- Laura Goldstein
from 'golden infection' // Laura Goldstein
there's only one exception to war, and that's capitalism. watching the weary costumers, their
efforts positively reinforced from all sides, and then i lost the thread. better wages? possibly, but
then you lose to the revolutionary void. who am i to say? sitting here while you stand for 12
hours, still. each network's dendrites eventually caught in some neutral reliance on the
individual, a living thread. listening for some stale synonym for some other body we'd rather fill,
lest we be all the way dead.
*
yeah, that line is a lie. war is essential to capitalism, not an exception, but i often get a line in my
head that's obviously a lie and i have to write it down & then later expose it. this is something
i've always tended towards. my process right now is to write a new section and then type up an
older section into and have my transcription/editing process be influenced by my current
writing. This kind of reminds me of how a person works, too. I have a dream that reprocesses an
old memory and then I wake up and start my day.
*
every time i go home i get some sort of infection that reminds me to pay closer attention to
words like "infection" and "home". where and what are these places in the heart and head? what
is "heart" and what is "head"? i make meaning out of the world around me, but i also make my
own world with my own meanings, concentrating sometimes on "meaning" and "world" as if to
stay active and present makes a body that seems to be real to others in that it evokes reaction
into a person that's me, for what that's worth, sometimes that's worth everything one can give in
exchange to what other worlds request
*
The quiet in the morning
The consistency of questions
The questionable core of confidence
The seclusion of one’s own concepts
The star burst of society
The seclusion of certain collectivities
The turning into ever, the terrifying, the tenor
The stupid system’s corners
The streaming rights
The outdated regulations
The mutated manifesto
The constant measuring of perspective
The increasing irrelevance of paintings
The false sense of security, the false security
The long overdue litmus test
The languishing mass of pinecones, lichen and grass
The love we come back to, the love that eludes us, the past
The love that eludes us, the love we come back to, the rest
//

Laura Goldstein's first collection of poetry, loaded arc, was released by Trembling Pillow Press in 2013 and her second collection, awesome camera was published by Make Now Press in 2014. She has published several chapbooks as well as numerous poems and essays in magazines in print and online. She currently teaches at Loyola University and is the co-curator of the Red Rover Reading Series.