Great Libidinal Time-Skin
by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Unconscious time bit by a desert animal divides the monstrous mercantilist body. A superabundance of dark figures glide to the infamy of a silent world-hole, while a perfectly mercantilist idea of a libidinal wasteland chatters in chaos. Small vegetable fragments form a twisted creature with an aberrant band of plosive lips.
Baudrillard’s Prehistoric America
by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Landscapes alter plants, encircled by a transparent and insuperable obstacle. Humans share their lack of realism with somnambulic violence. Brutes transform into consummate artists by a few car headlights not placed over animals from broken-down, worn out motel chairs. Special bony architecture escaping history traced by a finger on a wall of glass – ideogram of women, camouflaged with a long beak and feathers. Cranial walls are very thick, indifferent to nuclear pathos. Few geometric or human representations panic through the characteristic smell from the walls to the vaults that enclose longing all-out modern eyes.
Poetic Surrealism, which is the subject of this study, has focused its efforts up to this point on reestablishing dialogue in its absolute truth, by freeing both interlocutors from any obligations and politeness. Each of them simply pursues his soliloquy without trying to derive any special dialectical pleasure from it and without trying to impose anything whatsoever upon his neighbor.
– Andre Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism
Precious Gems
by Howie Good
I asked the bored-looking security guard dawdling inside the main door, “Are you really an ethical person?” He pointed with his chin. I walked to the right. Every child was a precious gem, a big head on a starved body. There were so many that I just kept walking. The farther I went, the fainter the memory of the suffering in their eyes became. Soon I could smell the ocean. I felt strangely emotional. And then death loomed up through the rain, like the whaling museum we talked about but never visited.
Ain’t No Cure for the Summertime Blues
by Howie Good
Death, dressed all in black to intimidate, removed the cigarette from his mouth and stepped back to assess his work. A man flopped about on the pavement, gasping. It was the summer I was 12. My first beer ever tasted like diarrhea, the breath of cancer. The times were strange. Flowers ached to open and the eyeholes bled.
the forever poem
by summa iru
we breathe on each other's necks when we hug, always you catch my gust to sail away in your boat-necked tee, leaving me in the musk bowl of our embrace. with all this love in me, death should be a frolic of light. who's to say this night sky won't remain lit up for a second?
Note: “the forever poem” follows the Six Lines poetry prompt.
Art: “Snakebiter,” Eduard Bezembinder; Pair of Clappers, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Nicholas Alexander Hayes is a Chicago-based writer and educator. He is the author of Lexicartographies (BlazeVOX) and No Wish Unfulfilled (Alien Buddha Press). His work has been featured in the anthologies Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry; Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry: An International Anthology; and Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism.
Howie Good is the author of The Dark, a poetry collection forthcoming from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.
summa iru happened when the poet came across Rilke's Book of Hours. The rest, as they say, is a dog whistle.