Four Poems by Mark Young

periods of hypoglycemia

 

In a truly conservative

approach, sunken cobble-

stones, with dirt thrown

 

or grass grown over them,

provide form & function.

The brain releases dopa-

 

mine; sugar alters the chem-

istry. Swahili agents move

inland in search of slaves.

 

 

Ecumenical

 

Before we go back to that crucial road trip, as Umberto Eco wrote, where society is shaped & served by machines, the superhero must embody the Standard Model, that theory explaining how the universe is built, & how its existence in the last minute of the national interest is the hardest millennia-old question to be wrestled with.

 

Right now it's all settling, & he's starting to feel dark matter that intellectual property laws & income streams can’t detect, but it's important to note that the history of vibrations against one's temples ascribes all such sensations to those ancient Greeks who earned a living by producing music, movies, pharmaceuticals, fashion goods, & other popular products.

 

 

Enterprises of subversion & destruction

 

The polished surface throws

back the arrow. Beneath it, 

handwritten in a painstaking

artificial script, a script from

the convent, is "an American

 

may possibly know the customs

of your country better than you

do." Visible form is excavated.

Shape dissipates. About this

ambiguity I am ambiguous.

 

To reproduce & to articulate; to

imitate & to signify; to look &

to read. What misleads us is the

inevitable futility of converting

the text to some glaring color

 

when a simple swipe of a rag

could soon erase it & reduce

phoneticism to mere gray noise or

inconspicuous article. Treasure

the pearls of what you have read.

 

 

Sources:

This Is Not a Pipe, by Michel Foucault

The Ladies' Book of Etiquette (1860), by Florence Hartley

 

 

High flow drainage crossings

 

Umbrellas lined the delay

in work commitments on

her Facebook page. Cited

as a possible reason was the

discovery of four pigs that

had been slaughtered in

bizarre circumstances. Flam-

boyant headpieces will now

be the order of the day says

the Climate Council's Tonto

thru to the Lone Ranger report.

Two Poems by BCAB

Kiyhun

 

Have u seen the sun light yet today?
mind blowing
        A sobering look,
        in its thousands of photos
(All-American),
        how it gives this world of busted brackets
exclusive to THOUSANDS of children
why?

I mean why am I human?
There’s an actual crisis this time around,

this dude puts me under and says
I’m just going to enjoy my way through life
for I enjoy kihyun’s hypocrisy (he repeated this)
hypocrisy hypocrisy hypocrisy
But this sucks. A magician tried to hypnotize me!

I’ve had enough. So this morning
I stood up
for Texas, and America,
and most of all
the Sonic fanbase
our team that clearly didn’t play to its full potential.

yes it’s true,

        I am a human

but the crisis ends

            only
    if a magician can really hypnotize me

put me under and teach me to say
it is all sober‒and at the lake you can swim
so the sun can rise to say
    it is true: I am an unlockable character

 

 

Guitar-shaped Forest

 

 

I met Money one day and I said: “You are CEO of Google,
Sundar Pichai. It’s World War 11 and
This is a hydrogen bomb.”
While I am dreaming, schools are shut
and teachers read lessons on the radio:

This Dad shaved his head
A storm washed this puffer fish away
This Man Planted Guitar-Shaped Forest

That is a good idea.
We should plant various fruit trees on city sidewalks
and everyone (including the homeless)
would eat all year. It could last lifetimes.

I won an award for suggesting that
students should focus our sculpture into scrap:
that there are stones to be broken. There are stones in Romania,
for instance, which grow or multiply 3D portraits
from DNA found on cigarette butts.
It’s the only thing on earth with this capacity.

 

 

BCAB

Two Poems by Howie Good

Ashes to Ashes

A human body produces five pounds of ash when burned. Twenty-five tons of ash from the Topf & Sons ovens in the crematorium had been spread as fertilizer on the surrounding fields. Whenever the wind came whipping in, it would churn up a bitter brown smog of topsoil and ash that stung the skin and burned the nose and mouth and choked the lungs. Visibility shrank to almost nothing. Cart horses refused to budge and received terrible beatings from their enraged masters. Looters smashed shop windows. Countless frantic calls for help went unanswered. We look back and shake our heads and tell ourselves we aren’t like those people. No, not at all. 

One of Those Days

None of us even knew God was dying until we heard He was dead. There was nothing the TV analysts could adduce that would stop the borders from bleeding or a shooting war from starting. A crow laughed at the old Jew being forced by masked vigilantes to climb a tree and chirp like a bird. I was inside this whole time tinkering with a machine for testing the concept that rocks communicate with each other. Parts and tools were scattered everywhere, but I wasn’t ready to say yet whether it was the machine or the concept that was flawed.

Three Poems by Livio Farallo

perpetuating the melodrama
 
I.
could you see
the look on my face
when you told me the
saddle was on the
back of a sand dune
that you could ride
anywhere,
 
as long as you wanted.
 
that it would never need
any water or sleep
and if its lips began
to bleed,
well,
it was a mirage that
simply had to be.
 
II.
you tumbled down the stairs
so slowly i was able
to shoot a roll of film
showing that
every step was
a new angle that
burned into you like a
wedge of acid.
i bit my lip sitting
on a chair you had broken
but never closed my eyes.
 
III.
you’d like to take a shower
and wash out the rorschach
ink from your memory
but you know damn well
that pills do a better job
and they can be your
mattress and diaper
and refrigerator
until the side effects,
or an emergency room doctor
slaps your face.
until the music is over.
until new earthquakes.

 
beaten up by the day

the wind goes through my heart like a screw on a day so obtuse it
couldn’t bend anymore. a summer day is a vase knocked over. a burial
for seeds that never rooted. a straw-yellow day is seldom as dry as
you think and i jump on it with heavy boots, even if it is as useless as an old
broom. i remember many years ago it killed a mouse. now it drips like
a faucet and i try to stomp the water into retreat. it is my day,
eventual and painful. i can chew it like cud. i can walk around it.
but it pulls like a fish hook and i never bleed enough to bleed for
the last time. the wind crumbles me like cork into a silly battalion
of pieces the spiders walk over. today is a large ripe day. a juicy
abdomen threatening to burst. it sweeps me down wooden steps like
dead pollen. i am immeasurable in time.


digits bigger than myself

cultures suffocate
as the zipper is
pulled up to the last
tooth by fingers
bigger than countries.
 
fertile land turned to fog;
the vengeance of worms
building up through the day
sucks the sun into the soil
at night.
 
horizons with red skies
are allegories.
earth’s rotations are illusions
unless you stand inside the
observatory.
 
orbits
slow as eons,
fossilize
before they complete.
 
i am a sugar cube in a feedbag
of oats and heavy syrup,
and while evolution offers ample
change
it ignores its tangents
until they decompose in blind alleys.
 
i am stuck on a pincushion
of unbelievable numbness
thrown into a drawer after
insects are mounted under glass
by fingers bigger than continents.