With subtleties broken, / discourses returned / much heavier / A fresh train of disquietudes / sighed often /Sparks of temper; / the puzzle and the plague / But, in full view, / all things in the world / answer consequently: / fallen, rescued / The deepest impression, / a fine truth to any purpose — / that odd legacy / of occasion
one much quieter
one much more talkative,
interpreting daylight as if it were a room
depleted sidewalk wants
2 tell u (me) some
thing
something só imp. It
had to wa
it
a pile of dirt remains ambiguous
laying on the stone like that
can it tell the future?
can the most mundane
can it (not) shine in my eye?
a rock gets lost but ppl forget
then nothing much done today
sometimes sleep
but sometimes not.
washed away
an interesting turn of phrase
someone walks into a bar
but someone
someone tries to convince me of something
but i’m conversing with a
desk lamp
the problem w the world today:
the problem w the world today
5.
Dusk completes its sundowning as crowds of people begin to congregate. Dark tourism is streamed on the brick walls of the town square. From the sewers: the fatberg sits in silent judgment: Popcorn lungs blooming in the young. Distant bleeps and glitches. A Faraday box stuffed with emotions. New fiberoptics beneath the cobblestones. “10G bae bee! 10G!!” The pale green glow of a billion minds humming beneath these streets. “Shot up some estrogen and grabbed the mic. Never felt so free.” GhostBots™ linger on the edge of the crowds asking if we need resurrecting. We lie supplicate at the open pit. Body heat rises up. Visible by the light of our screens. Easter eggs in a snuff film. *cherry vape clouds* Generational grief pegged to a wildly fluctuating index. <current artery blockage at 65%> The attract screen welcomes us to join the deceased. We line the open mass grave with our phablets. We place them gently along the edge. Our banking details auto-scrolling. Endless digits glowing in the night.
6.
Piles of burning mattresses. Labyrinthine tent cities tunnel deep in the night. Dynamos of madness. Blister packs of fear litter the sidewalk. People slicking their hair back looking to make a name for themselves. Mag-lev handcuffs are issued to citizens of good standing. Making arrests has become de rigueur. “Don’t get left behind – make yours today!” They say, ecoterrorism is back on the menu – whether we like it or not. Try decreasing memory footprint to speed things up. *panicked breathing, faces flush with relief* “It’s ok. It’s ok, guys! It’s all behind login.” Blood boys wandering aimlessly. Leashed to IVs. They skirt the vortex at the center of the town square. They gather in the murk. Peel like shadows off the brick walls. Supplicant and meek they are loaded into trucks. :the fatberg sweats in the dark: Bonfires burning large and bright on every street corner. Feverish dancing, arms flailing. Engagement rates are up! Distant bleeps and glitches. Drones pinging in the night. This is a place where no one wins. “Welcome to the unsubscribe center. You made it!”
7.
Washing bones to arrive at their final incantation. Broken teeth litter the streets. Shattered bottles line the curbs. Burger boxes and Styrofoam clamshells shift and slide along the sidewalk. :the fatberg wheezes from the sewers: “Dark empaths on the prowl” Great is their grift and short is their thrift. The pavement is covered in feces. Broken tents sway in the wind. A yellow sulfurous pollen burns the nostrils. Blankets everything in its stench. Blister packs of disappointment clog the sewer drains. The dispossessed have set up shop at the local mall. All honeycombed out with anguish architecture. Occult practices sold here for a price. *whispering* i’m on the verge. Flickering at the edge of sense. Cut-tongue mumblecore. Agitated. Carbonated. Overstimulated. Wandering the halls looking to score code. Countless stalls in cramped space. Frenetic haggling. Stale sweat and burned pharmaceuticals. JUUL pods litter the tile floor. Stimming on glitterbombs. Tech spells and hexes coded in COBOL. Etsy witches paid in arcade tokens. “Hey there are gravity sinkholes everywhere here so – watch your step.”
15 minute pinhole exposure, handprinted fibre-based silver print
Sculpture Garden
Brick Professional Building
enislanded by offramps.
Asphalt Curbs Pushed onto the Mulch
by the plow service
spell something broken
in the lot of the brick professional building.
Black Plastic Rat Traps
every twenty paces
under dead brown junipers
ring the brick professional building.
Box for Patient Samples
bolted to the masonry
outside the back basement door
of the brick professional building.
