Nocturne, Tonight

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Seth Canner

From the boathouse we speak of no one. With my foot on the water
I feel the moon outside. Angelo
has given birth to a horde of dragonflies, they come
in the night— they whisper

that the climate is changing, to splay my hips because anything
is changing.
I write to warn my family: Dearest Mother & Father
The terrain a womb, is splitting—there is little left and how will we eat.
I am still addicted to drugs. But don’t worry—
the air will dry up soon and all that will be left is this sandy road
that provides no relief.
No.
No sound of crickets, or hyacinths—
No sound
but the sound of dragonflies
and no relief. I came to expect more but there is little more
than my foot on the water
and the curved bone of this dying moon.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Miss Hooker

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Gale Acuff

I don’t want to die, I’m ten years old and
I don’t want to die, I’ve barely begun
living but one day I have to, I mean
die, whether it’s tomorrow or ten years
from now or ninety, I may as well die
now I tell the ceiling in my bedroom,
it will pass it on to the roof and may
-be the roof give it to the sky and may
-be it will float up to Heaven and God
will hear it, maybe even listen, may
-be even act and make me immortal
and never too old up until the end
which will never come. I told my Sunday
School teacher what I wish for – long for – but
she was angry and made me let her pray
over me to get the demon of self
-ishness out but I don’t think it’s taken,
now all I think of are cool slender fingers
on my scalp, it’s summertime, and what to
do now that I’ve fallen in love. Tonight
I’ll pray about that – I’ll be up a while.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Insulae

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Alexander Booth
Little to remember now but more stone floors. Another cot. The cold. The window looked onto the backs of older buildings, ochre mostly, faded, or fallen off. Inside all a chipped, thinning white. Tattered rolling blinds and a small corner table, covered with an oilcloth. A language as of yet unlearned. Rent, in cash, to be left in a bible. You were alone. Supposedly there was a daughter or distant cousin too, though you never heard or saw her. The building faced a bus terminus and busy intersection, cut, in one direction, by the tramline, in the other, a long row of simple ex-votos, cut by simple hands.




Most of the time you were in the kitchen. It was narrow, and looked onto a couple of trees, a few pre-fab high-rises tinged in blue. Bluish evenings. Haunt, hope, hue. Still the light was warm despite winter’s grey monotony: ice-rain, snow, frostblooms before your morning mouth, all the way up through May. The range was to the left, a corner bench tucked in on the right. On the table two empty teacups, half bottle, ashtray. Was there a plant? She had a cat. The radio was almost always on, tuned to a local station. You remained a guest.




This is the room you always come back to. Twin bed, shuttered window, tiny desk. The walls have stayed a pale pink, you think, the crown molding white, and the toilet’s behind a cheap accordion door, next to a handheld showerhead and drain. Across the street, palms and giddy cries from a parochial courtyard. The sky is soft October blue, and, from here, the main train station is just a few blocks away, like being young. It hasn’t been renovated yet, and the seer whose book you have with you isn’t dead. The seer you’re looking for, twenty years (but the distance between you and you now is longer). At first, of course, the city was a stranger. Soon after, the center. This is the room you always come back to. Here it is always warm, and everything’s just at the edge of beginning.
Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

In Memoriam

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Chris Oakey

One by one they all leave us behind
Walking into surf or slipping through trees they leave us
On long slabs of bitumen who created this language – we survive.

It seemed fitting that he should go forever
As the world turned away from the heat, and the long burn
Of the roads he knew so lonely sent him up.

Grass lines the verges. In summer the birds came down to eat the seeds.
They bobbed and turned like clowns, raucous and ready to scatter
Should the mower trundle out to mark its tenor on the season.

A chill crept out amongst the scrub
and all the lorikeets shuffled and thought of flying.
Across the headlands and promontory spikes

A metal roof threw the light back into evening.
Somewhere an engine hummed, and cows
by the roadside sent out a rumour in low moan.

