A note from the editors: Locust #3 is going to the printers. Subscribers should begin receiving their full copies within a few weeks — featuring artwork, poetry, literature, essays, interviews and other gestures from Locust writers, artists, and contributors. Subscribe here. In the meantime, enjoy this piece from Locust #2.
In December 2019 the Born Again Labor Museum and Locust Review issued our first “Irrealist Worker Survey” as part of our quixotic attempt to map the gravedigger’s multiverse. A selection of responses from you — our dear comrade readers — along with the survey questions, as printed in Locust #2, is posted here.
Don Otis
Yes.
Kelsey Goldberg
The animals would be mostly comprised of large pink and fuchsia birds, that would roam around stomping on the feet of the capitalists who had once trod upon the masses. The flora would be beautiful and large and sing show tunes. At first the capitalists would think they had tricked us; this beautiful paradise all to themselves. Then they’d get bitten by a giant mosquito and contract malaria. We’d offer them medicine, because we’re not monsters. But we’d charge so much they couldn’t afford it, because they were once monsters. Their bodies would turn to husks that tap dancing prairie dogs would burrow in and use as their home.
Nom de Guerre
The capacity of the world working class movement to foment revolution is not diminished in the long view, but the consciousness of workers had suffered retrograde motion with the destruction of the USSR, but plants are still nice to have around.
artwork above by Leslie Lea from Locust #2
Joy Happiness Gleam
The animals would be huge and symbiotic with the plant life. There would be massive, feathered death-birds and brightly colored tree lizards and fluffy, lynx-sized red squirrels. The plants would be oversized tropical plants. They would all eat anything that disrupted their relationship to each other. Several insects would lay eggs in the eyes, skin, and intestines. The eye eggs would burrow into the sinuses and brain of the rich. Their brains would drain out slowly as their flesh and bellies erupted with new, iridescent, giant baby wasps.
Fluffer Hooligan
Don’t intern the bourgeoisie unless they won’t shut up. Many of them may enjoy living differently. If they were to try to recreate capitalist ways of living on this island, the plants and animals would discourage them from doing so. Otherwise, the plants would provide an abundance of fruits and vegetables, the animals wouldn’t allow themselves to be caught so all the bourgeoisie would have to go vegan.
Pope Felix the Scurrilous
The plants and animals would constitute a hive mind named Phil. Being an alien hive mind, you would think that Phil would be naturally telepathic. They are, but only with flora and fauna from their own world. With humans, some assistance is needed. Small insects would crawl into the ears of the humans and embed themselves in the humans’ brains. Kinda like Wrath of Khan. Once the humans were able to receive Phil’s telepathic messages, Phil would proceed to tell them stories of their home world. This would normally be extremely fascinating, but Phil is a terrible storyteller, and their telepathic voice is a grating monotone.
Beatrix Morel
The island itself would be a living organism, a bio-hellscape of alien flesh secreting a choking miasma of mind-altering substances. Those living on the island would find themselves trapped in hallucinatory haze, a limbo of subtle torture where the occasional squirt of xeno-dopamine sustains their will to live. In other words, a symbolic approximation of the hell they put the rest of us through, bearing a passing resemblance to the soulless high art they once consumed.
Red Moose
I would say since most of the modern bourgeoisie are libertarians and “self-made” men and women, I would leave them with no flora or fauna, they can procreate and eat the resulting children.
Lane Powell
The trees of the islands are sphincters. Their leaves are farts. Due to the haze that muzzles the ears as well as the eyes it is difficult to obtain any further information about the island.
A Scott Buch
The plants would be money trees and the animals would be a species of money consuming money. They would eat uh, money. Soon there would be no reason to breed, as breeding doesn’t necessarily lead to an increase of money, but rather a decrease of it. However since they all needed to keep eating money, they would still need to produce more of it to eat, which would be a survival mechanism of the collective mind, one vast Money Mind.
Colin
An island of flowers made of precious metals and gems, luminous orbs of sapphire and emerald roll out of white petals of paper thin titanium, and then it snaps shut on the head of a hedge fund manager.
June
I’d like to think that the flora and fauna would be indistinguishable from one another. Each one a creature of impermanent form, reminiscent of the flailing mycelium that penetrate every corner of the globe. The fauna would distinguish themselves only by their ability to ethereally ambulate towards the swine on which they and their offspring will feed. I can only hope so. I can only dream.
Joy Happiness Gleam
I am a forest Bigfoot with three eyes and elk horns. I live in cold caves and grunt Bigfoot poetry to the other forest animals.
Beatrix Morel
A thing of blue gradients and wicked claws. The only recognizable facial feature is a fanged grin - a crimson rictus on the surface of an inky void with glittering stars. Curved neon horns erupt from a wild mane. The flesh is lean, lithe, rippling with tight muscle. It lives in the moment. It lives for play. It lives for art.
Kelsey Goldberg
A banshee- if you’ve ever seen me mad, this makes sense.
Jordy Cummings
Duck Billed Platypus with leprosy.
Fluffer Hooligan
I am a shape-shifter who chooses what appearance to have on any given day. That means I can appear human if I wish, or turn into a kangaroo if it suits me. I enjoy being a bird, a snake, a junebug, or a tiny gnat bothering someone who deserves to be pestered. I can also become a hybrid animal and scare the heck out of people just before seeming to vanish--which really means I’ve turned into a ladybug to make my getaway.
Nom de Guerre
The stuff of your worst nightmares.
Don Otis
A shape-shifting entity from the 10th dimension.
