Dark Crystals

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Chris Holdaway
“Fighting a fire that cannot be seen.”
Louis MacNiece

Rural news

Begin a new life with the pledge never
To fly again. Knee-deep in the debts
Of heavy machinery—reign of irrigation
—the only choice left to tour the velvet
Leaf’s black grass until your yoga retreat
On a climate denying farm comes to focus
On maximising carcase value. I’m using
My heartbeat to count a breathing
Exercise that has the effect of slowing
My heartrate—as if it were cool
Irony to breathe myself out of existence
Just like everyone else. Even tailwinds
Feel ahead of me. Dragging culvert
Pipe like a cross I see antibiotics
In the eyes of livestock and bank vaults
In bottles of milk—monoculture former
Weapons manufacturer trademarks
The science of pouring money on forest
Fires. Phoenix or bust. My new boots
Advertised as last rites wading into
Quantum cereal fields both antistate and
State subsidised—the Perseids as my
Herbicide for sheer abundance of gilded
Plants more dead than alive.

 
Industrial formations

We’ve taken metaphors to heart stream
-ing assets wedded to soul-searching
The statusquo. Everyone is a nature story
In lucrative environments even the moon
Bestowed upon us by healthy competition.
If only mindfulness meant remembering
Survival of the fittest was never Blitzkrieg
And not to get all instructional video in a
Poem but we owe the modern alpha male
Meme to a 1947 study of eight caged wolves
And when you observe functional packs
In the wild you see none of those dynamics
That are great tools for class warfare.
Causality was backwards: cooperation isn’t
A byproduct of harsh environments it’s
The engine—yet some razor-thin plateaus
Hold the ideal temperature range for loners.
Evolution is no arms race—what’re rockets
To penicillin for the clinically president—
What’s market for trying to escape your
Footprints. Look inwards and glimpse that
Early model capital and the spirit level of
Excess in your very own chemistry they say
—foreign investment like losing your house
Is just a state of mind. My goal is to never see
Another lawn again in the state wasteland
As privatised stress. The difference between
A peak and a valley is the brink of extinction.

 
Gravel highways

Here comes the wellness juggernaut boom
-ing intentions on sage water—gold cobalt
Sapphires quartz all part of the same old
Story. When did the rose of time get so
Complex from windup clocks to universally
Coordinated zones and confronting our
Death cult. The road only gets built when
There’s something they want to get out
—crystal concrete for the crystal coloniser
—bricks of angeline and labradorite mortar
Heaping these stones into my salt pyramids.
There is no budget even for child labour
Backs strained against the darkness polished
Dust in the weave of lungs like forgotten
Clothes. I suppose most people would take
Cheap healing power over clean fusion energy
And I want to mine lithium for FMRI machines
In hospitals just not laptop batteries. Number
One priority is to be surrounded by crystals
So why not try mineral uranium as an anti-
depressant: if it would mean the last sale ever
The final astrological lawsuit for there is no
Healing power in middlemen. Grass glitters
Like sharp knives through cracked earth as sun
-light bends out of sight through earth’s prism.

 
Loose wall

Drowning in powdered milk swept up
On the tide of facial recognition—
Rose quartz on wooden shelves ringing
Like an overture the bells of erosion.
Drill once for industry and twice for
Evolution’s random walk falling down
For you for the forever’th time.
Questions at all costs where forward is
Westward the very idea of “flaw” my
Closest allegory—a broad spectrum
Prophylactic doing thinking feeling.
It’s important to walk home in the cold
From the funeral even if you have other
Options. Headphones on your commute
Are the enemy and evolution is a terrible
Metaphor for technology. For all its supposed
Networking evolution doesn’t spend billions
Provoking love and care of social surveillance
Nets. Imagine one day analysing the surname
Manager just as you would Fletcher. Getting
Comfortable with guilt as it usually means
I have something I shouldn’t—so much so
Innocence feels like lack. More quality time
—handmade—where no loop is inevitable.
Opting out of natural selection. Walking
Away from even the idea of opting out.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Borisov

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Magdalena Ball

An object
travelling fifteen miles a second
in close collision course
trajectory

I thought of the earth
receiving the blow
in her solar plexus
radiating nerves and ganglia

two million hectares
rivers, forests, floodplains
exploded instantly into winter
such terrible alchemy

the crisscross of lines
across distended hips
tears to amber.

I could be there
first in the queue
taking the hit for our planet

sensing the shiver as the rock enters
a new species in deadly motion
riding shockwaves: exogenesis.

There are other scars below the crust
keloids of industry
we’re an industrious race
always working, metabolizing, metastasising.