Five People in Cars Eating by Phonelight
two of them wearing scrubs
each of them alone
behind the brick professional building.
Oft-Gnawed Fisher Price People
collect pathogens
in the children’s corner
of the brick professional building.
*
Inholding
Where feral bloodroot blooms
prettily, where knotweed and bittersweet
are bad ideas that have won the meadow
where there are wells and springs
and cairns and cellars
there is a heavy chain and hook
hanging from a maple too old to tap
where her late husband
butchered their cow.
(Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard. “Untitled,” 1963. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery)
A Tense to Describe a Duck That Isn’t There
After Asger Jorn’s The Disquieting Duckling
Duck would have been erupting.
Duck would have erupted.
Duck continuous erupt
in the would / have been. Future
duck the perfect erupts. The never duck
eruption.
present simple farmer
haybales fowl in the is and ises in the ed
of rural whitewash each breath
a flesh of brushstrokes.
a tense to describe the temporal
stretch of canvas. Dapples
of birch leavings to stack
in impasto. An erupt
to duck a basal ganglia.
*
A-Political Self-immolators
We fizzy & piffy lakeside straight shooter boys
shoot stray cats from the Baroque balcony boys
we’re landslide boys eat crab boys big bullet
bully boys hooligan melodies & tenebrous eyes boys
sparkle sparkle little pig we ride rapid boys wide
boys locked safe boys sink to the depths the Davy
Jones boys real boy’s boys’ boys locker room
boys’ talk boys neck foam boys nick phones boys rock
-a-bye baby boys the blue-eyed boys bish bash
bosh job’s a good’un boys we’re those landgrab boys
swamp stab boys drain the blood dig the liver
boys pile-driver boys we’re deep-sea diver boys
black-lung coal miner boys real DH Lawrence boys
big tough boys with big tough toys oioioi boys
make some fucking noise boys we’re poison boys
burn the fields salt the earth shatter seas stone skim
boys we’re the make room boys the me-first boys
the boys with a fire in our fists we’re pollution boys
we’re gruesome boys those lumpen laymen men
of the earth serf boys we’re wind & rain boys fight
through snow sludge through mud we breathe gas
boys bottle rocket shrapnel boys we’re front-line boys
Gulf War Syndrome born alone die alone eight
pawn boys dethroned boys deflowered & defaced
face the music boys on my mark we go over
trench foot shell shock whizz-bang boys no man’s
land landless boys no stake in society ASBO boys
we’re high fire boys burn like mustard boys
we burn water baptisms of gas explosions stop
drop & roll up a fatty we’re rock n troll star
boys steal your hearts & leave a scar life sentence no
possibility of parole we’re born to die boys beautiful
corpse cheap funeral Amazon coffin & BYOB
boys search & destroy boys given no quarter hung
drawn & quartered we’re those coup de grâce
coup d'état boys raze the dead seize the day gone
tomorrow boys we’re the lost boys the last boys
last of our name last of our nature we’re ouroboros
boys anonymous boys we see things say things
you wouldn’t dream boys you wouldn’t feed us
to your dog you wouldn’t touch us with his you’d
off with our heads you wouldn’t be seen dead.
How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?
After defeating
the bull-headed monster,
not once but
over and over again,
I hung my sword up
on the bullet-pitted wall,
and tried to find my way back home.
The thread was broken, though,
and now I wander in this fearful light
and search for darkness.
Untitled. 2025. Mixed media on canvas (found paper, corrugated cardboard, house paint).
36 in. x 24 in.
Interrogator needed
must fail to understand
the simplest things
in a vault of goo —
Platitudes generated
by electricity
falling into a source
it troubles us to consider
even once,
whispering to solvent after solvent —
is this the visual
you redirect your password from,
are there other kinds
of sympathy you act
out about?
Do you inventory
your playing cards
routinely.
What I’m telling you
is none of your business
and business is good.
*
The book of
how’s that going to work:
Like aliens,
their flitting pincers
storming across the stacks.
Supervision for the loneliest,
and architecture
made of composure and
lidocaine.
There is this long waiting period
before it makes sense to talk.
It’s fine that you want
a reservoir of tenderness,
but you should know
it comes with conditions
your character
tends to oppose.
