Four Poems by Mark Young

A line from Nelson Mandela

 

This is an America that is not

necessarily retreating from the

world stage but consolidating

its power through bullying &

 

dealmaking, where the influ-

ences of Christian nationalism

& the presidential vices are the

most apparent. Ushering in a

 

new golden age, says the new

National Security Strategy; but

to others it is the onset of a new

age of fear, of repression, of de-

 

privation & virtual slavery. To

oppose it is to not merely cast

off one's chains, it is a renewal

of life & liberty without pursuit.

 

 

notes from a broad

 

It's not that I think the world is broken, just that pieces keep falling off. At least, that's what I assume the debris around me is. & everywhere I go, more, & different, debris. Clips on YouTube, search results from Google, memories for sale on eBay, trivial newsbites from trivial news-sites; all mixed in with lines from millenium-old novels, fragments from mythology, subtexts, signs in shop windows, gall & philosophers' stones, lines from the decades of pop I have lived through, thoughts I & others have had. Or may still yet have.

It's a kind of bricolage, which means I'm a kind of bricoleur. I take these things I find around me & put them together; at least I try to. Not to repair the world but to see how the found objects look when rearranged—a parallel universe perhaps, a history or histories rewritten. Or, perhaps the world as it really is, because everything I write about comes out of the world around me.

We are subjected to information overload these days. So much so, in fact, that it becomes impossible to take it all in. Warhol's 15 minutes of fame has been reduced to 15 seconds so it fits as a soundbite in the evening news. Where it blurs, sandwiched between competing 15 seconds, goes digital, & we lose the last few words because the pre-programmed ads come in over the top & we end up not knowing if it was the grapple tackle or the retirement of Muttiah Muralitharan that caused the floods in, was it, Pakistan. Peccavi, cabled General Napier. I have Sind. It's a funny old world, & I milk the humor as much as I can.

 

 

Le Cicérone

after the 1948 painting by René Magritte

The temperance advocates come

knocking at my door but I haven't

had a drink for days. Nor do I

feel like one. Sorry to disappoint.

 

The pentecostal proselytizers pause

on the pathway. I instantly recog-

nize the pairing, can see more pairs

over their shoulders, say no thanks

 

politely to them before they have a

chance to open their mouths. & they,

inured to rejection, offer their equally

polite blessings & walk quietly away.

 

Then the politicians, the outliers only —

independents who seek to save the

planet; or those far to the right, want-

ing to stop immigration or gender e-

 

quality or renewable energy sources.

The mainstream parties mainly leave

us alone. Impersonal. Letterbox drops

& billboards. Polling booth handouts.

 

In the early evening the cicerone comes

calling. Said: "Saw you had a lot of

visitors today, thought you might like

to know their antecedents. What drives

 

them, what is behind their focus on a

singular cause whether it be bigotry

or hope or a need for an answer as to

why the world turned out the way it

 

has, & how it might be rearranged to

match their vision of it." "Come in" I

said "& get comfortable. Will make

you a coffee. Going to be a long night."

 

 

Melania

 

is a cheeseball infomercial of staggering

inertia, made out of car rides & cold silences,

so polished it slips out of (her) hands. I

immediately regret not buying popcorn

so at least one of my senses would be enter-

tained. It's a gilded trash remake of The Zone

of Interest, a forty-million-dollar journey into

the void, a film that should have been called

Day of the Living Tradwife, a lazy, bafflingly

incurious documentary that insults the

person it is trying to celebrate. All the money

in the world can’t make good propaganda, &

this is shameless propaganda that could put

you to sleep, a preening, scowling void of

pure nothingness, an unabashed, fly-on-the-

gilded-wall fawn job, a tedious, criminally

shallow puff piece, a Slovenian sphinx flick

nixed. Pure, endless hell, an unbelievable

abomination of filmmaking that if they

showed it on a plane, people would still walk

out. 20 stage-managed days in the life portrays

world events as B-roll between wardrobe

changes, feels entirely at a remove from any

objective reality, a face like a fist that makes

(her) look like Marie Antoinette skulking in

her cake-filled chateau. This must be the night-

mare endpoint of celebrity documentaries.