Proof runs along the fault line
in warning shades of phosphorous green.
tailings, diggings, burning, tunnelling

liquid reserves in aqua blue
iridescent blooms and red tides
the trace of radionuclides

carbon spheres changing the signal
in sedimentary rock layer

arriving faster than the speed of sound
undoing all our fine damage
at the point of impact.

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Storied Storage

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Bill Howell

“We can’t afford everyday life anymore, and I’m voting
on that.” (Street interview, Bob Woodward, Fear)

1
You wake up, stare through the smog, spot the bicycles
jamming the high-rise balconies: whatever you choose
to cheer you up. After this, nothing will be over the top.
Bikes will save us during extended power failures once
we figure out how to get them to the ground. But weather
on balconies doesn’t hoist or heist mathematical seasons
or mechanical reasons, so good luck on your way to
the street. Even if it’s under water.

2
You can say anything now: it depends on how floored
we are by your story. E.g.: The probability of a woman
becoming pregnant from a single randomly-timed act
is about 3%. Credibility is in the details you include
in the description of each lonely instance, and this relies
hugely on what we find most or least memorable:
“Nothing mattered. Then it blew over.”

3
Disparities between plot & narrative hang on causality.
If we could train SUVs to swim upstream like semen
and perhaps park themselves away from current affairs,
the transitive drama of everyday life might provoke them
to carry us away from consequences instead of forever
having to cloak everything in grief & mystery because
our best excuses are getting a little rusty.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Scandal Bag

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Beth Merindah
The scandal bag spilled its belly on the foreshore
filling the sand with foam, bile, grabba, and
a plastic film that suffocated
tamarind seeds studded with sugar.

It was a black jellyfish swimming in streams of squid ink,
propelled forward in a constant propulsion
of passive energy recapture,
chased by cords of fibrin and
streams of semen
ejaculated across a cloudy night sky.

It was gelatinous,
inflated by global warming,
a hydrostatic skeleton holding up
canals filled with cilia,
filaments flexing,
lobes, lappets, Viagra,
a manubrium fucking
mouth sucking
anus with umbrella shaped bells, balls,
tentacles with stinging cells and testicles.

Swimming with other scandal bags,
vast blooms in warm waters,
vessels, tangled ghost nets
clogging ship engines.

The scandal bag was without a respiratory,
circulatory
or central nervous system.
It was without color television, air-conditioning,
wifi or superannuation.

It was an all-seeing ocellus,
splitting itself in half, and half, and half again
in infinite fission,
until the sea was full of its proteins, collagen,
petroleum, ammonia, anxiety,
and depression.

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Death of an Astronaut

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Benjamin Dodds 
Where lies Enos (Hebrew for Man)?

                        Not mouldering beside
            the deboned body-glove of
            HAM’s formless flesh

            underneath a New 
            Mexico museum’s 
            carpark flagpole

                        nor laid out 
            in the airforce 
            pathology lab’s 
            specimen drawers

            that house the same’s beetle-
            scrubbed bones.

When half-hearted dissectors
            were done with Enos
            first chimpanzee 
            to gain true orbit

             (third 
            hominid 
            after two 
            cosmonauts)

            their flayed pilot 
            bloomed 
            in flame
                        not on thrilling 
            re-entry but in a 
            medical incinerator.

Nothing of him remains.
                        No brass plaque 
            or ash-scattered 
            park claims 
            space for Enos
                         (Hebrew for Man).

Chimpanzee HAM was the first primate to cross the threshold of space during a sub-orbital NASA launch in 1961.
Enos followed in the same year, becoming the first chimp to achieve Earth-orbit.

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The cave, like the world

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Kristen Lang

The stone and the air enfold each other.
Their borders blur. The stone
sways the muscle of the air. The air
bleeds the silence of the stone. We breathe.
But the cave’s long exhale carries over us.
We walk. And each turn entangles us, twisting us
through catacombs of rippled ground.
Our skulls powder into a ceiling
darker than ourselves, dripping its fluid stain
into an artwork of protrusions, rust
and white and amber, the slow
rhythms reeling us into its hold.
We become

cave dwellers – the quiet
enters our hands and we give,
through the caverns of our bones,
the full length of our shadows.
The exchange cleans us.
How pervious we are. Imagine
sunlight and a blue dome.
Imagine the night, the stars’
perpetual fall, their precipice.

We have come to the cave, stepping out
of our other world, to pour the moment
of ourselves into the stone that is air
and the air that is stone. And when we return,
we climb into the day with the cave
in our bodies, the dark and the light like
birds sweeping inside us, one
past another. The sky’s arc pushes into us,
seeps into our pulse. And we give…
through the stretch of our tiny
lives, we give the noise in us,
all our force, all our tongues.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

At A Summer Festival This Year

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Miguel Garcia

for Keyla Salvador, Stephen Romero & Trevor Irby

I.