His was an old sunlight. The falling quiet over grass that bends
With wind tunnelled by magpies. Their ventures
Sought the limits of the season. We waited for the blade to start back up.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Loyal and Wanting to Have a Good Time

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Nadine Brown

Everyone in my family lives to about ninety-six.
Unless they stop working, then they die the next day,
like my Uncle did when he was fifty-two.

My grandfather dropped dead in between fixing barbed-wire fences and moving sheep.
In his 95th year, he sent out Christmas cards that had a photo of him on his horse.
My mum said that’s just showing off.

My grandma was in a wheel chair for ten years,
but she still kept sewing and looking after other people’s kids.
I have the pinafore she was half-way through when she died.

When I was twelve my mum’s cancer came back.
They said she was dying and I was to become an orphan and live with a lady from
church. The woman lived in a big house by the river, I was half looking forward to it.

If you did a dot-to-dot of my mum in the stars, her shape would be a city sky line –
always busy and spreading out, all the lights on all the time.
I’d be in the shape of a dog, loyal and wanting to have a good time.

When I was thirty I got my grandma’s disease, where all your joints get strangled by
your bad thoughts. In the morning it’s the worst, like someone poured concrete on you,
if you don’t move it’ll set. I’d sit on the side of the bed and think about my grandma’s
pigeon wing hands, always fluttering, and marvel at how she did anything at all.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

halcyon hurts

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Claire Cao

two girls swim in sunset bisque
wheeling a bike with shattered spokes. twin
apparitions, they drift by, lit
in soft orange—a momentary melange
of bruised knees, wet eyes, inflamed
gravel-scratched arms

overlaid, that dusty negative: rollerblades
scraping down the hot streak of first avenue,
your feral rattling laugh as
my knee unzips
on summer-baked tar

arid atoms of earth. squashed darts
caught in hair. your hands, powdered
with mammee noodle-salt, holding the gash
shut, steady. blood webbing
over our pinafores, over flesh
a baptism that binds
disparate matter into one

how do I disinfect these
phantom wounds protect against
all this useless
tactile knowledge
of a stranger

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Order of Birds

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Natalie Rose Dyer

First are Kookaburras tipping sun into
a saucer of algid earth, into ghostly looms
of morning, slipping a cure into our
sleeping mouths. The dream world thrashes
out scenarios of human desire, subjugation,
subsides to the libertarian musings of birds
bidding for dawn. The constant access
of Thrush to diminutive rehearsed rhythms
balancing over first light, another unknown
bird rocks the ledge, picks the lock,
a sort of Woodpecker perhaps rat-a-tat-tats.
Magpie’s next, one clear chorus.
Kookaburra gathers again,
starts up its winding machine,
a contraption spitting, fitting, starting.
All the while that anonymous bird
cracks open the disc of fractious light –
gains access to the wet throat of morning.
Cockatoos are last, come screeching over the
crush of warmth as if to stifle back a divinity
whose opened gate has now discharging
un-numbered wonders; coition of the elements.
This unknown bird, a mirror, clinks far away,
dips its hot needle, its unending thread
into the light-pool, stitches a patina
over earth; extinguished gold, rusted lint.
The morning is opened, Magpie confirms it.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

High Straight Trunk

Posted on May 1, 2020 by S J Finn

All morning she counts the beat of crickets until the
grass makes a noise like scrunched paper. Ants take
a turn over the hump of her foot. Heat curls the air away
from trees and the call of a shrike is snatched, blurred.
Her eyes stream the fizzling sun, turn the brown paddocks
fealty and behind the forest’s scalp the throb of machine is
palpable, read by touch, its faltering efforts swaying time
until the high straight trunk falls, pounds to the ground,
the epicentre of a quake, silence sticky in the aftermath …

… clean sheets slide, a territory of wide rock, plateau of wood
and earth, sweat; grass more ascorbic, the prickle of warmth
deep in her lungs, head sinking into pillow. Downstairs, pots
are clanking, water runs, a knife hammers. She falls again as
if from a height to her straightened position, her cleaved post.

Light burns like fuel: match-heads, sparklers.
Training an eye, she wonders if it’s possible to see
the dark move in. There’s a section in the garden seeping
purple: changing from oak-green to mint to lavender.

