Half Page

“on this day poem” [sept 30 2020]

by olli sure

drag myself across the floor i cant take this any more

this is me in the winter this is me in the fall last year 3 years ago trying to keep the familiar from keeping liminal

im wearing the same thing i was the last time u saw me everyone is some young queer everyone is someone's trans daughter

everyone's painting w the sound on

“checking up poem” [aug 8 2020]

by olli sure

binging euphoria say it back how many people are checking to see if u ate today

im done proving things to myself except this

ya know i woke up and dont feel anymore dont feel any kinda way anymore

it actually takes no time @ all does my face have to be in the picture

did u eat today ??

Femme Fatality by Lauren Frazier

I slipped your hands over newfound hips Budded breasts and rose-hued lips Exploring at your behest

I can’t escape your well-meant care I am forever trapped upstairs Scratching and clawing in protest

You have achieved much more than I Given me natural endorphin highs I am the problem with us

You swim, run, move for miles I beat you against bathroom tile Yet you never waver in your trust

Purple tattoos are etched into your limbs I promise I won’t do it again My reliable, stale claim

You bear my torture and utter disdain Without means or will to complain And still we remain one and the same

“posture poem 2” [sept 20 2020]

by olli sure

promise ill lean forward 4 u screen cracked to shit it's hard to say any of the time let alone now

sharp speed bump probably did some damage green cotton too big on the sides

breathing the same air your're breathing

hard days work

by Rhi Conry

Alienation: How We Are Taught To Value Ourselves

by Lynn Connell

How valuable are we? This is an important question not only for somebody’s self-esteem, but also to capitalist economics. Let’s take a look.

We’re going to be crude and look at things from the perspective of a market capitalist. A person’s value is how much money they can make me. That is how capitalists are taught to view people. This bleeds from the capitalist to the rest of society, and it just so happens that this is a pretty important concept right here. The capitalists pay our politicians (they fund their campaigns and whatever else they seem to need), so they have a lot of control over what is done in politics. Their control over our society is pretty total. The way they think is pretty well distributed to society because they are the people who supposedly keep society running. We’ve already run into a pretty big problem. For the most part, long-term employers are massive businesses. And who runs these businesses; who are the people who keep this well-oiled economic machine running? It isn’t the executives. It isn’t the shareholders or the board of directors. It’s the workers.

I hear a lot of talk about a white working class. Of course, there’s a white working class. I’m not going to argue about that. I’m going to argue something completely different. The oppression of the white working class is made possible by the oppression of the colonized masses. The black and Latinx and foreign masses within the United States are the most marginalized. And this lets the capitalists oppress the white masses. First, though, we need to ask another important question. How does capitalism continue? I would say that the only thing keeping capitalism afloat during this trying time is the forcing of workers into competition with one another. And now we get back to the question of value. To the capitalist, the people who are most valuable are those they can pay the least for the same amount of work. So, in reality, who is the most useful? The people whose labor is, in reality, worth the same amount as anyone else’s are now paid the least. This drives the price of labor down overall. What does this mean for how we think about ourselves? In a capitalist society, it means that the people with the highest labor costs are those who are actually not as useful to capitalists. Of course not! It is out of self-interest that they seek to oppress people! And so to keep labor prices down for all involved, they must force them down further, convince people that they aren’t worth the same amount in wages! This is a contradiction of epic proportions. Now we look towards the central argument again. What does this mean for how we look at ourselves? Let’s try to get to our assumptions first. I assume that under a capitalist society, all people act in their rational self-interest, as the classical and neoclassical economists do. This means we act in a way to experience the least oppression. We do this without thinking about it, because it is so well embedded in society!

So when we act, we try to become the least useful to the economics of capitalism! And now we understand! The capitalists seek at the same time to make people more useful to them, and the people seek to make themselves less useful! And the value assigned to that person (who I’ll say is a measure of labor performed) is not determined by how useful they are. The use-value and the wage-value of the laborer are two totally independent things. And here is the contradiction!

And now how does this divide us from how we view ourselves? All of our actions are subject to how we are viewed socially, and they become commodities. Too much of one style of action, and we become lesser in wagevalue. Too much of another, and we become greater in wage-value, but lesser in use-value. We make ourselves in ways that make it easier for us to exist materially, so that we have greater wagevalue. Yet it does not benefit the capitalists to hire those greater in wagevalue!