There was a bee
& it landed clumsily over
a field of poppy & yellow seep monkey.

There’s a gold rush here,
it believed—

The rustle of golden yarrow & yellow stonecrop
local to Santa Clara County
only emboldened it
to dig through the pollen
& collect plenty its segmented hands can.

The waning afternoon sun meant
the canopies & tents
are about to be taken down soon
& garlands of garlic are to be kept
inside car boots & family vans.

Another summer festival
about to pass but we haven’t seen
the last of summer yet:
the bee still has pollen in its hands.

A field of poppy & yellow seep monkey
glinted gold in an afternoon sun.

II.

We smelled garlic,
it clung like pollen in our shirts,
& left our breaths sticking to chewing gum.

A child would think vampire hunters
came to this haunt—

But there were mostly chefs, perhaps a child
crying from being bitten by
a gnat or a bee
dazed, confused landing on
a clove of garlic, sizzling on a frying pan.

Man with a whisker wore a garlic hat,
garlic ice cream slipped
between his fingers while a broken
up clove smiled at visitors snapping
photos from phones that smelled.

Another ordinary family trip,
another day for the patches of
checkerbloom & honey suckle
to stand out amidst the yellow,

& for our car to stand out during traffic,
the smell of garlic rising up as heat.

III.

There was a girl
with golden yarrow & yellow
stonecrop laurel rustling on her hair.

She smelled garlic right before she
smelled the gunpowder—

Pacific winds caught a sneeze from the pollen
the bee dropped from its sac.
It got startled from
the spray of bullets flying
around canopies, cars, & garlands of garlic.

A boy that day imagined playing
the role of vampire hunter,
but his rifle fell on innocence,
not on vampires: a girl with a golden
yarrow & yellow stonecrop laurel

was one of them, her ice cream
melted amidst the afternoon heat.
Cars going home that day smelled
garlic, but one left an empty seat.

There was a bee & it gathered pollen right
before, it gathered the gunpowder.

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Crow

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Lucy Alexander
I hail the wind. Before I transformed from a daughter – we were always of the egg. Bluer than the lake, a few shades lighter. I hail the wind, but I will not follow its instruction. With my feathers I winnow the direction, I sift it for my intentions. It cannot take me, the way I take flight from gravity. Burned I was. Burned more than Magpie who kept her voice. Burned I was. Burned more than Currawong who calls evening into being and plots all night with the fire still in her eye. The sky stuck in my eye. In my haste to flee fire I took skywards and the spell fell through the crackling air. It took my girl-dom. It took my long possum hair. Now I am feathered. Now I am as coal, with my feathers glistening blue from the sky’s last kiss as I transformed. I call to my mother, forgive my jealous heart. I call to my father, make me whole again. But to you, to you I say: feed me your children. For with this transformation, gone is my shame. I will eat their hearts and sing my short votive song to their deaths. I have always hailed the wind, the one that took the fire up and threw me into its midst. It has scattered me, shattered me, made me what I am.
Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

OCTOPUS

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Kim Westwood

Every moment of mortal smallness has a thread loosened in the fabric where a button was;
some days I glimpse infinity through that worsted eye, and some
a yawing flank about to bombs away a world of baggage

News of the latest killings has me stranded on the bath edge, cribbed by dread;
of course to my companion the dog this translates as a hiccup in the usual flow of habits,
so he is paws and haunches sphinx-like on the mat, head cocked in confusion

My hands leave off their frenzied wringing, landed in my lap they seem sluggish and strange—
octopus hands, veined and drying in their frail translucence
as if netted by a long line then pitched into the ribby stomach of a boat

Which I suppose a fish catcher might say is a small thing in the bigger scheme,
as with the dingo’s dreadful creature agony in the leg trap three long days before it will be shot,
or another country’s bears in cages, catheterized for bile

Surely no relation to our planetary feuds and neighbour wars and family estrangements,
those casual cruelties between two people who purport to love, but cart an accumulation of despair
to the café table, not speaking across the salt?

When smallness sends me, an atheist, inside the wishbones of someone else’s church,
I beg forgiveness for my part in a chimera that remakes itself each generation
with aliases

Humanity’s bannered cavalcade: digging the road ahead with indissoluble fervour,
breaking the spirits of dissenters with bulldozers,
electrodes

While I’m there I say how bad I feel about the lunchtime soup—
all those tiny beings crushed in it—
and the gastronomic cruelty that boils lobsters alive

What if the cavalcade slowed its madness through the woods, the fields, the city square, and allowed a
question? About the bones, for instance, in the wheel tracks, about the mysterious foot without its shoe
on the dusty verge

Say such tank-like certainty met with shimmering doubt—a slick of impossible water to notice the sky
in—and shaped a new thought,
like, how does it feel to be an octopus?

