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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. 

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