Michael Broek’s chapbook, The Logic of Yoo, was issued by Beloit Poetry Journal in 2011. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Literary Imagination, Pif, MiPOesias, Fourteen Hills, The Sycamore Review, The Cimarron Review, Parthenon West Review, Pif, MiPOesias, and elsewhere in print and online. He has held a scholarship to the […]
Elska is not a word I expect you to know but to someone in Iceland it is love, which is also nothing I expect you to know, but means etymologically there is steam under the earth which may gush from its fissures any time of day or night but often when no one is watching, […]
6. He had heard of this John C. Yoo, what he had written US Code while soldiers packed black-hooded men into planes […]
Of course, there were the “torture memos,” OED which could signal, if they were metaphoric, the little notes […]
The irony of Yoo didn’t evade him – the inverse universe of the I. When his wife had said, You, she meant, I feel. When he had said, You, he meant, I wish I hadn’t. That equation, as he tried to repair the […]
Notes: Torture=31 (usage in all of Shakespeare’s works) Techniques≠Tortures (see below) Number of techniques usually needed to bring detainee to “baseline dependent state”=3 (1, nudity; 2, sleep deprivation, with shackling & diaper; 3, dietary manipulation) Number of […]
He had secrets. Not a blooming day went by when he didn’t think about what he hadn’t yet thought about. Absence: enough butter, enough wine, enough silence, enough language, enough clean wash blowing in the breeze. Enough children, enough times yes was said without regret. Such experiments, just like all other matters, were, of course, […]
In a paper he wrote for another student, the topic was voyeurism & he found that when Marie Antoinette was imprisoned in the Conciergerie awaiting execution, une garde never left her room. She slept, ate & prayed all under his gaze, his body hidden behind a tall screen but his head protruding above, like […]