Pre-apocalyptic poetics
Yellow flowers suddenly appearing,
ghost ships and curse birds,
the petty-profound re-occuring
nature of nature – fall, autumn,
fall, autumn, O! Spring! (the month
of May featured heavily)
– they used to write poetry about this!
And wrote about love/luv/lv – a word
as vague as ‘They’.* Back then, when
the world/welt/veld/gwlâd/welât
was made of moving parts (see: production).
Now we (the three of us) invent alphabets
each day, with bone-point pens in the
generous plastic-dust. For old Times™’ sake.
Help us. We can’t help it.
*’They’ – indefinite descriptor for all political
and commercial enemies of the people
Cas tweets here (work). Her work website is here
featured image from Cas is taken from a 17th century book of tantric drawings of Maharastra, no copyright.
Theodoros Chiotis is the editor and translator of the anthology Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015). Other publications include Screen (in collaboration with photographer Nikolas Ventourakis; Paper Tigers Books, 2017) and limit.less: towards an assembly of the sick (Litmus, 2017). His work has appeared in Catechism, Litmus, Datableed, Forward Book of Poetry 2017, Adventures in Form, Austerity Measures, Shearsman, aglimpseof, Visual Verse, lyrikline, Otoliths, amongst others. He has translated contemporary British and American poets into Greek and Aristophanes into English. He is a member of the editorial board of the Greek literary magazine [φρμκ] and contributing editor for Hotel magazine. His project Mutualised Archives, an ongoing performative interdisciplinary work, received the Dot Award by the Institute for the Future of Book and Bournemouth University; he has also been awarded a High Commendation from the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2017. He tweets @selfcoding
featured image: Bob Modem
War
Bobbie-Jo Treglown is a retired dancer and choreographer. Now in her fifties, she uses her life experiences as a medium. She is also a writer, performance poet and artist. Recently she collaborated with Degenerate Space on Solus and The City and previous publishers include Emmylou Books and Little Red Writers.
Alice Willitts graduated with Distinction from the Creative Writing Poetry MA at UEA in 2018 and was shortlisted with her creative partner for the Ivan Juritz Prize for their poetic essay in experimental fractal poetics ‘p0_EM Stein1’. Her poetry is concerned with personal and ecological losses and the limits of human intelli- gence as our species faces its own end. She is also writing for the Speculative Futures Collective (UEA), creating the ‘speculative nature writing of 2080’, due to be published in summer 2019 by Boilerhouse Press.
Twitter: @WillittsAlice @cwpoetics
Personal website: anotherkindofhappiness.wordpress.com
Collaboration website: cathenkawillitts.wixsite.com/cwpoetics
PERFECTLY HAPPY WORKERS
Not too much was working these days.
In the passenger seat, Eric was having trouble with his seatbelt. It wasn’t that it was stuck or even disabled. The metal sat coolly in its socket, but Eric didn’t seem to be having a good time.
“Fuckin’ thing,” he said and took the belt off entirely. George frowned. There wasn’t a lot of risk in their job, he reflected vapidly. The day was warm, the air-conditioner was on. Outside the sun shined and now that the morning was done, none of it was getting in his eye.
There was a certain point where George always got an erection coming east of the Mississippi.
“Fuckin’ thing!” Eric put the belt back on. Instinctively, George looked in the rearview mirror. A cop with his lights on was directly behind him.
“Shit!” said Eric as George pulled the car over.
Not a whole lot of risk and not a whole lot working as well, thought George.
George fast-talked the cop. He was a middle age white guy much like George was. Eric had some kind of farmers tan going on but he looked out the windshield, ignoring the cop on his direct right and let George do the talking. It was probably the smartest thing he could do.
So, the cop walked away, befuddled by George’s small talk about going east and all, and don’t mind the trailer in the back, yeah, it was home-made, but the lights worked, why did he get pulled over anyway?
The cop, mumbled something about a description matching them. George kept nodding and smiling. Eric continued to stare straight into the horizon.
“What’d we do?” asked George.
“Ah, nothing, someone pulled a gas run, but no, you fellas look all right…” That was code that they were looking for some black guys or just wanted to get a look at the California plates.
George smiled, letting his heart settle. He didn’t know what Eric was thinking. He mumbled thanks a long time after the officer left and didn’t touch the seatbelt after that. The sun continued its journey across the sky and eventually, as it was setting, they were in Tennessee.
George pulled the car and trailer into the parking lot for viewing the Blue Ridge Mountains, put it in park and got out of it. Eric followed.
They walked over to the fence, stared out at the mist and the view and Eric lit a cigarette and George sucked on his chewing tobacco. A couple minutes later a girl in a trench coat and glasses walked beside him.
“Do you like the Talking Heads?” asked George amiably.
“Shut up.”
“Oh no, please don’t be like that, darling! Shit, we’ve been all over and you, you with your spy master disguise…”
“You’re going to be all over again. They want you in California.”
“We just came from there! This is bullshit!” Eric walked away then, kicked a rock over the edge of the cliff.
“Regardless, those are the coordinates.”
“All right, all right, but please, take a look at the business and tell me where it needs to go.”
“No need.”