The land has been cleared, but inside there’s mouse-shit in
the shadows especially where the floors meet the wall.
Lifting her head to calls, she glimpses the last of the light. It
shifts in metal slides like blades spinning, and there’s
sweeping, the harrying of clutter, a banging broom, clashing
plate, the music of cutlery. ‘It’s ready,’ says a caller.
Shimmying across the bed of cool hard slate, the dark
shortens her grasp. She stands to a dizzying height.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

untitled

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Ben Mazer

It rains. One steps up through the haze
of tan and violet to the maze
of memory–misty where one stands,
twisting, separating strands.

The hour’s dim, and no one calls;
obligation mutely falls
through floors of mountains, origin:
anonymously you begin.

The blasted lantern of the nerves
lights up the sky, where starlight curves;
below, on earth, some few pass by
sheer constructs of identity.

They swirl and plaster every sense,
unto a law of difference:
not clear how long, or what direction,
subsume the nerves in their inspection.

The skeleton’s examination
evokes, incites, brief procreation:
filed away, some future date
astonished memories locate.

The seraphs of pedestrians
seep into violets, into tans,
breaching desire’s boulevards;
throw down the last of evening’s cards.

There is no way to formulate
identity’s raw nervous state:
it seems to slip into the world,
by stellar facts and atoms hurled

into the mythic stratosphere.
Ideas formulate the seer.
Genesis sans génération.
A change of trains at London station.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

The Messages

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Stephen Sexton

On Sunday afternoons the price of broccoli
may well drop by eighty percent,
the noodles bear the pallor of the travel sick,
but the uncontracted can’t be picky

though the troubled, otherworldly stare of hunger
only adds to the spooky aesthetic
lazy or at-their-wits’-end detectives expect
from their local psychic correspondent;

should the missing person remain undiscovered
in the abandoned trophy factory
and the only recourse be supernatural,
it’s Cheryl who is waiting by the phone.

Hers is a dying trade—there’s no future in it,
she’d say—but a gift wasted is a sin,
however hard it is raising handfuls of boys
on a couple of hours of work a month

and Agony-Aunting for trashy magazines,
but harder is catching the cashier’s eye
and seeing not the routine mysteries of love
and divorce, but a moonlit winter’s night

a multi-story car park a decade away,
from somewhere, the quick bristling of fists,
and knowing the boys will be teenagers by then
or were already, or never won’t be.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Should I

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Curtis Bauer
tell my wife/ clean my ears more often/ open one door and close another/ stand to pee or rise and use the toilet/ organize my days the way others organize theirs/ attempt to learn the language of the blue jay/ define by learn I don’t mean speak, I mean should I listen and not shout/ acquire a gun/ do pushups every time I want to look at porn/ call my father or wait for him to call me/ document how long I will wait/ count how many books I read a day, month, year/ try to write everything down/ forget my role and the rules I used to live by/ be afraid to start or to finish/ take greater pride in my person, home, possessions/ do away with my possessions/ save more than I spend/ keep writing here until my time is up/ clean out my ear canals more often/ listen to my body/ announce my intentions to each person I meet, such as “I will walk by you w/o harming you,” or “I find you attractive but I promise not to act upon my attraction,” or “I see you but I will act like I do not because seeing you makes me uncomfortable,” or “do you see me because I want to be seen,”/ know how much ink is in my well/ stop writing before I have finished what I want to say/ share the uncomfortable bits with strangers/ share the uncomfortable bits with friends/ read a new book a week in order to hide my anxiety/ spend more time in my yard because that is what people with yards do/ attempt silence/ know if my body is silent, my face, my scent, my strength, i.e., my power/ worry about leaks or the deluge/ know how many more miles my car can drive/ risk everything for this/ tell you I got a papercut on your letter kissing you goodnight/

