Stood Up
By Will Cordeiro
I’ve sat here long enough to know.
More fool, the longer I still wait —
my food arrives just as I’m going.
Certain you were caddish, I slurp
chilled radish soup. I nurse my drink.
Fiddle with my spoon, my salad
fork. I live by proxy, pondering
the moonlight groping passersby.
Plucked off a ring, I tuck a napkin
in my lap. I’ve happily refused
to empty out your fresh cut
wildflowers. Left to languish,
their limp throats beg one sip.
Their sapless, withered husks
fall wrinkled in a pot like old,
forgotten letters — they crumble
when a leaf is touched. I puzzle
out long afternoons we’d pocket
any pebble; splash willingly in
puddles; bounce along, flashing
one more button lost. Startled
by a champagne’s pop, pink
gelatin quibbles with suspended
fruit. An hour skips. Down the bar
I spot a silver fox who’s nibbling
the olive from his drink. All solid
things must melt. Just for the hell
of it, I toss one down the hatch,
no chaser. Suck an ice cube
riddled with a star. I chat
him up. I stroke his blazer,
his stubbled face. I take him back
to my place and we fuck.
Whitney Lynn, Inertia Studies (Peaches), 2020-2023, 4K Video Loop.
Will Cordeiro has work published in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street and is the author of Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024). Will is also co-author of Experimental Writing: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the forthcoming New Foundations of Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2026). Will received an MFA and a Ph.D from Cornell University. Currently, Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Whitney Lynn has staged performances at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the de Young Museum; screened videos at venues including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and El Espacio 23; and created public artworks for the San Diego International Airport, Reno City Hall, and Seattle’s Burke-Gilman Trail. She was the inaugural National Artist-in-Residence at The Neon Museum in Las Vegas and has completed residencies at institutions such as the Internet Archive and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. Currently, she is an Artist Fellow with Black Cube, a nomadic museum for site-specific public art. Born on a military base in Arizona, Lynn studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, earned a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is now an Associate Professor of Photo/Media and New Genres at the University of Washington.