Bending my neck, I’m watching planes up overhead; I look up at planes floating bright over top of me. I’m looking up at planes passing overhead, and I see the bellies of planes flying so huge, lovely and glittering.

I’m watching bodybuilders in videos. I watch as bodybuilders organize their parts and exaggerate their masses in videos, and I see their bellies there, their bellies in such lively states of revision.

I’m watching planes overhead, looking up, and I’m seeing the bellies of bodybuilders. I’m seeing the bellies of bodybuilders flying up there, so high and so gorgeous, bellies fibrous with bulbs of muscle, slick and shining, bellies hundreds of feet long and 40,000 feet up in summer’s very blue air.

Download PDF Jet-Stream, Let’s Do It!

Performative reading 12:30-12:50, SUNDAY July 14, 2024
Gatorade served as refreshments

Derek Coulombe is an artist and writer based in Toronto who writes about embodiment, pictures, speculative physicality, and the relationships between materiality, bodies, and critical disability. His writing has previously appeared in Blackflash Magazine, ReIssue, Moire, Des Pair Quarterly, TBA Journal, Peripheral Review, and Commo, with a forthcoming piece from Hazlitt. In the summer of 2022, he carried out a short-term fellowship with the Warburg Institute (London) where he wrote an experimental work about the god-body of Herakles. In 2022-2023 he was the Chester Dale Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York).

Images 1-4 by Stefana Fratila