May, 2023

15 Kills: Solid Perry, The Phantom Pain, Performance

Literary critics were once fond of stating that close reading’s obsessive attention to microscopic effects of language merely replicates the kind of detailed attention that the artist needed to write the work in the first place. As a form of analysis, exploiting faults in a game could bear the same justification: one plays the game like a designer.

Missing Crooked

For so long, I’ve scoured
thumbprints on maps, empty

corridors, boats in harbor, constellations
that refuse to navigate. Thick with shrapnel

and gutted like a shoe
without laces, I stumble, call for you