Does Melania dream of AI-generated sheep?

 

Sources:

BuzzFeed, Decider, empireonline, Los Angeles Times, MS Now, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, The Independent, The Irish Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wrap, Vanity Fair, Variety, & Vulture.

Two Poems by Kevin Armor Harris

I carry this noose

I carry this noose around in case anyone needs it, they only have to ask. After each use, I untie it, wash it thoroughly, and reconstruct it carefully. Those are sad days, after it’s been used, when I’m waiting for the fibres to dry and don’t feel I can go out. One matronly lady has tried it several times, just can’t seem to get on with it but credit to her for trying I say, it doesn’t suit everyone. It certainly suited one feller who sought to sport it, décor de moribondage, at a party that went wrong, or right, or both perhaps, things can be both right and wrong, in the end, it seems. Sometimes I think I should get more up to date, maybe offer some of these fashionable nylon numbers, you can have a range of colours, I expect the townsfolk would like that. But I’m a traditionalist, I grew up with the touch of yarn, the plies and braids of hemp, the artificial is not for me.

 

I went to the sage

I went to the sage to ask if she would take me as a student. A long journey through four seasons. She spoke quietly and simply, glancing at me from time to time as she drew skillfully on a sheet. This had the effect of making me try to keep very still, without having been asked, but it also caused me to be slightly inattentive. Finally she explained that I was not ready to be her student, and gave me the portrait, so that I understood immediately. Thus am I able to say, I have learned directly from the wisdom of the sage.

 

Kevin Armor Harris

Three Poems by Edward Johnson

TRESPASS

 

To the North, a thickening,

smog or haze, fog or smoke,

nature made or someone to blame?

My mom FaceTimes me. She spotted another

rando perspiring in her tomatoes.

On one level I’m nearly certain

these creepers don’t exist. But who knows?

They keep us on our toes.

On screen we vibrate—one box

in Oregon, one in Indiana.

She tells me that the last time

my lips were purple like this

I had thrush. She tells me that she’s

rewatching Downton Abbey and

that it’s astounding

how much she missed the first time.

As she talks, bugs

kamikaze the screened-in porch,

guitar chords from the canyon,

a drop in pressure,

an alertness, crickets.  

A shadow moves behind her,

along the privacy fence

tip-toeing the property line.

THE NOISE

 

Sea mist salts the lips out here

where the red edge of earth plunges

into the misnamed sea as we power

through our daily practice.

Mindfulness is mindlessness.

Drain your head like a dirty bathtub.

Profit has Progress pinned in the grass.

Static crashes in from headquarters.

Someone misgendered someone’s child.

Meanwhile, the corporate oligarchs

and their oxy-addicted serfs

have simplified their non-fluid gameplan:

the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,

the sick get sicker, the earth gets warmer.

These aggressions require no microscope.

You see them on the bodycam footage,

you smell them when our cities burn,

you hear them when our neighbors are taken away.

An oil derrick humps itself

back toward darkness and fossil.

Pelicans kamikaze, catch as catch can.

A few hate-filled precincts have yet to report.  

Villagers await their blood-stained sheet.

Our better selves have been gerrymandered

into deformed Lego dragons

and we’ve lost the ability to breathe,

to acknowledge the reality of the breeze,

to understand which way the wind blows.

The purveyors of wellness know this,

so they flutter down on gossamer wings

and devour us whole like cocktail wieners. 

PANGOLIN UNFURLING

  April 2020

 

Things were bumping along 

then we awoke under house arrest,

a predator in the mist,

our reality hyphenated, asterisked,

ellipses spilled across the floor.

Our experts had misread the recipe,

transposed the pinch of faith

with the dollop of science.

The bunkered typists twitched

and spat: It’s the Chinese! 

The liberals! The homeless!

We all stewed in our juices.

The Oregon Health Authority urged

everyone to press pause on rimming.

Pure entropy knocked on the door

looking for all the world like the delivery person

taking a proof of life photo of our dinner.  

Randomness is like that.

It wants us to see patterns,

the beginnings of order.

Language is a hurricane of faith,

punctuation a thief.

The anti-maskers demanded

that the economy be reopened,

especially the part that sells teeth.