*
A chaos familiar enough
I experience it as valuable,
clinging sideways
into its reason
and misread the story
the way anyone would
from underneath the letters.
Giving down its lesson,
the fear electrifies
a plateau for breathing
the sour lonely soup,
a glittering cassette
blowing in the brisk
aftermath.
Sympathy we dissolve
is nevertheless available
later for unknown newcomers
with even a dime —
in this system
wanting both
is rubble roulette, sweetie.
You have to be that slippery
and no more.
Come on, already,
it’s unbearable how you
refuse
this dialogue without borders,
these dependable changes
while the world considers
what it really wants,
the drift of feeling
in a crisis —
After the earthquake
the ceiling leaks,
the layered presence
parted like a bead curtain …
Not, more light:
Lighter.
Lighter.
we had a dinette, the house was too small for a proper dining room, there was a painting on the wall, notable because artwork was minimal in the house, I was fascinated by this painting, it looked European to me in a vague way as at nine years of age I knew nothing of life outside the US, it was a river scene, a river surrounded by a forest, a mountainous forest, with a small house about a third of the way up on the mountain surrounded by evergreens, I think it would be called a chalet, there’s a European word, it pronounced funny, and on the river was a small boat with a man standing astern navigating with a long pole, the painting was always there on that dinette wall, I didn’t know its origins, how, where and why my parents bought it, after some time, after months of glances, I made an observation, the perspective was wrong, the chalet was too small to be real, or the boat with the man was too large, even taking into account that the boat with the man was closer to the viewer it felt like sizes were off, once noticed this was all I could think about when looking at the painting, this mismatch of proportions, if happening to walk through the dinette I glanced up at the wall, all I saw were the two mismatched objects and my mind became stuck in a comparison loop, judging dimensions and wondering, but then sometime later, more glances, I noticed something else was off, the paint was darkened to the right of the chalet, a chaletshadow, and the paint was darkened to the left of the boat, a boatshadow, right then left, as if the chalet was painted under morning sky and the boat was painted under afternoon sky, or as if there were two suns over Europe, and once noticed that was all I could think about when looking at the painting, this mismatch of illumination, my mind stuck in a newer superseding comparison loop, and then still, sometime later, yet more glances, I stood up on a chair and gazed at the painting, closer, my nose inches from the chalet, I examined each brushstroke though it was hard to tell a brush was used, the paint was glopped on thick as paste, perhaps a palette knife was the artist’s implement of choice, and this was fine, interesting, but there was one glop, a dark green section of forest just above and to the left of the chalet, where, my face almost touching the canvas, I discovered unmistakably a fingerprint embedded into the painting as if instead of a brush or knife the artist had smooshed this one glop with a finger, it looked purposeful, the brushes needed cleaning, the palette knife was dirty, but here was a finger, relatively clean and always available, the artist’s original tool, I could follow the loops, arches and whorls around and around within the print, no one else noticed this fingerprint, only I, my secret, as a child I was not afforded many, after months of glances and after some time, no other family member knew this existed, and that impression was all I could think about when looking at the painting from that discovery on, the chalet no longer existed, the boat with the man and his pole no longer existed, the mismatched perspective, the contrasting shadows, all forgotten, the painting was just a fingerprint, every glance at the painting caused wonder, a loop, my mind dominated by a single fingerprint, a fingerprint that belonged to an unknown artist, maybe European, working hours every day in his studio with his paints and his palette knife and his finger
The Buried Museums
Holy Grail, hollowed bone, half buried in the dirt. Above the
Brow God is moving his furniture, wardrobes of thunderclouds,
heavy driving migraines into your skull
Within these hills there are buried museums. Gleaners,
looters, archaeologists scrape the dust, sift for clues. When
the rain comes flashfloods will turn this dirt to mud,
exposing doll’s prams, tin bathtubs, a mangled accordion wheezing
Boy on a stolen moped dragging it uphill towards the church
cowboy swagger
I sit by the shrine of plastic flowers rolling a joint with
shaking fingers. A cracked Now That’s What I Call Music CD
hangs from a tree, a fetish token for the homeless woman
winter-death, grief-moon
Dig into the dirt with the heel of my boot remembering the Dog
King. Somewhere down there in an old tin can are his tethering
ropes, latch keys, can-opener, flick knife cassettes of mad
muttering, dog-howl
In buried museums beneath these hills, your memories, earth-
weighted mad saint’s bone relics, nightmare archive.
