2026

fist-sized

Video taken through the construction barrier at the site of the new Brooklyn Jail, December 2025.

Here is a poem as a sort of document of the last year, please forgive the bad formatting for Substack. If you’d like to see it in its original layout you can do that here. Thank you for another year of reading and being here, there is much to attend to and I don’t take the presence lightly <3

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TEMPERED ATTENTIONS

Kuwasi says the sound of breaking glass can’t be spelled, said, repeated,

must be broken

-- to hear the sound of glass breaking, glass must be broken --

I tried to spell it with a poem, it stayed intact, a kettled sentence kept me from plenty

Said it with a sculpture, too bulletproof and lacked the weight to stay

planted in the ground, left the building dragged against its will

Tried to repeat it with a painting, too tempered, I waited for it to raise its voice

I tried to lose my chains today, left them

in the refrigerator with my cell phone then walked

through the apartment one shoe on, one off,

disordered attention to rigor on one hundred

And I prayed for a border, absurdly

A fence whose icy calculus of parcels and lots I’d bloodfully obey

An enclosure to plot the outermost limit of this place, this pain, this continual

shock and its cynical allotments of the deeply alive

This year I learned to plunge my hand into broken glass, a fist-sized muscle flexing – crazy for something, not made crazy by it

The advice is:

Do one thing every day

Hoping soon if this painting can shout for a

Do everything one day