Uut Poetry

Clink of Shunting Engines

What shall we do, what shall we do? The world calls us,
breaking its neck like an eagle on Friday
while pursuing the good, weight of eternity on its back
cool back of stone, appearing to bystanders to close and open
close and open, organ of the ruddy god in our veins.
Deacons and presbyterians have disappeared—what have we but each other?
The river when it opens grabs our knees, bends us toward the
warm gusts of June blasting the oaks outside
torching them like butterflies, blowing sea-ward our heavy baggage
like a ruby in the invisible dark, glowing
letting the weekend come early, at least in my heart.

some phrases from D. H. Lawrence and James Michael; art by /|\

at your breasts two blackbirds awoke,
shook their heads, then swung
on huge musical wings
high above us

Peter Wild, “To Silvia”

Frescobaldi

You were pilot of a ship with three flags, spilled coffee,
defunct Hydroflasks, and dry erase markers. The over-watered plants
drooped toward us as if bowing, but they’re dying.
My least favorite surrealist poet is staring at me from the corner.
She’s a stressful coworker who comes to work early and talks on the phone.
Frescobaldi seems too sharp, my shoes, too brown.

art by DulceChicoLatina

To Stitch Together Green Bones

Angelo ‘NGE’ Colella

To stitch together green bones
first you need to adjust the crosshair on your needle.
It’s no different from swaddling disproportionate opals
because bones have that mechanicalized allure
but it’s more similar to plugging in windmills
and sketching flowcharts of their thinking & dreaming activities.
When lovers will see how non-collaborative Time is
they will treasure even the swarfs of sculpted palpitations
like they really are ransom sacks extrait.
But, before that, they shun the false king
with his quicksilver appetites
with his hypnotizing whip to telepathically deflower roses
with his marching band of acuminate fifes and shivering ouija boards.
If I were a lover, I’d love to just moonstrike candleholders like flags
during a backseat zoning-out.

art by ms. neaux neaux

old memories of fallow lands
slumber in my flesh
listen to the immensity
breaking in the trees outside

Tristan Tzara, “Acceptance of Spring”

Totem

My coffee this morning is all the way from Jamaica, and The Surrealism Reader
cannot explain. The golden-blue June sunrise
cannot explain. The world is around but also next to me, the same
as I left it. There were no vacant spots in the luggage of my mind
to take it with me. Where I went is best explained in Brauner’s
Totem of Blessed Subjectivity II, which “touches base”
on how, in a dry meadow, we hold our hearts out while screaming.
We grow weary, put on contrarian gloves, form an ouroboros
with our feet, mouths, eyes. Do we guard or destroy
the tiny animal inside? We are a womb which is about to become a sun,
a maze of umbilical cord and teeth, transfmorgrifying the wheat field
in gory psychology. May our kidney bean gym weights bring us “gains”
in pensive vascular markets. Art destroys the world
as it existed, leaving a foetal rubble
as bright as stars.

Art by Victor Brauner

Freedom has no age. It is not the fact of colour or reason. It belongs to a person as much as the sound of his own voice. It is, at the level of the immediate gesture, his means of choosing one path rather than another, his attitude with a landscape. It is his poetry and his portion of mystery and his difference from his brother. There is no one who is outside of freedom or who might not be called upon one day—even if only for a single moment—to meet with it and to grow with it.

George Henein, “Freedom as Nostalgia and as Project”

and the undressed get dressed again
and the dressed get undressed
and exchange the leaden swallows for the leaden nests
consequently the tail is an umbrella
a mouth opens within another mouth
and within this mouth another mouth
and within this mouth another mouth
and so on without end
it is a sad perspective

Hans Arp, “The Domestic Stones”

Poem With Phrases from Two Books I Just Bought From the City Library Because I’m Bored and Don’t Want To Work

The entire backyard is in shade—the great spruce
is monstrous. It offers visually precise copies of my heart
which sits on my head today in the form of a trucker hat
symbolizing, perhaps, my allegiance to Real America. No—
it’s just a W for “Washington,” which is the name of the surface
of an unknown asteroid. It’s a real good coincidence “astroid” and “avoid”
rhyme. In the “Treatise on Human Progress” we are admonished to
suddenly change directions and turn into religion. Yes,
on the southwest shores of India we become various solo instruments
of the cosmos. During the next half century, we reverse this process.

It can be said that things have gone well.
We have opened the way to mathematical cartography.
We have worked silently from morning to night to make clouds.
We have used latitude and longitude at sea.
We have eaten with lots of different people.
What more could we want? To diffuse information—
and misinformation? Ah. Yes. We could
ask for that.

Phrases from 1Q84 by Murakami and The Discovers by Boorstin, bought for .50 this afternoon. Art by ||.

5 Ingredients

With 5 Ingredients Jamie Oliver
has turned us into playful epicures, spraying orange cheese
on hot skillets, tossing the odd shoe at the window.
Raise the blinds of your heart, my love: let in some light.
Kotana’s Poplars By the Water offers
an example. It’s as easy as shelling peas—easy
if you do it in Jamie’s carefree way. From our kitchen
each night like clockwork we see neighbors in flannel pajamas,
walking the dog—a different carefree way to spend an evening.
At dusk we open our laptops, put ourselves under lights,
begin to write. We’re in ancient Rome or by yellow trees.
Synthwave tries again to identify with the human condition.
I admit it’s smooth, can harmonize any reflective surface.
The warm tones soften the false electric light
of these solemn rooms.