I
Millet’s spring mind soared red and skittish as an over-angled kite; in summer it entered the usual back-stall, and by August it had dived low enough for him to have another go at his wrists. This year he made an especial hash of it; fumbling with the false-economy razorblades until he ended up cutting his palms as much as anything else.
Afterwards the ambulance dumped him in the aisle of the A&E, where he lay on the hindmost of a metal spine of gurneys down the building’s centreline. Up on the ceiling, a loose panel exposed a pecking wedge of darkness. He turned on his side; the wall’s blank surface, gouged and spilling brown and fibrous shreds, was in worse nick than his skin.
After the stitching they left him in a side room, alone but for the slurping, whistling breaths of someone on the other side of a curtain. Wires snaked around its pleats to a bleeping machine in his own half of the room. His eyes tracked the glowing plots on the monitor; six months after his firing from Aventrix he still couldn’t stop himself subjecting the signals to confused analysis: window functions, discrete transforms, then breakdown into smaller sub-transforms. Radix two, four, sixteen … When the dragonfly lights on the screen began to sting his eyes he gave up his calculations and pulled the bedsheet over his head. Seeking distraction from the thin fabric’s vinegar-and-dead-skin scent, he tried to think its crumpled underside into the hills and valleys of that Stevenson poem. The Pleasant Land of Counter … Counter …
“… pain?”
The syllable repeated, a chain of islands in a sea of blurred speech, and he realized the nurse had arrived, with a prompt to rate his suffering out of ten. He thought the gurney was creaking, some part of the rails extending on either side of him.
“N over two,” he mumbled, and it seemed to do.
II
In the morning they had him shower the intact parts of his body. Two quivering shoots of something like watercress poked from the cubicle drain. He hoped they were real; he couldn’t bear the idea of hallucinating such lumpen symbolism. Then he was ferried to a psychiatric hospital on the county border, where his mind banked gently into the institutional mist. He spent much of the next few days contemplating more bedlinen, the troughs and peaks of mountain ranges hugged in soft shadow relief.
He wasn’t so keen on the topography of his outspread hands. In recent months they’d thinned out, the newly slackened skin across their backs trumpeting the onset of real ageing. When he turned them over, the mess of his healing palms troubled him. The scabs didn’t quite match the cuts he remembered making, though his memory was a joke. They kept him well-drugged. Quetiapine, lorazepam. Sometimes in the depths of the night a sister came to shine the round white beam of a pen torch on his eyelids. If they fluttered open, hands offered a pellet of zopiclone, the shadows of uniformed arms beating slowly on the walls. Sometimes, as sleep took hold, his throat felt like there was much more than one pill in it, a smooth, hard, comforting clutch.
III
They began to let him out. First just the grounds, the café and shop, in low outbuildings that reminded him of the old airfield Portakabins. He sat nursing weak coffee, watching the wings of the main building extend into milky light, until one day he and some others were put on a minibus and taken to the nearby riverside park.
On the drive one of their escorts enthused about the new fitness parcours along the banks, with special bodybuilding rigs, Ninja wheels, a machine for chest presses.
“Most of that junk’s already out of order,” his roommate Whitlock confided as they got off the bus. “The screws fail, and they’re a special kind. The council can’t be bothered to replace them.”
They quickly passed the old visitor centre, a silent cube of glass covered in crude paintings of leaf and feather that couldn’t hide the underlying curls of dustsheet. The trail head was marked by a pocked information sign. Lodged in one of its bulges, between a badly-drawn muskrat and a peeling heron, was a cluster of tiny pale green balls.
“They’ve got the map here,” said Whitlock.
“I can see that.”
“No, I mean the map butterfly. Araschnia levana, or prorsa, depending on the season. Invasive species, but I’d still like to spot the bleeder. Never set eyes on the black summer form.”
Millet murmured a vague answer to stem the flood of nature facts. The scabs on his palms were itching like hell, much worse than the ones on his arms.
IV
They walked on. After a while he ceased to notice the rise and fall of human voices. To his left was a dazzle of light on winding reed-lined water; foliage encroached on his right. Alder and beech, bramble hordes and white bells of bindweed, parted only by the green metal curves of the fitnessmachines. On each of their instruction diagrams, the silhouette figure looked less like a person.
