journal for new poetry
Martin Jackson
She screamed, as the camera whizzed into another room
On the leftist front of materiality
it’s easy where there are chairs
because if you put them
in an empty room
the chairs will be empty
which is a weird idea
but just sit in a chair
with no furniture
no TV
no clothes
and you’ll see
/
you can think of them
not being the chairs they are
but also not an empty room
like these shoes
and the same’s true
of all your tools
all of them empty
but their intersectionality
is the thing they do
in an empty room
/
they are functioning
to the satisfaction
of your mind
and the part that makes
something real
so to speak
is this collection of chairs
this empty room
this front
this
Notes on the poem: Found texts (e.g. from private but publicly accessible Google Docs, institutional PDFs, etc.) were fed into natural language processors, creating lots of raw material that was then cut-and-pasted into poems.