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20. Featuring: April Bratten

Including:

Aleathia Drehmer: Painted Post, upstate New York, USA + Mark Floyer: Hampshire, UK + Kate Hinds: Stanley, UK + S. Jalal Mousavi: Iran + Alec Newman: Newton-Le-Willows, UK + Anna Nowok: Berlin, Germany + Felino Soriano: California, USA

I See the End of the World

From the Top, Right Side Up

We all know
the world
will cave
eventually,
because all
things
must surely
die.

I know
how the planet
will look after,

(just like the
rotting stomachs
of all the
early mothers)

and I know
how we will be
destroyed when,

(lava will flow
over the plains,
and ash will fill the air,
as king tornadoes
devour our precious cities)

and we will lose
our lush pieces
of natural flesh.

We are no trees grown from the earth.
We are no dead birds or dried up fish.
We are not made of mud or rocks.
We are just the stupid wile of human.

Rings have dropped
faster from our
withered fingers
than any buildings
will split,
and the crack
of our knees
will mirror
the sands falling
into the vulgar,
as the rot
of berries
turns to gold
when all sweetness
has been lost.

We will be shocked along with
the lightning sublime,and we will
fall from the stumbling of statues,

their stoned feet
like a grand
rind
we could only pray
to suck at.

We will wear
our entities
like brackets
at our sides,
and then demolish them,
as everything else,
like smashed pretty faces.

We will rush
to the seas,
the new dormant
beds of hope,

and tell me
now,
wouldn’t you
rather
live
inside
that well placed
shroud
of the misty
blur?

Pacifist Afternoon

I feared there was a bird
deep nested
in your winter beard.
A bird,
alive or not,
is far too hostile a presence
for the precious pacings
of your clock-handed face.
There was no bird,
just a hunger
for more
of my answers.
I want to eat
questions
off of you
like Sunday dinner,
where we can wrap together
in linoleum truce,
and make our small fires
from the kitchen floor.

Legs

I finally decided to shave my legs
somewhere outside of Baton Rouge,
just as your head (lookin’ like a
rusted skillet) swung toward the road.
You rubbed your bear-like belly,
complained, complained,
of the hunger and the peas and rice.
I said what does it matter, I can’t cook nohow.
The sun started spillin’ just then,
poured like a smooth liquor over my calves.
I found a flat sharp stone and
chiseled at the coarse hairs.
You pointed your toes toward the north.
I decided to make a bed right there,
on the side of the road, somewhere outside of Baton Rouge,
in the sparse grass, inside the weeds,
and small nippled rocks.
You burned like a kerosene lamp on a hill.

Machine

The strict shape of a bone is masculine.
It will sit in your hands like a tiny god
with structure and purity.

Its perfectness can be brought and held
to a white wall, white bone,
where wall meets bone’s eye stare
and they both swear their beauty is distinct
and all their own.

On a perfect bone there are no red corners to clean,
there are no wet drooping parts to untangle.
You rip them from your body.

Bones now fly, striking that white steel wall,
and splintering out perfect miniature ones too.
From the body,
obscene white jut out
without a single blood drop.

You do not scream.
  You become dead matter.
  You are machine.