
+ With thanks to Emma Cocker and Anonymous What gaps in a language worried by love — or likezones of conversation.I body their truth and causal exchanges of naïveté — the swagger-hip, swagger-hip.Censorship is a technique of remembrance.Scratchings on wood brittle our felt betweens.This is a strategy.And, a heap of negotiation, I kiss you.The absence of text is a question of position.A slick of sweat behind my knees:unstable truths and ethical possession.Cost is the backbone of each speech-act.Social assemblage.You exit left, vanished, a relationship neither to history nor without it.Object action objectI am against a chair and still in it. Ragged edges and gloss.Repeat, repeatI am at a loss for what’s left to describe. The draft goes like caution andthe marks are doorswhere the language stuck us. I push this heart through what’s left.
Notes "Exchange Values #1-3" were written as part of a three-week, collaborative artist residency with Rachel Zolf, hosted by the Department of Micro-Poetics at the AC Institute in New York City, that explored a variety of exchanges and mappings — ekphrastic, dialogic, technological — in addition to embodying some of the challenges and creative loopholes of distance collaboration. Each week, I wrote on-site in the middle of the gallery's exhibition Exchange Value; at the end of each writing session I forwarded an ekphrastic poem to Zolf. Zolf then identified a set of search terms in my poem and used these to generate a new response via her work in progress The Tolerance Project — a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing rooted in an online archive of “poetic DNA” traces donated by 86 writers, artists and thinkers. Zolfʼs poetic permutation then served as the starting point for my next session in the gallery, and so on — for three sessions. In 2011, our full sequence of poems was then published in the “The Mapping Issue (37.1)” of Dandelion Magazine.