Oral Argument, by David DeGusta

an erasure poem of the transcript of the Supreme Court hearing in Free Speech Coalition v. Ken Paxton, January 15, 2025

may it please
the most
Texas

aberrant holding defies
adult users
abandon strict scrutiny
an emerging wave
unduly chilling
does not denigrate

compelling interest
what would that look like?
short of the transactional

private rights
avowedly hostile
tailored with sensitivity
flashing an ID
whoa, whoa, whoa
from personal experience

so good
right or wrong
all the gaps

you know, printed smut
it would almost surely satisfy
I'm going to press you, all right?
I'll take it
I'll stop there
Yeah. Good idea.

a very large universe
stretching upwards
lines up
so conspicuous, so inexplicable

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David DeGusta is a writer and translator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned his MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2023. He translated the Ethiopian novel Oromay by Baalu Girma (Soho Press), and his own writing has been published in Boulevard, the Cincinnati Review, and the Masters Review, among other places. He can be found online at www.davidwrites.net.