The one whose ink is draining on a boat somewhere,
plucked from its muscular passage through kelp-shrouded waters,
no longer suckered in the crevices of its plankton world

Or say our human vanguard came upon the sand-bitten dingo in its final day, and someone
held that wretched metal-anchored sack of fly-blown skin as its cells unlatched and sinews loosed
from bone?

Beside the bath two ears are radared to my wet incomprehensible signals,
all that bowing and yawning now persuasion to a plan—
my companion makes me smile

He’s sure I’ll clamber sometime from the dark subduct geology of grief’s terrain,
knows I’ll risk infinity or a bombing behind his flag-tailed lead
to step outside and walk the dog.

*
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Night-blooming Cereus

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Natalie D-Napoleon

After the Sally Mann photograph “Night-blooming Cereus, 1988”

Family: Cactaceae
Genus: Hylocereus undatus
Water: Regularly until flowering commences

Passed down from mother to daughter, friend to friend
this blood moon eclipse reflects in the waxy shadow
of my tea cup, an oxidized lunar sky. Milky clouds drift
across its surface revealing to peoples, ancient & present,
the moon moves beyond the edge; she is a great sphere, returning
the Earth’s light back to us each evening as an act of love.

The shadows of youth slide across the moon, clinging
to the bark of a tree, the siding of a house, the nearest bare wall,
the flat chests of boys and girls and those in-
between with roots that breathe the globules of wet air.
Once flowering each bud remains luminescent for one
night before withering into a dancer’s full-length skirt.
Spent blooms hug the neck of childhood,
a wounded swan seeking solace from the sins of men.
In the deep South, the night-blooming
cereus may flower all summer long.
Water sparingly once blooms appear.
Origin unknown.

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Thirteen ways of looking at an astronaut

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Guenter Sahr

(after Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)

I.
Among the panoply of stars
The only moving thing
Was the mind of the astronaut.

II.
I was of three minds
As at first sight of a space-station
Crewed by two astronauts.

III.
The astronaut tumbled slowly in the void beyond Earth.
She was the foreground to a cosmic pantomime.

IV.
Below, the lands and the seas and the clouds
Are one.
The lands and the seas and the clouds and the astronaut
Are one.

V.
I do not know which to prefer,
The volumetrics of the Tuscan column,
Or the voluptuousness of the dirigible,
The astronaut’s igniting propulsion unit
Or just after.

VI.
The Earth filled the impenetrable visor
With its sea-shepherd blue.
The reflection of the astronaut
Crossed it, to and fro.
The ache
Traced in the reflection’s antumbra
An unfathomable cause.

VII.
O ignorant and rapacious men destroying forests
In the Amazon, smudging archipelagos in Asia.
Why do you imagine golden locusts shall fill your coffers?
Do you not see the astronaut
On bended knees observing your desecrations.

VIII.
I know the beauty of symmetry in equations
And lucidity in columns of algorithms;
But I know, also,
That the astronaut is involved
In what I know.

IX.
When the Earth vectored out of sight
The astronaut became the pale
Marking the latest frontier.

X.
At the sight of the astronaut
Brightling in the feint blue light,
Even the epics of Homer
Would recede to nursery tales.

XI.
The astronaut slowly cartwheeled over continents
In her space-shroud.
Once, a fear pierced her,
In that she mistook
A malfunction in the voice communications
For a loss of pressure.

XII.
The light of the world is moving.
The astronaut must be vectoring in space.

XIII.
It was darkness all day and every day.
It was silent
And it was going to remain silent.
The astronaut suspended
In the royal-jelly of space.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Orange Wabi-Sabi

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Lou Verga

for Emily

i found an orange. it sprouted one morning, round, formed, out of my left index finger. when i plucked it the leaves were yawning. for weeks i racked my brain. weeks, and i didn’t know what to make of this orange that hovered on the edge of my sleep, refused to leave the furry gaps between my teeth then snuck up my nostrils to the bottom of my spleen

that wasn’t half of it. more of them started to pop up; on an uneven trestle table, befriending a gallon of wine in a neighbour’s garden, slapping the centre of a palm, brushing with impossible poise the ice-flecked grass. in glass jars and savers jackets with snapped twigs in the pockets, in kisses and lips that quiver like strings, sealed and singing, living in skin

the orange just kept it pretty simple. sitting on my dresser it amplified the silence,
counting the days in its crinkles. one arvo though i was getting sad, standing on the platform with my faded woolworths bag. when i came home everything was covered in dusk. i went straight to the orange and it was bashed up, rough, punctured with two holes

