Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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    • Mark DeCarteret
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    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
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  • 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
    • 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
Picture

JOSHUA WARE

Zizek Eats His Dirty Socks For Breakfast


Žižek stores his underwear in kitchen cabinets his socks neatly folded in a drawer below the sink

I am learning how to fail more epically

A painter renders the heads of all today’s middling celebrities on the bodies of cats

The coroner awakes at midnight

A train passes through the idea of travel and the romance of international intrigue

If you hold a cheap trade paperback version of a mass-marketed mystery novel up to a light you
             will see through its pages and into your own dying imagination

Žižek’s beard is big and burly

Žižek’s beard has problems

Žižek’s beard is my spirit animal

I will spearhead a movement called Occupy Žižek’s Beard

I will shave all of Žižek’s body hair

Žižek speaks of obscene music and hates “indie rock”

I have a poster of Žižek standing in front of a poster of Stalin

I have a poster of a bald eagle eating an apple pie on the hood of a Ford F-150

Within each one of us is a slovenly Eastern European philosopher waiting to explicate our
               theories of thought difference knowing and being upon the world in a language no one
               will understand

I understand less and less about language everyday





Joshua Ware

Picture
Joshua Ware is the author of Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley (Furniture Press Books) and several chapbooks, most recentlyImaginary You (Grey Ghost Press), SDVIG (alice blue books) with Natasha Kessler, and How We Remake the World (Slope Editions) with Trey Moody.

published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
Copyright © 2012-2022 Map Literary
Map Literary

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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
    • 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
    • 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