Finally the path made a swan-neck double bend, and he found himself in front of the most preposterous contraption yet. The paint on this one had almost entirely flaked off, exposing a tall structure of rust-brown metal crisscrossed with streaks of faded cream. It was studded with appendages, and a maze of gears, flanges and blades, culminating in something like a giant upturned wishbone. The sight of the two symmetrical handles fanning out on either side of a discoid seat prompted a distant memory of gym adverts, and then he saw the instruction diagram, with its caption:
BUTTERFLY MACHINE
At the sight of the wonky grid pattern running across the underside of the depicted creature’s wings, the scabs on his palms raged until something in him hatched. When he sat down and grabbed the handles above his head, he felt the fire in his hands drain out into the cold metal. Warming it. Informing it. Loading the chart of his scars into its central navigation system. The antennae slewed and thrummed; great metal wings unfolded with a shivering clang and began to beat, then it bore him into the air.
V
Sounds rose up from the riverbank, individual screams convolved into a single wavering keen, but he couldn’t have looked down if he’d wanted to. When the machine broke through the clouds, it dropped its payload of eggs. As they whistled towards the earth he let go of the handles and the craft itself fell away from him. He hung for a second in the air, hands whipped aloft, before each palm burst apart, discretizing again and again into clouds of tiny flitting things; after a moment his mind followed suit, merry black thoughts whirling up to the sun.
Burning House Press are excited to welcome Alexander Booth as the fourth BHP guest editor of our return series of special editions! As of today Alexander will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the month of September.
Submissions are open from today 1st September – and will remain open until 25TH SEPTEMBER.
Alexander’s theme/s for the month are as follows
—LANDSCAPE
LABYRINTH—
_____
LANDSCAPE // LABYRINTH
*
When the painter’s friends, however, looked around for the painter, they saw that he was gone—that he was in the picture. There, he followed the little path that led to the door, paused before it quite still, turned, smiled, and disappeared through the narrow opening.
– Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (trans. Howard Eiland)
*
Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows.
Gaston Bachelard (trans. Maria Jolas)
*
“Though Minos blocks escape by land or water,”
Daedalus said, “surely the sky is open,
And that’s the way we’ll go. Minos’ dominion
Does not include the air.”
– Ovid, Metamorphosis (trans. Rolfe Humphries)
_____
Alexander Booth is a poet, translator, collage artist and printmaker who lives in Berlin. Recent translations include books by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Rühm, and a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His collection of poems Triptych was published in 2021 and Kantor in 2023.
__________
Submission Guidelines
All submissions should be sent as attachments to guesteditorbhp@gmail.com
Please state the theme and form of your submission in the subject of the email. For example: LANDSCAPE/POETRY Or LABYRINTH/FICTION
Poetry and Fiction
For poetry submissions, submit no more than three of your best poems. Short stories should be limited to 1,500 words or (preferably) less. We encourage flash fiction submissions, no more than three at a time. Send these in as a .doc or .docx file, along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Art
Submit hi-res images of your works (drawings, paintings, illustrations, collages, photography, etc) with descriptions of the work (Title, Year, Medium, etc) in the body of the email. Files should be in .JPEG unless they are GIFs or videos, and should not exceed 2MB in size for each work. File names should correspond with the work titles. Video submissions can be uploaded onto Youtube or Vimeo for feature on our website. Send these submissions along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Virtual Reality/ 3D Artworks
For VR Submissions, please submit no more than three (3) individual artworks. For Tilt Brush works, please upload your artwork to Google Poly (https://poly.google.com/), and mark it as ‘public’ (‘remixable’ is at your own preference). A VR/3D artwork can also be submitted as a video export navigating through the artwork. If you prefer this method, please upload your finished video file to YouTube or Vimeo and provide a URL. With either format, please provide a 150 word artist’s statement.
Non-fiction
Non-fiction submissions (essays, reviews, commentary, interviews, etc) should be no more than 1, 500 words and sent as a .doc or .docx file along with your third-person bio/and optional photograph.
Submissions are open until 25th SEPTEMBER – and will reopen again on 1st OCTOBER 2025/for new theme/new editor/s.
BHP online is now in the capable hands of the amazing Alexander Booth – friends, arsonistas, send our SEPTEMBER 2025 guest editor your magic!
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 