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    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
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Picture

John Lowther

Note on the Text

555 is both the name and number of sonnets in the manuscript. Counting is crucial (requiring calculator and text analytics). I used Shakespeare’s sonnets combined and divided to find the average for letter, syllable and word, then matched that number exactly in three groups of sonnets. No rhyme or meter but a very exacting measure nonetheless. All lines are found, and typos are retained. Line selection varies with my mood. Assembly has to do with something immaterial that passes through them that’s somehow more than any sum could tell.



W009


The first thing I want to do is show my underarm routine.
Sorry to icky on your moral fiber.
While it is true that everything visible is becoming, it is not true that all
    becoming is visible.
It is as if our facts were losing their truth.
They are craving for dreams and action, the purest passions, the
    wildest pleasures, and thus they cast into all kinds of fantasies,
    and foolishness.
‘Boyfriend’ is just another one of those gross words like 'vagina' or 'love.'

Do you look, I am accident.
Block and move on.
Stand a little out of my sun.



W010


It speaks.
You get the idea.
I'm Amber and I ooze popularity.
Where is the monkey in the baby cage.
What if we can't envision any escape from the present.
They're putting together a list of movies with great roller skating
    scenes.

All the most interesting problems around information today are about
    structure: how to cope with the overload, and find sense in the
    data.

Is a one night stand a non sequitur in this context.
We don’t another cliché metaphor, we just cliché metaphor.
I don't know how to unlove you.
So I did swimming cupcakes.
I piss excellence.
Mush.



W011


Don't smoke without causing an explosion.
When the reader finds words of common usage in the pages that
    follow, he is urged to interpret them in a straightforward way.
God has slipped over the horizon.
I have a terrible case of imposter syndrome, feeling like at any
    moment everyone is going to find out I have no qualifications
    and no idea what I’m doing.

There is no labor history section.
I'm a member since a few days but I can tell you it's really comforting
    to know there is a world that resembles to you.
Guilt in search of a crime.



S002


One major review in 2003 looked at 38 different studies, containing
    data on 20,000 participants, and found that overall, political
    conservatism was associated with things like death anxiety,
    fear of threat and loss, intolerance of uncertainty, a lack of
    openness to experience, and a need for order, structure, and
    closure.

We implicate ourselves if we even evince familiarity with the frame of
    reference.



S003


Let's buy some food home.
I can't believe she told you about that, like I'm holding your cards that
    way.
It means nothing else.
For if, as they say, man is a bubble, all the more so is an old man.
Deserve what you reap.
He hears all ambient as new age and there is no arguing with him.
The mouse pupils shrank.
Or you can see what your life can be if you really let your light shine.
You know what I mean.

The rumors are true.
Sometimes during my ride on the bike, my mind will automatically
    think about things.
Then the trouble starts.



S004


In experiments on subliminal influence, participants are presented
    with two mirror images of the same picture, asked which they
    prefer, and are likely to choose the images where a subliminal
    negative image is flashed up for milliseconds, before they make
    their choice.
Fuck your ass.
It is not a question of purification through language, but on the
    contrary of releasing the material in disorder.

The eyes can mislead, a smile can lie, but the shoes always tell the
    truth.



L005


It's like you've got all these John Wayne movies going on inside your
    head.
Arrogance is not a uniquely American trait but you do it better than
    anyone.
Here are two fun ways that numbers can be distorted for political
    purposes.
Temperatures are said to be as high as nineteen hundred on one of
    the planets.

Use as a replacement for lemon zest or as a garnish to the
    centerpiece dish.
I've never been a lead or a supervisor or key-holder anywhere I've
    worked.
Many flowers also have an anus; it is an opening at the base of their
    bloom.



L006


There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most
    sensual of desires.
I was going down a path that I'd never dreamed of taking, but there I
    was, forging my way.
Struggling against the tide of disappointment, we continue to search
    for a sweet one.
He stood up when the speaker gave anyone the out and suddenly
    half the room quit as well.
Now if she could only drop forty-eight pounds and stop watching
    Judge Joe Brown all the time.

The singularity of aesthetic self-enjoyment can never be dragged out,
    into the light.




L007


Remember, for each of these that the idea is that it can be used
    intentionally to influence user behavior.

You have every reason to be tentative, closed and distrustful, and I
    myself, would not trust any of us.
If I had a nickel for every time I had drunken sex when I didn't want to
    I sure wouldn't be selling this shit.
The penultimate is really nothing in itself, such that anything could be
    justified as penultimate of its own accord.
I know the only place on earth that will survive the apocalypse, and
    what’s more I’ve been there.




Picture
John Lowther’s work appears in the anthologies, The Lattice Inside (UNO Press, 2012) and Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama, 2003). Held to the Letter, co-authored with Dana Lisa Young is forthcoming from Lavender Ink. John works in video, photography, paint and performance. He’s writing a dissertation to reimagine psychoanalysis as grounded in the lives of intersex and transgender people so as to broaden our appreciation of subjective possibility.

published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
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  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Links
    • Internship Opportunity
    • WPU MFA
  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art