We create ourselves as commodities. We make ourselves act in certain ways so that we are not oppressed, and thus bring oppression upon ourselves and others. We make certain portions of ourselves, and consider them as outside of ourselves, activities that affect our value! And so parts of ourselves are not parts of ourselves, and we make ourselves into people that we are not, all in the name of capital! This is how we are so often urged to attach value to ourselves, and yet we are all the time showing how absurd it is. It is a drive of the market forces of capitalism, and built on contradictions.

Do Not Despair, Organize!

by Lynn Connell

In leftist movements I have observed a certain tendency to despair that the masses will never be ready for revolution. These movements, of course, come often from institutions that do not actually engage with the masses. They pontificate, teach, and lecture, and at this not even to the masses, but to each other! They do nothing for the masses and expect their loyalty in return! And then they wonder why the masses are not ready for the revolution! It is absurd! In all reality, the masses will listen to you if you listen to them. We cannot allow ourselves this pity, this despair that we are a marginalized ideology. We have not organized the masses, so we have no ground on which to stand. There is great strength in communist doctrine, and yet these leftists do not read it! They talk about how to make the communist concepts understandable, and yet they do not realize that the easiest way to do that is to live, breathe, and organize along the communist line. It becomes accessible instantaneously. How do you explain that there is strength within the community and in community organizing when you have experience in neither? You cannot. It is an impossibility. We have to engage with the oppressed classes, those materially disadvantaged classes in the community

and learn from them how to actually organize them. Otherwise we yank the tablecloth off the table and all the dishes come with it!

Stop dealing in abstractions! Engage with the masses! These are the two greatest tools in organizing the masses themselves; when somebody says “communism doesn’t work in practice,” strive to prove them wrong. You are the measure of whether communism and organizing along class lines can work . And so when I say that we need to engage in class struggle, I mean we need to do so! If we talk and talk and talk about how we will change society, we will never change it. Talk only gets us so far. We cannot be totally afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes happen. We, as communists and organizers, are people, too.

The problem is when we allow our mistakes to demoralize us. As communists, we have to realize that we will be criticized, and we will criticize ourselves. In the words of a well-read and well-spoken comrade, “Criticism is a gift, not a curse.” It is a blessing, and it results in greater understanding of doctrine and organizing itself. We “do not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses…are on our side.”

But they are not on our side automatically! We must work with them to win them over to the cause of class struggle, and increase their consciousness in class struggle. When we say “x will not work,” or “y will not work,” perhaps we ought to try x and y first! Nothing will happen if we do not engage with the masses in the struggle against intolerable conditions!

So what do I mean when I say do not despair? It means that “we can get rid of the bad style and keep the good,” and that we and the masses are the people that make the revolutionary moment. The masses have a boundless creative energy to organize themselves, they must only be made to realize it! Do not despair! Organize!

On Revolution:

by Lynn Connell

We have, in the last year, seen the boundless energies of the masses on full display across the United States. They have arisen as a result of intolerable conditions of oppression, and they build upon the pattern of wrongs and injustices of centuries. What does this mean for the revolutionary now? We have two distinct choices: Fight or Die. The first choice is obvious. Fascism and white nationalism are dangerous forces, and the bourgeois democracy of the country is unraveling into dictatorship, stripping itself of its old trappings and acting in brutal, naked force. As a communist, I predicted that, in 2016, we would have a dictatorship within the next 15 years. We have seen that, during the pandemic, the conditions under which the masses have toiled have grown to brutal and more intolerable heights than we thought possible previously. And now what have the masses done? They have organized themselves in resistance! Just as Marx and Mao have predicted, the Masses have a boundless creative energy! The revolutionary moment is coming,

and that is no hazy prediction. It is apparent that the right is increasingly militant, that white supremacists and their allies in the government are fighting desperately to eradicate the strain of revolution that is arising. We are here to ensure that the people organize themselves along the right lines and in the most effective ways. Ultimately, that is to organize, not for elections, but for communal self-support and mutual aid.