inside one ran a maze of its own contorted rind. the other was decorated with webs of dust and black mould. but it just sat there, still, so unapologetically orange and tranquil. and that’s how it was when a cloud encroached the room, when music scratched in the walls and poems passed out on the floor. the weeks congealed and oranges continued to loom

on some loose cobblestones, half-submerged in a thin puddle that glittered and ran the length of a lonely alley. amongst billows of mist that collapsed into their middles then opened outwards, rising, entwining over the tired night sea. when the dash lights were dead on a dark empty street, with the old lady on the bus who took a month to get from the door to her seat and years of unbroken drizzle gathering in roof gutters

one night i walked in and saw just the soft carcass of the orange and a few drops of juice oozing down the dresser’s side. as i stared at the scene, a voice moved with my jaw:
the orange is sometimes questioning the orange, giving it your full attention, watching it blossom and thaw. the orange is remembering there’s no it or you, just one, and waking up to give it new. even though you sometimes feel old and i remembered the gardener who planted an orange tree in the earth of my soul

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Hands in the Earth

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Dylan Brennan

a drab puzzle for these scrambling mothers amongst shredded remnants of plastic bags 

shallow landfill, semi desert half-light the pieces of their sons mixed with others 

contrasting rates of decomposition pozole hominy in a thick mud soup  

rain on groundwater bringing to surface a scattered phalanx of human hand bones 

(some of the little pieces are children’s) up against a gated community 

the blue pools unrippled by commotion not too far from here a woman’s young neck

blown open with a dead toad placed inside the medium is always the message 

what’s the best to be hoped for at this stage to be cleaned to original whiteness 

misidentified to ease someone’s grief returned to earth in a marigold dusk 

or just deposit at the foot of this desert mistletoe fertile red no pain

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Amazon up in smoke

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Christian Garduno

Do thoughts + prayers work for the burning of the planet’s lungs?
lol asking for Bolsonaro (can we blame video games for this, too)
See, we let them have the Olympics once & this is how they repay us? Geeze.
Would a wall of strong Russian steel slats perhaps help contain this issue?
How about blaming at least 85% of this on Jewish Democrats?
I, for one, do not believe anything is actually burning in Brazil at all–
It’s so annoying how people compare this to Notre Dame; ND was technically someone’s
property, not just random unkept “nature”, that’s why it got rebuilt so fast.

Well, I mean, did the Brazilians properly rake their forest floors? Highly doubt it.
Are the favelas still intact? Okay, cool, just checking.
Do NOT use this relatively “tiny, completely natural forest fire” to stump about junk “science”
and “global warming yadda yadda” because it sounds like Al Gore is making millions off of this
in his private jet- makes me sick. Democrats are so disgusting (and violent).
It’s prolly happening because Amazon doesn’t pay any taxes. Sad!

If it’s so “catastrophic”, how come no people are dying? OMG get over it already lol
Remember when Barack Obama personally started those heinous Amazonian rain forest fires
that permanently + irreversibly scarred our Planet’s lungs forever? Now he wants your guns!!!
I heard it’s the lugenpresse starting all the fires everywhere and I wouldn’t put it past them

How come the aboriginals aren’t doing anything to put out these fires? Are they in on it or
something? Hmm, sounds fishy, I’m just gonna say it.
It’s not in the King James Version so I don’t think it’s gonna be a big deal at all ha ha y’all
always exaggerating smh calm down
There is a silver lining in all these smoke clouds, though, guys:
AMAZON FIRE HD ON SALE $121.99 with free shipping ok
I’m out of ideas
I’m out of oxygen

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Diary Poem: Uses of the Nobel Prize

