Issue 9: Tony Lopez

Living Systems

Please take a few minutes to read over these notices.

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Moonlight lay upon the hills like snow.

See if you can find and play ‘January Snows’ by Lúnasa.

A sentence is quietly pleasing.


When you torture people you get bad information.

This block of granite, for instance, is a mere thing.

Use a single asterisk * to truncate from one to five characters.

This is one of those memories formed to protect you

  from re-experiencing anxiety.

It is autumn: Nanjing is full of too many beautiful things.


The strong force is carried by eight particles known as gluons.

Edges should be glued together using contact adhesive.

The images of children are library footage.

Intelligence is a property of living systems.

Imagine a pear tree covered with golden fruit.


All previous sets are located in memory by date order.

In Warsaw the sale of armbands became a regular business.

Sleep helps us extract rules from our experience.

A starling imitates the sound of a refrigerator.

Nothing more than nothing can be said.


Swifts are massing around the building in the evening.

Making new pathways that override old ones is called extinction.

These objects will then be truly and completely invisible to us.

It was considered to be a light sentence.

A hunter came to find out who was playing such beautiful music.

Tony Lopez's latest book is Only More So, published in North America by University of New Orleans Press, 2011 and in the UK by Shearsman Books, 2012. A new edition of False Memory was also published by Shearsman in 2012. He works by commission on public art incorporating text: http://tonylopez.org.uk