Blackbox Manifold

Issue 12: Astrid Lorange

Actual Technologies

We assume these are actual technologies! [laughter]


Letters between writers during one or the other of the two world wars are

mostly always about the soft trade and gift service of contraband or luxuries:

cigarettes, American brand name domestic goods (electric mixers), chocolate,

foreign cash, books, papers, tickets for travel, and information. The larger

disasters now just miniatures, a thumb of hidden resin.



small early model hard drive harvest poem

platelets mic’d up


felty effortless a new player enters the room:

cocoa powerballs, index cards, two (brain-looking) bones

a soft wooden tile, a smelling breadlike leaf, a cut out (proto laser slice)

layered image, a wooden box with yarn, gold leaf, two-sided

tape, small red shoes and the shutter sound echoed back

in the form of a look of surprise.

 

the flat edge of a brush but dry

                        envelope in miniature (as if for seeds) is leathery gold


Re/compuet small dumpling screed Or a third, two patch effects three times

for six alt cigs on land and where cassette—


that’s a spade

that looks like a handbag

that’s a body that could be a push-up scene


Dry in a persimmon

but a slick off


I with a soft log of coins

the small pre-aperture skt skt

I for a sec not here but off camera



it’d be a better bootleg if

when it leaves it takes your toxins

with it as a charcoal biscuit

Astrid Lorange is an Associate Lecturer at UNSW | Art & Design and a researcher at the National Institute of Experimental Arts. Her book, How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. She co-edits the Aus-USA chapbook press, SUS. Poetry books include Eating and Speaking, Minor Dogs and one that made it alike.