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Jennifer Maiden

In her comment on my poem about Borges in Geneva
—where he and the Archetypal Critic from Australia,
on the blue shores of the Lake, haunted each other,
both bluely haunted by the Nobel Prize—a reviewer
remarked she could think of no better contender
for the Nobel than I was. How could any responder
not revel in the mischief that would cause? I wonder
how it would fit in with the real Prize’s agenda,
as seen in its history, such as conflict between Russia
and the CIA in the Fifties: Operation AEDINOSAUR
was what the CIA called their careful strategy for
creating Boris Pasternak’s anti-Soviet persona
to win the Nobel Prize, which the Russians in their
turn blocked but got it for Sholokhov (who was better
actually at writing, but that’s perhaps a lesser matter).
John Maury, AEDINOSAUR’s busy Director,
wrote in a memo to CIA Operations Head, Frank Wisner,
establishing a credo: ‘The heresy[against Russia] which Dr.
Zhivago preaches—political passivity—is,’ he can reassure:
‘fundamental.’ So it must have caused bother later
when the great acceptance-speech by Pinter,
in his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture, defied America:
‘Hundreds of thousands of deaths…Did they take place? The answer
is yes…But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever
happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t…It didn’t matter.
You have to hand it to America…a quite clinical manipulation of power
…masquerading as a force for universal good,’ said the Nobel winner:
‘a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis…A writer’s
life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity…You find no shelter,
no protection—unless you lie…When we look into a mirror
…the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-
ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer
has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror
that the truth stares at us…the real truth of our lives,’ concluded Pinter,
‘and our societies is a crucial obligation…It is in fact mandatory.’ There
the CIA clearly had conniptions. There, might have gone forever
the attempt to turn the prize to pure introspection. Neruda,
quoted succinctly by Pinter, wouldn’t have helped that either,
before he died mysteriously in Chile. Lord, would I rather
a Mercedes or the Nobel? Lord, the Mercedes is safer,
although the CIA have now devised a controller
of car electronics from a distance, the revealer
of this being Wikileaks’ Vault Seven. Paul Robeson’s fear
that they’d damage his brakes seems gentler
in comparison. At any rate some accusation of mild gender
molestation meant the Nobel was postponed until later
this year, this time, and that gives a double chancer
to the Company, if their act is quite together,
the Russians being more involved in Syria.
In my poem, Borges seemed jealous a Salusinszky manoeuvre
would win Murnane the prize, but the Critic could reassure
him that this meant nothing sinister. And labyrinths of art never
preclude mirroring any blackness behind the mirror.
I am dazzled by glass fragments trodden under,
rippling light as blue as mountain lakes, but colder.

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Striation

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Broede Carmody

Post-turbulence I hug the road’s blue
curve. Mid-morning melt—
lakes twisting other lakes. I am blind to
the periphery: you describe rocks, undergrowth,
a scribble of trees. A reindeer bows into slush. For the first
time in months I am as calm as folding linen
sheets into clean, straight
lines. All I can order are two vegetarian
pizzas. Sticky pickle & pineapple. Time is
like that in the climate apocalypse. Whipping
ourselves with birch leaves & restless for three
weeks of autumn. Some daydreams are
meant to swerve onto the wrong side of the
highway. The way water refracts light &
insects but also swallows them. You flick
me across the sauna like paint. On the train a child
asks: can dogs get mental illness?
Glaciers leaving scars on rock. I don’t think
our solar conditions are right. Air moving
in & out of glaciers, salmon,
dinosaurs. Exhale ’till it hurts & we might
just float to the top.

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abandoning the planet

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Phil Wallach

leave
in whatever
can be found
and commandeered,
kites, tube trains,
44 gallon drums,
abandoning
gravity
as the first step

maintain
(in a nominal biosphere)
a skeleton crew
only
for pro-active archaeological
preparations
(to build
irrelevant yet enduring
monuments)
and to feed the animals
in the zoo

keep floating
outwards,
maintain a uniform
3-dimensional globe,
like the detritus
of a supernova
explosion
(but faster)

rush past
alien civilisations
and tweak their
spaceward
installations
with random data

become ions
fizzing
in the juice
of space,
and execute
anomalies of sub-particle
physics
with mathematical
precision

follow the curves
of space
that involute into
the curves of time,
and fall back
to the planet
as no more
than an idea
in the minds
of proto-men
cowering in firelit caves –
we will be God –
one day

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Guidelines

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Hibah Shabkhez

“If swathe after swathe of blighted ocean
Leaves you all glazed and indifferent, then,”
The thick black letters of the handbook say
“Rig this. Rope them in. Find the wit to sway

Your kin. First, find a child with grave green eyes
To set next to a rubbish dump where flies
Swarm sickeningly. Next, before a face
Drought-wrecked but not void of pathos and grace

Set a cracked, weeping, desiccating hearth:
Find human codes for urgency and worth.”

For alone, my Earth, you are not enough
For us to save you.

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Sie semper tyrannis

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Samuel Wagan Watson

In memory of Blair Peach…

A message in a bottle / organic song in a can / coveted neo-fruit; hunted…harvested… hacked-over / our thoughts modified; Goebbels’-style / from the same tree of life / an olive branch robbed from humanity / before I became General Electric Me / a colonised tongue void of the healing frequency / 432Hz to a death tone in 440Hz / insatiable hunger pains groaning / Alan Jones snuffing the bravest mouths with sullied socks / dreaming a future from minds that are multinational acquired territories / winds of an electric-storm cometh / swept from the grove where we fell before ripening / free-range produce for the slaughter; thus always to tyrants…Sie semper tyrannis.
Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Figures in the Water