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Anthropocene

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Anthony Lawrence

While there are other words I’d prefer
to break down into the sum 
of their syllabic parts,
contraband, for example, or corollary,
for now this catch-cry for the age 
will do, and so I begin, and when 
I have taken each sound apart 
to find definitions
of climate, geology, human intervention 
and anything else within
its musical componentry,
I return, not to another name
for illicit goods, but to Licmetis,
white relative of the sulphur-
crested cockatoo,
once a full-time denizen
of the interior, now a resident
in rowdy flocks that number
many thousands, driven
to the margins, to the coast,
away from dying crops
and a killing absence of water,
I refer to the Corella,
the natural extension
of a word that means
being resultant from something else,
and how corollary
also applies to corally,
given a red tide of coral spawn
on a reef, which in turn
brings four syllables
from where they’ve been
hiding in plain sight
in the Anthropocene.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Answers Taken from HIV Questionnaires

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Austere Rex Gamao

1. There’s too much love
2. Spreading in him
3. I let him in because he was afraid of me
4. When I accidentally cut myself I screamed
at the sight of my own blood, alive
on the sink
5. He was white when he told me in a Japanese hotel.
6. Gay cancer dancer
7. Bitter when it goes down and heavy
8. Fainted on train platform first.
9. in the bathroom with music
10. moth eaten mouth leaden
11. She didn’t know her father was the needle
12. N/A
13. He cut my hair in a style that could last a year
14. around the corner, a mall with close
friends
15. Will die from complications of –
never as simple as tuberculosis
16. The doctor is very handsome
17. hate him hate him hate him!!!
18. Levitating over me
19. My body will drown my body with my body
20. Mother thinks he’s still fat
21. hurts even the second time
22. He hugged me on the inside
23.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

call collect

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Xiaoran Shi

well, lately, i am the grim reaper.
death trails in my wake — flies lie
belly up on my windowsill, side by
side as if they were star-cross’d
lovers, drunk on abjection, on lye.
melons lose a lifetime overnight,
growing marrow soft w/ the inching
light of day, sweeter than smog.
even succulents give in, preferring
the company of dirt. forgive me.
i said lately, but i meant earlier too.
the years read as obituaries do —
circling back forever in our hearts
to a terminal beginning. they say,
living makes light work of you and
i say, amen, all hail the grim reaper.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

In the Mountains

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Forrest Gander
No hay exterior del cuerpo. O mejor dicho,
el exterior ocurre dentro del cuerpo
— Juan Sebastián Cárdenas


If the April dog-days reach her before your note does

If at your back door, a mushroom speckled with roving mites
turns the color of rodent teeth

Then her thighs will tremble, her head go light as she tries to stand

If her irises flare, if your collied face stares back from her pupils dull as a writ

Then you must submit to the sensation of being cored

If you take another sip of dust, trying to remember what to say

If the sludge she calls your sadness stops gungeing-up your veins

Could she glimpse what was there before you turned inside yourself?

If the regrets edge up behind you chattering

Then she will blindfold you saying: taste this

If it takes just one more crossed-out name to complete the bitterness

If ululations rising from the hills are answered in her face

Then whatever you gasp while she lies over you will sound like nonsense from a play

If you reflexively choose the first response that precludes thinking

Then she will cry out Oh no as though surprised she can’t stop it

If the Western Ghats swallow a carbonized sun

If she mistakes that tic at your eye’s crease for a signal

If when she sets the basket on the counter, the ripest mango topples from the peak

You must forget how many hands have tugged open her robe

If local animals make themselves nocturnal to avoid you, if swarms of laughing
thrushes no longer descend from the summit

Then the barest gleam from her eyes in the dark room will reel you in

But if this orange lichen— gossiping across boulders— blackens, curls, and goes
silent?