“We’ve got…. Damn it!” A few yards away, Eric got into the car and slammed the door.
It had been going on like this for a month. George didn’t know what was going on. Eric had been dropped off to him in Boston and his surly ass wasn’t the only thing getting sick of the feel of fake leather seats. After they picked up the weapons in NYC, they drove straight to Louisiana, then to Minnesota, then to California and then to Southern California, and now to this southern, stupid, idiotic, fucked up place on the side of a road!
“Hey!” she said, taking off her glasses. Her eyes were blue. “You signed up just like all of us! We’re all hoping this will come off…”
“What’s the point of a revolution that does nothing! Christ! I thought things were ready! I thought it was cool to be radical again!”
Eric honked the horn.
“We just don’t need that kind of service right now,” she said, then walked away. George stared after her.
“Well, excuse me for listening to you when you did!” He yelled. He didn’t care. There were several cartons of bullets and a couple assault rifles under a big camping equipment tool-box in his car’s trailer. Sights and silencers in the trunk.
George didn’t care, why should he? Why should anyone? Why should anyone care about the world and be willing to do something to change it? What the fuck was the point?
George slammed the car door. Eric was all hunched into his seat with his boots on the glove department and his head covered by a cap.
“Where too now?” he asked.
George sighed.
“Nowhere in particular,” he said and started the car. Outside the air was hot and he threw on the air-conditioning again and drove away. Eric whistled something because their radio was broke and it was a long way from L.A.
Benjamin Joe lives in Buffalo, New York where he works as a freelance writer for The Niagara Gazette and IPWatchdog.com. His first novel, Nirvana Dreams, was published by NFB Publishing in November and excerpts from it can be found in the March 2018 Ghost City Review and Issue 14 of Riggwelter Press. A short story can also be found at Aspirant Magazine. Twitter: @benjamin_joeb01
featured image: Bob Modem
JL Bogenschneider has had work featured in a number of print and online journals, including 404 Ink, minor literature[s], Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Necessary Fiction, PANK and Ambit. @bourgnetstogner
Future Consciousness
Droning sound and dancing lights. Images melt together; electromagnetic vomit. Waste. Wasting. Wasted.
Legs splayed over the arm rest. Neck propped on a cushion. Bad angle, pinching back pain. This ain’t good but fuck it, and its pain. I can die.
Detestable. Such a draining lack of significance. Incapability; force, action, motion. Projects aimed at the future. A literal projection, out of and into something.
Continue reading “Oliver Cato: Future Consciousness”
Meat Factory
Who are the vermin?
Not Mother Nature
“Injustices are everywhere. We live in a world that is beautiful and yet there is so much oppression and destruction upon it. The anthropocene is upon us and humanity has a long way to go before equality exists in every sense. My artwork has the intention to make the viewer aware of this and sometimes feel complicit in the various destructive actions of humanity and thereby, hopefully lead my audience to enact positive change through feeling some what responsible to take action themselves. I hope the least I can do is provoke thought in to an individual that had previously not cared for the world around them.”
Gut Things I
The oral, at the end of one symbiosis is periodontopathic, we think parasitic bacterium to the human we think (symbiosis does not mean only parasitism to the) Fusobacterium nucleatum who has been, (like soybeans to breast cancer repeatedly and broadly) associated with parasitism within colorectal tumors. Continue reading “Julia Lewis: Gut Things”
ReVerse Butcher is a multi-disciplinary artist with focuses in making unique artist’s books, collages, visual art, writing & performance. She will use any medium necessary to engage and subvert reality until it is less dull and oppressive. When she grows up she wants to be a well-read recluse. She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her artist’s book ‘On The Rod’ will be available via her website (www.reversebutcher.com) or the iTunes Bookstore from November 18th 2018.
Giant Tube Worms
When the saidnow news of smothering ecological
apocalypse had been assimilated into the culture,
we all could relax once more. It hadn’t been the heat –
‘Martin, order more refrigerators’ – that was stressful,
it was the exhaust headache of dystopian art everywhere,
frankly we could do with some love songs again.
And just in time, away from the fattening of the water,
a group of young thems started being fucking vital
in plume-like vascularised clothes. Undersea
rift worms vampiring on the energy of a volcanic vent.
We’d not realised, living far too close to ourselves,
that evolution had always been a hot and sexy circle.
Tom Sharp is a vanity poet with five self-published pamphlets released over the last year. He tweets here @ThomasSharp_
Continue reading “Tom Sharp: Giant Tube Worms”
POEM IN WHICH I DO NOT TELL MY ENEMIES HOW LONG I’VE BEEN STARING AT THIS GRAPEFRUIT TREE
Sick Secret
One Existence
When the future was now
“Injustices are everywhere. We live in a world that is beautiful and yet there is so much oppression and destruction upon it. The anthropocene is upon us and humanity has a long way to go before equality exists in every sense. My artwork has the intention to make the viewer aware of this and sometimes feel complicit in the various destructive actions of humanity and thereby, hopefully lead my audience to enact positive change through feeling some what responsible to take action themselves. I hope the least I can do is provoke thought in to an individual that had previously not cared for the world around them.”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 