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Caitlin Doyle-Markwick

What, Sir, would you have us do?
Rub powdered glass into the folds of old faces to make them anew?
Press the wasted shoulder to the wheel just to drive the point?
Turn young chests to coal face and tell us to seek our destiny in a vein of quartz?
Bend our faces to the dirt and tell us it is grain?
Force chins to necks and rub ash into the crowns of exposed crania?
I’ve seen you before, sir, rationing public losses like a bad Santa,
laying down your logic like a bloody roadmap to a utilitarian nirvana,
aiming the fourteenth finger at false foe and the refugee
while you flaunt your self-flagellation in the square and preach of
necessary sacrifice
while you deal in our commons with the ingrate by night.
Will you really suck that fat cigar and tell me it’s for medicinal purposes?
I get the feeling, Sir, that I’m being swindled, but I’ve no time to investigate.
Our toes are just touching the sandy bottom of the beach
nostrils flagging the air above the water, chins bobbing like apples in a rip tide,
each new wave knocking back our heads, blocking the oxygen yet again for
round three, or was it ten?
Our arms don’t work in this strange liquid,
so for now we’ll just teeter and tread as the tide of your floating
swirls our hair about our heads.
We must all be a sight from up high;
a watery mass crucifixion in the boat wreck bay of
last month’s digital commotion.
Remember, Sir,
how you forced us to watch as the last orange perished on the tree?
That day when the air scorched, the sky withered and the parched water bittered.
Now you say we’re all to sow seeds for another season of sweet prosperity in the glen
and that
maybe
we’ll get a taste of the rind at the end.
I try to exclaim that I’d be better to sow seeds in the hollow of my own neck;
That soon we’ll be on our knees panning for gold in the dustbowl that you’re constructing for us
But there’s something obstructing my gullet and my mouth strains to make shapes
let alone sounds, for the bind you’ve put on it.
But you told me to take this spade and dig my own grave,
because, you said, if I’m to lie in it then I should be the one to move the earth aside
and fit my awkward death in the space that’s left behind.
And yet,
now, in your desperate justifications, your mouth, once so precocious,
is flapping about in different directions, it emits only intermittent honks and
indecipherable snorts
that contradict your previous lamentations.
Now your villain is burning on the dock,
you’ve handed me a brick to throw at the smoke
but all I can think about are the figures in the water
and the way your fingers curl around the stones in your pocket
ready to cast them at the newest arrival.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Squids

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Corey Hill

In the hinterlands of my organ cabinet
the sneaky tentacles roil and writhe,
wreathed in volcano spew and
scar tattooed from death wrestles with whales.

Scissors don’t split that salt-cured rubber.
Though rum may confuse their pincer beak’s searching,
certainly they never drown,
and my lungs are tenderer to soaking.

I harpoon myself at night.
I hit my own spleen as often as
the ceaseless eyes of the bastards
squicking about so slither in there.
Lying to yourself sounds like brine laughter.
Sounds like coils.

Deep bred creatures broker no easy truces,
eating shameless the reserves I thought hidden,
slapping words before they get out of my tubes.

Titanic is the struggle I imagine,
Beard flash and metal strike and
Ink and blood and finality.

Salt water spills from my nose at dinner
and I simply wipe it away and we all pretend it’s not there.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Hotbed

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Adam Stokell

If it were safe to press an ear to the earth surrounding a jack
jumper nest, you’d hear the liquorice hundreds simmering just
below the crust, forging, following through on lavish routes and
threats.

Hereabouts a nest swells up every ten or so metres, and
every mound boasts multiple vents. You might – but you won’t – be
forgiven for thinking that some of that subcutaneous pressure
must, of necessity, steam off.

Local farmers make no bones. One recently capped ‘the mother
of all nests’ – for years bullying the home paddock – with
concrete.

But the whole post code’s precarious, hotspurred,
uninsurable as Iceland.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Forecast 2030

Posted on February 1, 2020 by King Llanza

this just in
clouds are strung higher than any cello
or even the riches of the world’s elite bigger,
more ominous, as shady as the last time somebody
on TV was read to filth kindergarteners keep
saying the sun is angry and we laugh it off
because we are adults now like our parents
looking back more often than usual looking away
from where we’re headed we know it is
morning because there’s a black veil above cities
woven from the puffs of exhaust
pipes and crematoriums the premise here:
persistence meaning the light at the end of a tunnel
or the blood of the covenant being thicker than
the water in the womb we wonder
if it’s still right to give birth crows do not turn
white but we do now we leave a trail of rose
thorns instead of rose petals
nothing follows

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Main Street Mamas: Stay Safe, Beauty:)

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Anne Lesley Selcer 
By    nine   p.m.    last   night,   I   was
nauseous, dizzy,  fatigued, had a bad
migraine, and my sixteen month old
was  coughing. We’re  in  a  very  old
building,  the windows  are not fully
sealed  or  double-paned.    We  were
going to start Thanksgiving  Monday
but decided to pack the car up  early
and drive away as  fast  as  possible.

