Watch The Throne

ST. AUGUSTINE: IF NO ONE ASKS ME, I KNOW WHAT IT IS. IF I WISH TO EXPLAIN IT TO HIM WHO ASKS ME, I DO NOT KNOW.
(PART TWO OF THE CONATUS IMPROVISATIONS)
Gregory Pardlo

Prince calls it little because he imagines a woman's body
waist up, the rest Corvette, which is French for a sort of girlie
warship, a chimerical twist on the Freudian cockpit. Who
wouldn't want a belly button for a windshield? All us baby
ball turret gunners would submit to mother love as long as we
were allowed the illusion that we commanded the vessel. This
may be why we give them names like Bessy and Lila Mae,
but our cars are more prosthesis than portmanteau. We say
horses that muscle and gun, but idle next to one and hear
its sputtering. Promethean delirium like a hound's
twitching dream of dogfights in biplanes that strafe
the velvet sky with leathery helmets of their little red
barons. We would have swooped the oil fields where pilot
lights burned like Zippos at a rock concert to safeguard our
memories of weekends washing father's Verte, fearing both its
pliant fire and our need to ride in pursuit of some unconscious
joy, certain only that we'd know it if it could ever be found.

from Gregory Pardlo's Digest
recommended by the Pulitzer Prize Committee,
​discovered on an expedition at The Harvard Book Store

WATCH THE THRONE
Adam Stone

The video jukebox has Bruce Springsteen opening for The Backstreet Boys
without apology. This muddy festival of a poolhall seems content to 
slur along with Bon Jovi's Livin' On A Prayer as it rolls into Jay-Z and Kanye's
Who Gon Stop Me. There is a refreshing lack of class warfare in this red
velvet nowhere. The bartender retired from smoking at his boyfriend's
request but sneaks outside for the seventy degree colder air and the
snarls of those more committed to cancer. Who better to talk to than those who have
resigned themselves to die faster if it makes them feel slightly less
anxious to be currently alive? Who wants to be alive now? Other than these
carolers of incongruous lyrics, dripping their hop dusted water over these
scotchguarded couches, still crusty with the scheduling manager's
leavings from a server's Christmas vacation request. The bartender
covers their shifts like Febreeze in a house of pot smoking cats. If your
drink isn't free tonight, you must be an ex. When the holiday revelry ends, the
scheduling manager and the ordering manager, who has taste-tested half the
servers himself, return from their island getaways with their Not As
Oblivious As They Wish spouses, and their probable kids, they sit the 
bartender down to discuss the discrepancies between the damned
inventory and the stagnant cashflow. They chuckle the word 
embezzlement and name check the owners of every bar in the city like
plastic police badges. The bartender, who used to work on the
docks, smiles his loyal following of teeth at them, shows them how he's
downloaded incriminating security footage to his phone and
whispers Who gon' stop me? Who gon' stop me, huh?