Absent

A great new issue of Absent Magazine has graced the internet.  Check out this poem by Jasper Bernes:

Note on the Etymology of Camera

Shuddering with duplicates or, eyes overcast: any room rented or
temporary’s a camera. This a rare skin disease: photodermatitis, Hank
and Liselle at the beach on your shoulder, a balcony in fog, a wall
with the words SHIT HERE in ketchup. In this way, you are able to live
next door to yourself, by truce, for months

Through the viewfinder, a tiny judge consults his notes: f. Aryan root kam-
to curve, bend. From room to room, from ether to object to mind to
voice, oh boy. Stand there, no over there, that’s it, look up, don’t do
that thinking thing with your mouth. And when the big wing tears free,
like all the things you liked to look at overexposed

While she’s out buying film, you open the locket she wears around
her neck, the chain of which, snagged on a faster part of being, a
loose end, broke. There’s nothing in it, not even a picture of nothing,
not even nothing’s likeness. Like this, you know that there is room for
you in her life, if you can keep quiet about what you know

Inside entire, in feet per second, in Cinemascope, with an
elephantiasis of the will and, by fortune, your thesis on the tragic
rejected by the Bureau of Entireties? What architecture does not leave
itself printed on your skin like a limit: that way physics, this way
feeling?

by Jasper Bernes

published in Absent 2.0

Issue two also features Charles Bernstein, Regis Bonvicino, Jack Boettcher, Tim Botta, Julia Cohen, Shanna Compton, John Cotter, Shafer Hall, Lisa Jarnot, Pierre Joris, Joan Kane, Noelle Kocot, Jason Labbe, Kathleen Ossip, The Pines, Matthew Rohrer, Kate Schapira, Mathias Svalina, Kathryn Tabb, Allison Titus, and Betsy Wheeler.  I really enjoyed reading these poems.