We drove to Monterey last night and
are staying in Carmel  the rest of the
weekend.   It  was  only  a  two  hour
drive.  It  is  much  better down here
but  the  winds  could always change. 
  
We’re  heading  to  Tahoe  where the
air   quality   is   green.  It   was   like
Armageddon  til  we  got  to   Folsom.

We   left   once    I    saw   respiratory
problems  with  our  six   month  old.
Drove to LA late Thursday night and
arrived with  two  kids  at  two thirty
a.m.  We’re  watching  San Francisco
in the news  for having  the worst air
quality in the world.

We   just  don’t   know  where   to  go.
Even Santa Cruz is red now. 
 
I considered going to Monterey with
my  boys  but  then   the   air  quality
declined  there   too. I’m  thirty-nine
weeks pregnant and can’t risk going
further,  solo.     So    we’re    sticking
inside with the  curtains closed  and
air purifier on blast. 

We  don’t  have  a  car  so  we’re  still
here.

We  left  for  Tahoe  last night.  Crazy
bad smoke  until  you  get to Auburn. 
We had the  air  in the on recirculate
and just  drove  as  fast  as  we could. 

I   was  in   Reno   earlier   this  week,
driving to Palm Springs now.
‪‬‬‬‬‬‬
Headed  to  LA.   Southwest  changed
our   Thanksgiving   flights  for  free!

We’re  headed to  Fort Bragg.  We got
a   last   minute   hotel   for   under  a
hundred dollars‬‬. 

We  happened to have a trip to  Palm
Springs  planned  for  this   weekend.
Air  is  great, if  anyone  can  swing a
quick flight!

We   drove   to   Carmel.  We   got   an
incredible hotel deal.

If you want to  escape but don't want
to add to the air issue you can always
take Amtrak. It's a pleasant train ride
and    an   enclosed    air    circulation
system.       Trains        leave        from
Emeryville  for  points  north,   south
and east.

I  was  going  to  take  my little one to
Monterey    this   afternoon   for    the
weekend.    But   it   looks   like   it   is
supposed   to   get   better   here   and
worse in Monterey. 

Same.  But now it’s turning red here.
Thinking to keep on moving.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

We  would've  left  last night  but our
newborn  is too young  to  travel  far
and doesn't do well in the car. We've
been   inside  the   house   since   last
Wednesday.

We  left  this  morning  around   nine
a.m.  for  Reno.  No traffic but the air
was   awful   in   Sacramento.   It’s   a
hazardous  335   on   the   air  quality
index. 

We    have     been   gone    since   last
Saturday.   First  we  went  to  Fresno
then  flew  to   Florida.   We   debated
going  to  Palm Springs  but   decided
for Grandmas instead.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

We’re in Tahoe and  it’s gorgeous.  It
sounds  like  there’re  still  plenty  of
vacancies. 

If   anyone   wants   to   go   to   SoCal,
Great  Wolf  Lodge  has  a  good  deal
right now.‬‬‬‬‬‬

Tahoe  City  air  is  perfect  and  there
are  a  ton  of  vacancies  everywhere.
It’s a few  uncomfortable hours in the
car  but  once  you   are   through  the
smoke it’s totally worth it.‪ ‬‬‬‬‬‬

I  just  saw  an  article  that  they  are
evacuating a neighborhood in  Santa
Cruz because of a new fire.‬‬

We are staying put.   We don’t have a
cheap  place  to  go  where  we  know
the  air quality  won't tank as soon as
we get there.   The husband has been
sealing up windows.

I heard there’s a  wildfire burning  in
the Santa Cruz Mountains.‬‬‬

American   Airlines   and   Southwest
will waive change fee  if you call and
say  you  were  affected  by wildfires. 

We     stayed.    Mostly   because     I'm
worried that once  we go  somewhere
the air will get worse there and better
in   San   Francisco.   But   now   I  feel
claustrophobic  and  I just want to get
out of this smoke.‬‬‬

Staying  put!   Baby  has  the  sniffles,
but she’s still  in great spirits.   We’ve
got a mega good air purifying system
in  our  house   (yeah,  we  can  thank
Papa  Bear   for  that!),    and  Mama’s
gettin’    her    home    cooking      ON.
Praying that things begin to clear  by
early next week.   Stay safe,  beauty:)‬‬‬‬

Came to Paso Robles  on  Friday and
staying for the week. Great place for
kids.
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