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Where you belong

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Imtiaz Dharker

You can squat in this room if you don’t say a word,
you can stay in this town if you pay for a room,
you can go on this train if it’s off-peak,
you can speak your mind if you change your look,
you can have your chance if you don’t expect luck,
you can be in the group if you get enough likes,
you can live with family if you toe the line,
you can keep your children if we countersign,
you can enter this church if you quote the book,
you can open the book if you close your mind,
you can save our time if you follow the rules,
you can play a role if you buy the mask,
you can take on the task if no-one else wants it,
you can ask the question if you never offend,
you can belong but only if you don’t stay too long,
you can end it now or start over again,
you can follow the signs but never turn back,
you can see you have run out of time and years,
you can leave in tears or you can go with a laugh,
you can take your clothes but leave your shoes and
your attitude behind, it does you no favours, and
you can do us a favour, don’t change your mind.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

A Thing or Two

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Elaine Sexton

The leaf falls on the page,
red, after being green

her whole life. The mail carrier
and his broken marriage

at the door deliver grief
and the Paris Review,

the icemaker knocking out
ice. Outside the trees laugh

the tops of their heads off.
This blow, a breeze, gusts

wildly denuding
deciduous trees, determined

to leave nothing weak behind.
Oblivious, the pines

have grown too close
to the shingled house.

They brush the slats.
Both are cedar and flirt

with reunification. We live
by the sea and clear-cut trees

harvested for building
and burning. Some die

for others, and by some
I mean those who don’t breathe

the way we do, but are no less
alive: beach grass, trees,

the breeze. Dear trees––the earth
still spins for the love of you.

I lean my skin against your skin.
My dog in all innocence pees

at your feet. I let him.
Your mourning arouses ––X––

in the air, what I breathe
and can’t breathe,

what I see and don’t.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

A King Sends a Delegation to Meet a Clan in the South

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Judith Beveridge

We’ve heard they make music
by tying tin pots to donkeys, yanking on the ropes
then beating them with wooden goads. We’ve heard
their highest cultural achievement
is a poetry that never veers from the subject
of spitting in public places, that they torture

hermetic dreamers
and anyone who perceives The Great Ferry Boat
among the stellar immensities. Can it really be true
they believe alliances
are jealousies, that they call the on-going hum of things
a disease of the ear and recommend breath-holding

as a cure? It’s said they sing
hymns to a coterie of aged parrots and at weddings
give gifts of broken trays, dented pots, torn quilts
and clothes of the dead.
We’ve heard they have embassies underground,
that they’re gathering information on clans

from the north, spreading
rumours we choose our leaders from those who can
best predict the future from the scratching behaviour
of flea-ridden dogs—
we can only think this is a result of their indulgence
in rancid goat butter and their belief that the mind

and the world are just shadowy
inventions and that wasps are lords of the sky.
I’ve sent a delegation carrying gifts of ivory, perfume,
jewellery, pottery, leather
and copperware to show that our artisans are the most
delicately skilled. Our musicians will astound

them with their rhythms and flutes,
and I have written a poem about mathematics
and its relationship to floods and plagues
which I hope can be translated
and recited, though we’ve heard their language
lacks complexity and rigour making it impossible

to pursue perfection in thought.
Perhaps our sweetmeats can tempt them into trade,
though we’ve heard they produce nothing of value
except a liquor made from
cinnamon and snake venom. We’ll offer them
our koumis, at a price of course, though we’ve

heard their currency is pond water
because it slips and scatters like money that’s made
in a dream. I just hope they don’t serve my hapless
diplomats their notorious
cuisine—fried horse eyes and braised yak tongues
in a thick brown paste of their own fermented viscera.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

my father was not a gardener

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Grace Yee

but he was a handsome widespreading form descended from a long-lived drought-resistant species.

every night he out-walked the doughnut boys “fuckin’ asians!” out in the street in their revved-up ford cortinas.

walking, he knew, was good for surveying the lie of the land and building tolerance for life’s implacably white horizons.

in forty years, one hundred and twenty-five million steps graven in the asphalt, relieving the pressure like a burr hole.

the woman he married was a graceful weeping habit (her beauties severe and planed): a splendid courtyard specimen, unable to grow in heavy soils.

nightly she waited for him: flashlight wedging the dark, bones crumbling early, safe and dry.

discouraged by heavy staking and rectilinear boundaries, my father, struck with leaves of variable light, was a legend among biologists.

