the sea, the sky, the mountain, even while knowing it was impossible to do so without automatically painting the social meaning of the sea, the sky, the mountain. The blurred landscape — teasing us with the pleasures of the pastoral, and then letting it melt before our eyes — was nothing less than a moral argument for how to look and how to think when every route seemed barred. You had to do it ambivalently, self-critically, and while risking irrelevance or cliché. But it could be done."

“…between yesterday and tomorrow there is no place left for the present.”

Rondal Partridge

Pave it and Paint it Green, Yosemite National Park

My Father

October 30, the day before my father died, we argued about a piece of paper. Around this time, I made an announcement regarding my identity on social media, and I wrote or called close friends to tell them about it. No one was surprised, which surprised me. I sent a letter to my parents in Wisconsin to let them know about my changes. My letter was clear and decisive; it also expressed a deep desire for understanding and compassion. As an adult, I didn’t need their approval, but I hoped they would be glad. Because of their conservative politics and Catholicism, I did not expect them to be ecstatic.

I knew that a part of him, if it could be said that there are parts of people, could be loving.

On the phone that day in October, the day before he died, my father and I didn’t talk about my decision to change my life. From my parents’ perspective, a part of me, if it could be said there were parts, was dying, the part that once had long black hair past my shoulders, the part that did the dishes without complaint. I grew up in a household with traditional gender roles. I never saw my mother drive the car with my father in the passenger seat, not once. My father didn’t want to talk about what was happening, what I had chosen for myself. He tended to avoid uncomfortable subjects in his quiet, Midwestern Catholic way. He was obsessed with church, charity, airplanes, and forgiveness. A Buddhist therapist wrote: “It doesn’t work that way. You’re not made of parts.” Recently my father had stopped saying “I love you” when we ended our conversations on the phone. He was friendly enough when discussing financial matters, but preoccupied and anxious, almost as if he were calculating how to end the call as quickly as possible. “Is that it?” he would ask.