Art by Ferdinand Katona

Cadmium

Dave Shortt

the quantum of action
inhabits rainbow spectra speculative matter,
where inflammable energy showers & electron clouds
personally grace each other,
anonymously hailed in cults of tobacco smoke
hanging in rooms of negative ions
gone mad from huge micro-abuse
later directed towards an electrode proclaimed sane
periodically put on trial for its envied powers
released from further social responsibility
by contributing to the predicted glory
of the annihilation of night,
a prediction made small
by pundits in absolute TV (picture tube) security
sowing daily survivals of apparently useless probabilities
whose unregistered velocities
superpose locally to all that,
contributing to a fluffy psychological imprint of bottlefeeding
formed from malarkey
(passing beings change color somewhere under
‘indeterminably fair’ skies
realized from a painter’s elemental palette,
future auras of steel culture coated with uncertainty
go in & out of focus
under ultraviolet gazes
of science love art
scientist lover artist

who could ever understand?
how a star’s fusion snuffs out cause, of death etc.
like a neutron plasma (for peace) destabilized
& hovering just belowground,
spent rags of ergs of graying frequencies
age in outer shells,
flux of emotion is blocked
during calcium’s hungerings after
voltages capable of singeing the young
slowly exciting into statistical freedoms
transacted from ashen cool,
in which their judgment, lacking impressionistic tints,
might collapse one fine day into fluorescent compassion,
classically invisible

random cancers are analyzed late
in a life lived in marked tendency
towards beta decay,
a participant-observer physiognomy
captures electrons from duality
(his or her chewed-on pipe’s distinction from old PVC
inspires elephantine travels into unity
based in indium, witnessable
as healthy percentiles of natural law
radiating from the consumer/consumed,
traded for an unconditioned hadron
in the largesse of whose radioactive superscripts & heavy breathing
ore receives glittery its complementarity
extracted into light of day

viewed closely in experiments of possession,
comfort experience retains discreteness
before leaping into (isotopic masks of) spiritual values
appearing as the same enzyme
devolved to material-in-the-raw
unplugged from fine appliances,
reflecting on the whelping S-process of its star
to 'prove’ a non-violent natural neutrino,
long lost

ridiculous the souvenir
of dogweed’s dogmatic deadly hackings
using poetry’s ink & inkless chemical syntheses
moderating inductively in ductile bi-valency
(against emphysema’s amorphous takeover),
what opens onto
solar cell gluon middle paths
on top of nearby refuge dimensions
for poison victims taking added chances
with what’s left in another hardly believed space
where home sweet home the dying sun’s
bluegreen nickel-cored battery
is probably leaking
its life
?

Dave Shortt is a longtime writer (from the USA) whose work has appeared over the years in a number of online and print literary-type venues, most recently Silver Pinion, Beatific, Molly Bloom and the print anthology Octo-Emanations #8. More of his poems can be found archived in Blackbox Manifold and Blaze Vox.

Art by vavoir

Being born amounts to peering out from a cliff
Over the sea. The great jellyfish who spread their arms
Out on the sea tell us how deep our ignorance is.

Robert Bly, “A Week on the Oregon Coast”

The Blinds Dance

Melody was born in simple song, the pristine clarity of a single voice.
As Albarosie warns, you don’t want salute / by a gun dispute.
We may assert: there is darkness. The mailbox, shaking with fright
keeps its eye open wide, and we exchange smouldering glances,
laugh…

art by /|\

5 Medical Signs You Shouldn’t Ignore

Catherine B. Krause

1. A new tentacle on your head. While it’s normal for a growing biology to develop tentacles in the process of mutating to the next-level organism, a tentacle on the head is dangerously close to the brain and may enable it to access higher knowledge or food items, ultimately leading it to become more powerful than your puny body. Resist the temptation to transcend this reality, as the next reality might not be any better, and what would we do without you? Think of the oylem-haze.

2. Flashing back to previous poems. Truly there is nothing more poetic than cheese, as a famous person once said, but salanthropists are flowing with salad to give to anyone who needs it, if only they would swallow their vegetables. Do you think you understand where capitalism ends and vegetarianism begins? It’s more complicated than you think. Consume less, if you think it will help you. It’s a free space between our ears, for now.

3. Being delighted by razor beams. Razor beams are terrifying, like razory laser beams that cut you in half. What sort of sick mind would enjoy this sort of thing? Not me, not you. Stop teasing the cat with a back scratcher; it wasn’t meant for such things. It’s a carnivorous predator and it’s bored; how would a razor beam help it cope with a reality between four walls where there’s never enough scritching or food to chase?

4. Unquestionable thirst for power. I’ve had a painful bump in the middle of my right shin, maybe slightly to the right of the bone in the middle, for the last two weeks. It’s the whole group dynamic at a place like that, and people need to question it more. China, Russia and Iran are just competitor imperialists to America. May the world be corrected to such an extent that our descendants will look back on us with a bit of disgust.

5. Too many cats and not enough energy. If you want to live somewhere affordable, start using this spoon to scoop peanut butter out of the jar. Or go to a different country, preferably, because cats deserve all the attention and all the space, so don’t get too many, no matter how much you love them. No matter how great it sounds to be a crazy cat lady, always tease them with a back scratcher. This is not mean-spirited but a fictionalized account of something that really happened to me 10 years ago.

Catherine B. Krause is a crazy cat lady, survivor, and dork living in Niagara Falls, NY. All her writing is released under the CC-Zero license because she doesn’t believe in copyright. She has been doing a lot of T-shirt design lately under the name dikleyt at Redbubble and Teepublic, and has uploaded much of this art to Wikimedia Commons under the same license.

Art by kimama

Our many souls—what
Can they do about it?
Nothing. They’re already
Part of the invisible.

Robert Bly, “Why We Don’t Die”