every evening he ventured into the wilderness, spade hands a hundred feet deep in thought earth.
the land he roamed was densely populated:

sepia daughters, china, mother. heaving sea-plane, roiling ocean. jock-the-border-collie flying
in the rearview mirror. vauxhall viva. blue.

dead brother. dead lover. whisky. codeine. lost keys a tilting door nana mouskouri singing “you return to love” carbon monoxide filling his lungs like a lake in a bonsai forest.

rain hail sleet snow or interstellar dust, my father rode out to orion’s belt in his sherlock hat, hohner harmonica + johnnie walker + cat in tow. moths strumming the campfire.

when the embers fell, he’d pull up his collar and shuffle inside, pausing a moment to gaze at the oak trees bathed in molasses on the floors of the house.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Olympic Bingo

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Jessica Alice

God is always twenty-five
and I am still alive—
I didn’t die in the taxi,
or in the apartment,
or at the beach that night
where my hunger tore me
out on a silent black rip
to sink like a wasted plum
swallowed by Leviathan.
Between this and a thousand
fires left burning, living
is Olympic bingo.

There are suicide nets
in the shopping centre.

A woman who works
at a sandwich counter
in the basement food court
said she can’t forget the sound
of a human body smashing

into the ground.
The coordinates of impact
are printed on the back
of her tongue, nerve endings

bound to vertebrae that
come when she grinds
into the shape of a cathedral

under brutalist concrete
frescoes. On evenings



that I do not die
I make prayer—skincare

routine, seven steps—a
learned fastidiousness
in atonement for so much
annihilation. They say
hair salons and beauty
stores 
are recession-proof;
another Mecca has opened

in the mall. At the altar

I kiss the feet of God’s

memory, light candles
to her Beast. In nightly

benedictions I burn

the temple down—

orange heat in bloom
between me and the mirror

and God’s unlined face.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

They say this world …

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Katia Kapovich

They say this world is full of life, life, life …

But what I see is mostly slime, slime, slime …

Forests of voiceless and obedient women, men …

They’ll make a noise but leave into the cold night’s neon.

The only hero still seated in the hall, where

So many hands were raised and voices rang true,

Is a lifeless corpse: he continues to stare
a
t the state of affairs, disgusted at the view.


Hence the sort of smile that’s only found
on a dead face, underneath cold eyes,

as the head slowly, slowly wraps around
what’s known about us already – no surprise.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Duck Poems

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Vijay Nambisan

1. Buoyancy

Ducks have, in water, a feeling that they are
Not quite all there. That’s why they keep looking down
To see if their nether parts are still of the same
Feather, that they’re still together.
I too, sometimes
Catch myself looking down to see if my feet
Are still on earth.
And so when I look up
I return where I belong, after long separation.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Vanishing

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Samuel Wagan Watson
In memory of my Father …

For too long I have been a member of a vanishing tribe … We start using terms like; ‘going, going, gone …’ in our black and white mists; the shades and shards of grey … Shadow-companies of our races … When does it come to the staging ground when we’re comfortable in recognising our own ghosts? Stare into that spectral mirror … Should I be worrying about the size of the frame without caring about the horror in the view? When maybe for too long I’ve been a card-carrying member, of a vanishing people …

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Surveying What Adheres

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Jaya Savige

What was your status as of Monday?
Low on cling film. Fine for surface spray.

Name one highlight of your current job.
Midway on my journey to the Tube

the sticky men come tumbling down the glass
of the High Commission, a few yards

north of the Dominion. Hurled, they thwack
the tint, as though each wodge of gunk

were phlegm hoiked up from
underground, so thick it sprouted limbs.

The sticky men?
The toys I mean.

Those moulded figurines of polymer
and mucilage slash tackifier

that wobble down to earth like a mirage.
The de facto mascots of our plastic age.

And you learned what from your sticky man phase?
Perhaps the smear of north Atlantic ooze,

the veiny blob of albumen
that Huxley once mistakenly proclaimed

the missing link
appeared to him like this:

expectorated sputum, anthropoid,
squished against the window of a slide.

Is there anything else you wish to add?
The finest nanotech adhesive yet

aspires to the tread
of gecko feet.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged