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I. Skeleton
Well, the Curse fell down like a Sword
the feet fell down with a thunder-Sound
It was a technique, a Style
a Crying Out against what happened there
an insistence of living against.
all contact is numerical
manipulation —
insistently, we resort to recursion
do you concur?
blurry universe
green o green o green o green o
-dor of cuts dol
-or all around all screaming all surround no
— silence — all — sound —
take then, the god as emergent phenomena.
what ardor
emerges from what?
take then, my skin: glowing and raw.
yearning and
stretched.
what emerges from the circumstance of emerging?
wailing on whaling on
reason upon
reason rising out of
reasoning
sea.
II. Organ
cuts through my eye severed from it
by imagination film,
becoming , only camera
similarly eye. fizz fountains up the trees so bare so
autumn bare
surely there is wood here, surely.
our world aflame. and yours? the sh
ra
pn
el
of the explosion is designed to create a perfect armageddon of blades, whirling.
your mouth is
red and violent
a gash in
maple sweet
eye
repeating in
three parts
again, you say, again
III. Mind
perhaps the dog experiences a sort of teleportation, awakening into a quiet room from a dream of chase and rabbit and field and felt and blood and food-pound nose-prick wound-ache sound-flake
alternately: last night torching a field of wheat. a war crime, but it was fun, and i remember thinking of starvation while the gold burned.
again we hallucinate. above the killing field, a group of crows is a murder a group of heuristics is a justice.
poetry is a disease for which the poem is the cure or something or other.
through machine learning the strip is divided into blast radii in order to streamline the butchery of human bodies, with optimization modules focusing on poets, journalists, and, of course, children, in ascending order of primacy.
morale is always too fucking low. i am either talking about capitalism, war, or FIFA Ultimate Team. e microtransactions unum.
IV. Soul
given god’s infinite grace and wisdom,
all drone strikes were glorious, felicitous, good
we must imagine ; impaled by shards of time.
that the world loved exploding
we are haunted by a haunting
some recursion of a curse
this sentence is the blister and the burst.
Dylan Haston is a “vocateur” reader, writer, and reviewer of SFF fiction and poetry from North Carolina, currently residing in New York City. A recent graduate, they have worked as a bookseller, a literary agency intern, and an observer of lemur behavior. You can find them at nearby poetry readings or immersed in the world of their most recent favorite book.
