Ginny

Bioremed Engin.: Lake Michigan Strata, North Shore. [Healing the Land with the Lushkis? [Provisional Title]]* Gintare Lushki, UChicago under Dr. Petro Hirnyk Anthropogenic Fill mineral matter My dad called me last Monday. His mom Enlé hasn’t been well. Aunt Rasa cares for her. She noticed Enlé get unusually weak, and two weeks ago there was the fall. It was on the first landing, where they display some of their acrylics and marguçiai. Enlé's knees feel like jello. She's in he

Once upon a time in the city of Chicago, my parents didn’t have any money for Tylenol. When her migraines showed up, my mom slipped Excedrin from her friends’ purses during lectures on legal precedent. My dad would lift more Excedrin from cabinets at residency. We didn’t have Walgreens money: they were students. Back then, acetaminophen was the forbidden herb in the witch’s garden from Rapunzel. You had to scale a wall to score it. When my mom was pregnant, the Chicago Tyleno

Two space dudes looking space drippy in some space duds ACCOMPANYING PLAYLIST

Upon answering a lobster phone, a small-biz Detroitian kinetic artist found himself speaking to Yoruba orisha Oba Oduduwa who asserted he admired the thought , but then politely asked for that tradition back. " And for the metal arokin , which really just a talking piggy bank , isn't it? A naked Furby - Pez for colonizer money? 'Ah-AH. Need food.' " Oduduwa engorged his eye sockets and blinked twice mechanically , pursing his handsome lips over his white teeth and chomping li

I lay awake in bed late one night, frozen in the shadow of a figure in my doorway: a six-foot three amigurumi man. I made him, tediously, in my garage—it took years off me. The wool spun hot through my hands as I wove his tan skin and fringed his Western-style jacket and slacks. Screaming fingers balmed with sheep grease, I crocheted a pair of mosaic-pattern cowboy boots for my Man. He wears a size 11.5. He must have cost me a million in wool, as stuffing alone came from a Do

Harrowing as the day I was born —I think— you lamented about how you briefly forgot the love of your life--like driving a small pin into a toe pad inebriated with bathwater, you related the story to me--and the backs of my eyelids remembered that ear-worm Pathetique from the opera about the giantess who fell into unrequited love with an ogre. We watched it develop at the Civic, up in the nosebleeds and you placed your hand on the back of my head to lure me in, a riptide, and

I wonder what you looked like today, the day when I erased you from my mind. It didn’t emerge from bitterness; not an eviction but a slow expiration, like the shrinking of a bright balloon. ACCOMPANYING PLAYLIST

I'll wait: not like some fanged or taloned thing, but like drumlins lain regiment on cold plains, the last bullfrog rasping in the wood, or a silken arm of driftwood driven upright into barren sand. And I'll be patient: not like orb weavers at the center of iron-clad webs, but casually radiating like the tannined fingers of early-morning frost, or a fiddle- head in an erratic summer, awaiting unfurling. If you don’t follow— like roots devising their own way toward nurturing g

Remember that, the week I had convinced my bloated words to elope with me in the Riviera to sit, my placid subject; wear a Turkish robe in ways I could evince them? Akimbo in marital bed, the purplest words I minced, milled to gunpowder, and a combustive flare of hostile dust and physical power scared up hard times marked by The Struggle. In time since, I'd worked to find my euphemism, between two heavy stones, can sedimentize and crack a coarser silt that dissolves in boilin

To trust the writer of tidy endings is to trust the painter of perfect faces. I’d rather follow those who trace the gridlike struc- ture of plants, the mandalas within topography, and the ways life’s aberrations form agate innards with veiny parallels. ACCOMPANYING PLAYLIST

