Poems and Texts

from Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love by Anna Moschovakis

THE STORY SHE WAS READING was about a forty-three-year-old unarmed civilian shot to death in a Tampa Bay movie theater by a seventy-two-year-old retired police captain who’d become ‘agitated’ by the man during previews. Eyewitnesses said the victim had been ‘texting loudly.’ Popcorn had been thrown.

She looked down from the screen at the bead of blood on her thumb. She watched it form a rivulet that ran down her palm and onto the white down comforter her friend had laid out on the bed for a Ukrainian folksinger arriving that night to teach a workshop in bilij holos at a nearby club. The blood formed a spot, brighter than the bead itself.

‘He was a good, genuine person,’ it was said of the deceased.
“He was just a funny guy. He brought life into every room.’
‘Fate brought these two people together–it was ridiculous.’

None of the witnesses tried to stop the altercation. The movie was about Navy SEALS on a mission in Afghanistan. Its title was Lone Survivor.

 

Anna Moschovakis

Anna Moschovakis books of poetry include They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (2016) and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), and her translations include books and texts by Annie Ernaux, Albert Cossery, Claude Cahun, Jean-Luc Nancy, Pierre Alféri, Samira Negrouche, and Robert Bresson. Moschovakis is a long-time member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, where she heads up the Dossier Series for investigative texts. She lives in Brooklyn and Delaware County, New York, where in 2015 she co-founded Bushel Collective, an experimental storefront space for art, agriculture and action. Her first novel, Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love, will be published in summer 2018.

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