Converse

v., intrans.
1. To labor in such a way as to make a livelihood out of what, under conventional circumstances, would be a leisure activity.
2. You don’t know, or you don’t say what that you know, or something aligned with a strong sense of sometimes, something inextricable from experience itself, intrudes upon and then murders saying, so all you can speak of is the endless tragedy of this, your cannot, you can’t, your cant, your worship, you cast a shadow across everywhere, you shadow falls short of everything, you are a lever, you are a ladder, your face is a solar apostrophe: you and your you’re.
n.
1. A well-worn association.
As in, “She glittered, adorned with converse.”
2. A gift of chance. Generally lacking social or economic currency, but endowing the witness with joy or a kind of disgust that is like scratching an itch.
3. Similar to (2.), but referring specifically to internet-distributed memes involving domestic animals performing perversely humorous acts of ingestion. A dog eating a mango. A bird with something that’s just too big not to juggle.
adj.
1. How do we cope with the graft of our being founded on invention? how do we gentle reminders of our solipsism? how do we rescue the pattern of being from rapaciousness?
2. in the presence of a sound, orange or auburn, the names hee-ing, their hees set to hawing, and their hee-hees haw, and their haws hee-hee, etc.
3. I do not want to agree with this conclusion, but, serial and keyed-in, I find I must. 4. Not surprisingly.

Joe Milazzo is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie, two volumes of poetry — The Habiliments and Of All Places In This Place Of All Places — and several chapbooks (most recently, @p_roblem_s). His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Prelude, Tammy, Texas Review and elsewhere. He is an Associate Editor for Southwest Review and the Founder/Editor-In-Chief of Surveyor Books. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.joe-milazzo.com. Here in these definitions in danger are what these words now mean, or might mean, or must mean if they wish to escape the new world incommensurate with the perceptions they’re accustomed to inhabiting.

Eric Lindley is a musician, writer, and artist living in the bay area. His writing has appeared in Fence, Joyland, Tammy, and elsewhere, and other work at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Machine Project, Telic Arts Exchange, The Knitting Factory, and The Smell. With Janice Lee and Joe Milazzo, he co-edited the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing] from 2009 to 2015. You can find Eric’s work online at https://likeoverflowing.com/