The American Empire is crumbling, and we are witness to it. If we merely stand by and watch, we have played the part of the oppressor to the colonized and others of the oppressed masses. What do I mean? We must organize and rally along with the oppressed! That is what I mean. We have the unique opportunity to attack at the root the repressive and oppressive economic institutions of the American Empire! For all is not well in the land. Food insecurity is rising, unemployment still increasingly high. Corporations are filing for bankruptcy, and at least half of households who lost employment during the pandemic do not expect those jobs to return. We see another downturn, another recession, and if we continue in this manner, likely another depression. The free market proves once again its endemic instability. We are watching in real time the attempts of the ruling class, the white settler-colonial bourgeoisie, to destroy and appease the revolutionary forces, through two means. One is the attempt through the Democratic Party of pacifying the revolutionary masses with reforms that will achieve little. The second, however, is the attempt through the Republican Party to crack down on those same masses, and there is little debate in between. These two methods are proof that the ruling class is weakening. What should we do? We cannot fall into despair! We have seen the great energy with which the masses have turned towards organizing themselves! We understand the revolutionary moment is near! We must do three things: unite with the masses, educate the masses, and arm the masses!

Gesturing, posturing, and commanding are useless in the face of masses who do not care for us. Unite with the masses! Talk to the masses! Understand their struggles! These are the things to which we must dedicate ourselves. For understand this: “the masses and the masses alone are the motive force in the making of world history.” Will we join with them or turn on them? It is our choice, now.

by Rowen Conry

they were feeling horny, galactically. set out to fuck a planet, maybe a star.

zurn, they wear boots all the time. zurn, they got skin filmy, bathslimey. little dust motes travel around the hairless skinsurface, travelling from wartport to wartport.

little civilizations on little dustmotes in zurn's slimesea. students with little dustmote glasses, writing out the changing positions of the stars.

in the left boot, grimlick makes her home. she is working on a tiny little table to give to a family of tiny little dustfolks. she likes to run the tv in the background and munch vegetable straws out of the bag, sucking in through them before she cronches down.

"damn," says grimlick, "hard to build table when fucking zurn is this damn horny."

boots moving and moving and moving, stepping semicircle across the galactic plane.

"it's no rush," the little dustmote family tells her, "the table we've got works fine enough. though we do appreciate it, we do appreciate it."

zurn is ancient rivers from the nose and intermittent rivers from the eyes. they stop to pet a dog the size of a galaxy. they twirl of cord the size of a thousand lightyears that has their keys on the end. thumb in a belt loop or something. grimlick and longlost meet for an early lunch.

"your thumb's red 's a fir'truck" says longlost.

"bapped it with a hammer," says grimlick, "the damn gait changes when they're this fired up. i can't get nothing built for shit."

"i give up on work, times like these," says longlost, "i'm playing a video game. out to beat m' own high score."

"slime's more mucused, times like these," says grimlick, "bath runs weird. feel like i haven't gotten a decent shower in days." she sighs and sighs.

longlost is playing a video game with cowboys in it. she shoots at cowboys with her cowboy. the cowboys say things like "durn tootin" and "wrustle 'm up, boys!"

"durn tootin'" says longlost, "wrustle 'm up!"

horny, galactically. setting up dates with pCB 0.001 PLANETOID A. flirting with sirius, like that's gonna go anywhere. zurn has all the apps. their mucusfingers slide around the phonescreen, size of a starcluster arm of the spiral universe.

planets and stars love big ol mucusfolk! the websites tell them you're hot, you're hot, you're hot!

planetoid a's looking for something serious. the cobra nebula isn't interested at all. delphi and longstar are dating when the fuck did that happen?

grimlick swims through the inside of zurn, coming up through an artery to one of the vestigial organs where little dustfolk play poker and harmonica and sing songs about the couch potato days when nothing shook and the slime seas were tranquil.

"i gotta stop drinking so much" says grimlick, "gawd, i've gotta stop chewing fucking tobacco."

she watches games on the tv. dustfolk scramble on the top of a zit, kicking and punching. chaos, disorderly. grimlick sits at the bar and plays "one or the only" on the jukebox.

"thanks for the armoire" says a dustperson, "it's held up after all these years."

"damn right" says grimlick. "nothin i make is gonna fade away. nothin i make is gonna blink out snap, just like that."

when zurn fucks, folks have to decide. folks can see the star looming closeby, its heat warming the mucus on zurn's frontface. grimlick takes a good shower.

course i'm stayin, thinks grimlick, stayed this long. no sense in headin out now.

she sees boats of dustfolk on the horizon, making their way across zurn's ******** to the connected star's *********.

"fool dustfolk think they oughta live on a star," says longlost, sitting in a beachchair, reclined, sunglasses on, playing video game. "dustfolk thinkin they can live on a star. hooey! gonna burn right up, all the same."

longlost spits.

… See ya next time!