White Print Inc

by Matvei Yankelevich

in the removal of depth‐of‐field, much as the stars
map endpoints of a chart of lines, and are no more
than serifs snapped on tips of invisible letters. Meeting
in the eye, these intersections are after all only dots
of depth conspiring to drop their own dimensionality
to distort the memory of space, mocking transparency
as hats deride heads.

by Matvei Yankelevich

Oh, the many mislaid and best laid.
The ones that got away and stayed.
The many roads and their crossroads,
Legs that carried weightless loads.
How time’s hand does to skin, to bark,
Flesh of statues in the garden’s dark,
Aged urns and vases of perception,
Long furs and feathers of sensation.
Oh, failure of the five to grasp the depth
Of crumbling curb or garden step.

by Matvei Yankelevich

Animals cut into parts, crawling, scurrying along the soil. You pick one up
and gesture for us to look closer. In your hand is an organism, you are an
organism. Compare these things.

What can come of this, for instance, if your arm is a prosthetic device?

Your beckoning gesture is a sign, mechanically reproduced, also a drawing
in the air, a calligraphy that reads as black on white, a tautology packed in
ice, a frozen repetition of ancestral digits.

You stick your arm in the toilet by means of a prosthetic brush.

You make it new then erase it. You make it new, then do it again.

Put your arm through your arm, hand through hand, up to the shoulder,
repeat with legs, struggle into a statement, making a loudspeaker out of
your head, which hovers uneasily as a geometric sun above abstract planes,
the crosses of propellers spinning, wings un‐crossed as a swimmer against
the air.

Where did you go? And where’s the window you left through?