These sonnets are a naked play for legitimacy, like as if Lord Harrington had written sonnets to the queen instead of a mock-epic pamphlet on toilets. You can read them line by line, dollar by dollar, or throw the bottle against a wall and spend the feathers, or place the bottle on your shelf and admire the striations of money, which will spend, and the mark of a hand, which will live on past its mark and then not. Or you can imagine in the curled bills the phonemes at play against the discipline of the sonnet’s metrical grid. A poem that is bitter, or poem you imagine that is better than a poem could be. Money!

They’re ‘published’ (?) by Hostile Books and owe part of their inspiration from Danika Stegeman LeMay for summoning my words into Sporklet 15. I’ve also drawn abiding drive from my original Hostile Book collaborations w/Ryan Kaveh Sheldon and Angela Veronica Wong–and from the lovingly curated and impossible to shelve precarious and sometimes rotten objects in the Small Press Poetry collection at SUNY Buffalo, especially Ferrum Wheel.

“Sonnet on Fourteen…” are in a series of 14. Contact j o e s c i r e h a l l @ g m a i l . com if you’re interested in purchasing one of the remaining copies ($28.28 includes shipping and the ability to feed the sonnet into a vending machine).

“To make love, turn to page 121. / To die, turn to page 172,” Bernadette Mayer, “[You jerk you didn’t call me up]”.