An unperformable play. We open on an urban Caribbean plaza, the main square in a capital city. It is late morning. There are tourists toddling around with fanny packs and sunglasses taking up each other's space, the sweat just beginning to seep out of them. A school group wearing the same t-shirt trudges woundedly through the burgeoning crowd on their way to a hostel with their luggage, the sun intruding rudely on their bedtime. It looks like they're returning home from war,

in the living room, on the embroidered couch the light was dim, the only sign of death was in the air the stale fetor of yellow tail my great-aunt blanca on the left; on the right, my great-aunt la actriz, professional queen of drama proclaimer of poetry "your hair is like mine was," she said, "except mine was much longer--down to here. and red as rust. my eyes were green like yours, and my nose pointed like yours; everything like yours. and although i have grown old, you re

i'm sitting at marthes's piano, my fingers gliding across the new keys. new pianos are like new shoes--you have to break them in and get them dirty. my hands slip and stumble like some kid who's never ice skated before and i let the room know i am very drunk. they already know, i know. i play this version of "rain song" by led zeppelin that i rewrote for piano and this lady in the room says, "i know this! this is french" and she sounds like an idiot but i don't say anything

You called me Uvas I still have bug-eyes it was endearing it was myopia We’d stick branches wrapped in spiderwebs into trees’ knots brewing caldo Sitting outside eating grapefruit halves they were bitter starved for sugar You would laugh because you couldn’t braid my hair rolled it in your fingers called it slippery Your mom was nursing you called her vaca I called her vaca too then you slapped me We would fight sometimes I would pull your hair you would pull my hair til the

HYPERDOC PIECE (click words) An aging art critic shuffled through the Tate, stomach rumbling, seeking something to chew on. Maybe the bubbled umber skin of Jeff Koons' Basketball-in-Tank, or, better, a steak carved from Damien Hirst’s Shark-in-Tank. It all gave off the same pretentious rubbery flavor, though, as the billion-dollar Matisse escargot that audiences flocked for—and that one didn’t even come with its own takeout box; not yet. Giacometti's gaunt figures were far fr

Sweetened-up strings hold fast to your fingers—you hear resonance like a false harmonic when they unstick. You hammer wrought-iron fingertips into its long neck’s ebony; the vibration through your knuckles rings familiar and mechanical. Its voice is husky and doleful like a drowsy lover. Punctuating your collective frustration, you draw the bow in a quick chop in front of the bridge. You peer through its f-hole (you’re intimate). Amidst wisps of dust hides a deceased Czech’s

AI can never be as alive or as culturally deviant as we endeavor to be. It can never achieve our lived experiences, and so it does not have the power to take our voices away. It doesn’t understand. It sets a higher bar for all writers linguistically, but it will never take away the souls of the living. In the real world, it reveals ever-darkening corners within corporations' greed. When it comes to independent artists, it could advance us, at a cost. AI, like most artists, i

All the dreams you had for other people Are coming true for you, today: Photographed against a white background, like a word printed for the first time you experience Nothingness and its peace, like stale public air in the back of a Crown Victoria or behind a locked aluminum door. from your snitched pulpit, watching the others spin from self-wished futures emblazoned with bitten tongues on fire, you wonder with anxious burden what you have, in ignorance, stolen in the high-vi

Hey! split the night with razor feathers lap and tear the damp forging onward, no face, indeterminate flourishes and endless collision, cold and warm fronts eddying and whipping in frigid vortexes, famished for being vacuumed words suspended in pregnant air, operators vibrating, functions print(“saltando!”), keywords col legno; a waterfall of arithmetic plucked like a cat-gut. it dances in place, sinew wound tight to stone pegs and a liquid neck. it can’t paint secrecy wit

There you go again, blasting Arcade Fire's The Suburbs on headphones that betray all privacy! Your nose deep on the opposite side of a Pop Socket, you wonder, listless, when life might serve to entertain… The carrots and ranch you roll over your tongue are zesty Midwest ambrosia, your egg-crate mattress topper a cumulus throne. You’re itching for a goddess or some earthly nymph, but all who call upon you are those with zest for: board game, "pupper," 40oz water bottle, beat