Minus the Spine

Well this web exclusive from journal n+1 (famous for its Gawker article) is fitting: Year in Review by Ilya Bernstein. It’s a fragmented near-prose poem full of ellipsis, and feels like the scrambled lines of a few different stories. At first the fragments seem completely unrelated but by the end the effect is that you start to piece the situations and characters together. Pretty cool. Here’s my 5 minute version:

There was a slice of broken mirror left on the floor of the moving truck.

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“You’re like our office housekeeper,” he said. I looked down at the notes I had made on my pad of paper and then at my nails.

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I sat down at my computer with my little red-striped teacup that my friend sent me in the mail from L.A. It was mint tea. I was working on chapter 4.

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“I’m glad you called,” I said. “Yeah well I’m procrastinating on some work I have to do,” he replied. “Oh… How’s the weather there?” I asked.

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At the bar we all ordered fancy martinis. We weren’t paying anyway. It was the fourth going-away party in three months.

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We took turns playing each other songs off our iPods. The rental car spat out asphalt highway behind us and up ahead the green hills dotted with sheep parted to let us through.