A Scott Buch
One of those stubborn, beastly, godless and yet mystically minded; mad, bad and dangerous to know, anti-capitalist, un-American, libertarian socialist (anarchist), believers in the creative potential of all human beings to cast off their chronic chains; motherfucking worthless, ugly creature of that scummy human type which the general population tends to refer to as a “bad person,” who is also male and Caucasian.
art by Adam Ray Adkins from Locust #2
June
Every time I look in the mirror I see a shambling sack of flesh. Nothing matches. Everything looks strange and foreign. I take hormone pills to try and make it better but it doesn’t help much. I still see a monster in the mirror.
Pope Felix the Scurrilous
I am much like the monster at the end of this book. However, my fur is a pale yellow green and I constantly emit a high pitched whine at the edge of the human auditory range.
Colin
Large, palid, porcine, wild gusts of fur, sharp at points and soft at others, sad eyes.
Kelsey Goldberg
My HR manager is a troll. If you’ve ever heard her talk this makes sense.
Jordy Cummings
Whatever creature species that also includes Oscar the Grouch.
Joy Happiness Gleam
My boss is a harpy with a smiling face and giant, spiked wings. She spits venom.
Nom de Guerre
As the old age is withering and the new one is struggling to lay its eggs, it’s a time of monsters, so deal with it.
Pope Felix the Scurrilous
My boss is a monster of no account. The less said of them the better.
Fluffer Hooligan
My boss is a golf club, a martini glass, a line of cocaine, a pile of cayenne pepper on a coconut, and many other things besides.
Don Otis
Primarily, they be monkeys. Small ones.
A Scott Buch
A perfect angel doing God’s work in God’s country for the betterment of God and God’s chosen people.
Red Moose
Definitely an Argus like monster, there are eyes everywhere!
Colin
Parasitoid wasps are a large group of hymenopteran superfamilies, with all but the wood wasps (Orussoidea) being in the wasp-waisted Apocrita. As parasitoids, they lay their eggs on or in the bodies of other arthropods, sooner or later causing the death of these hosts.
June
My boss is the kind of monster that leeches blood and doesn’t even have the grace to admit that the blood he sucks once inhabited someone else.
June
I remember when my family lost our little house when I was young I had nightmares of God demanding I not kill myself. Now I have nightmares about my mother demanding I not kill myself.
Colin
As the tow truck pulled away with our car, my mother explained to me that we didn’t own the car, the bank owned the car, and now that dad was dead the bank wanted their car back.
Joy Happiness Gleam
I realized I was working class when I was about 12 because my mom desperately wanted not to be. I dreamt of being a writer and had nightmares about becoming her.
Kelsey Goldberg
In childhood I was between classes, to my neighborhood friends I was their “rich friend” and they often introduced me as such. At school I was “poor” and rode the wrong bus and my family didn’t belong to any private beach clubs. My friends who had more money than me had prettier things but were pretty boring and not goofy. Private beach clubs are stuffy and shouldn’t exist. When I graduated college I worked in the service industry. That’s when I realized the wealthy were not boring and harmless, they need to go. They are also shit tippers and rude.
Red Moose
My nightmares are always of alienation and self-doubt. I feel that is a feature of capital on the labor class.
Jordy Cummings
At 17 when I got fired from a canvassing job for saying “hassle” when the person thought I said “asshole.”
Nom de Guerre
Freedom is the appreciation of necessity of having to pay rent.
Beatrix Morel
When I got my first job, and again later, when I realized my college degree meant nothing. I’ve had nightmares of disembowelment, of blindingly realistic pain. The nightmares where I’m trapped in school are worse.
A Scott Buch
I dropped out of film school when I realized we were living in a strange, dark parallel universe where the best part of the revolution in consciousness and attack on the oppressive status quo of the 1960s-70s somehow failed, or had been appropriated into capitalism and commodified. Withdrawing consent from the dominant paradigm however is not something one is generally rewarded for, and my waking life became a sort of nightmare over time, through a gradual descent into drug and alcohol abuse, madness and numerous run-ins with the law. A criminal record that cannot be expunged leaves me as a member of an underclass in some ways, although I consider myself to have come from a lower-middle class background. I guess I’m stuck somewhere in a mix-mash between these.
Fluffer Hooligan
I didn’t much think about all that until probably my senior year in high school when I was exposed to punk music, the Dead Kennedys in particular. I deepened my understanding of class dynamics in college by going to the library a lot, reading underground literature, and kept developing my awareness even further after college. I’m sure that this realization has squeezed my dream life at certain times. That feeling of being on the job and needing to be there when I would rather be doing anything else, or that feeling of missing class when I’d been out of school for years already, have worked into my dreams. At other times, class dynamics are not present in my dream life because I have a certain degree of imaginative freedom.
Don Otis
Always been poor. Born poor, still have most of it. Dad left, Mama tried.
June
I dream about a world in which I can tell the people who love me that I don’t want to live and rather than begging me to stay they say “I understand. I wouldn’t want to live either. Rest well, please.” I dream about a world where I’m allowed to rest. Sometimes I think it will take an apocalypse to make the people around me feel peace with my exit.
Kelsey Goldberg
There’s a lot of fire and floods and crying and it hurts. I drown like that family in titanic, with the kids asleep on my stomach cuddling my partner.
Joy Happiness Gleam
I dream about being eaten by zombies and about escaping to space.
Beatrix Morel
Most souls automatically find themselves in heaven, which turns out to be a multidimensional holy battery created to boost god’s power. Only those who specifically made pacts with demons end up in hell, which isn’t so much a place of punishment as it is just some other god’s soul battery. The Queers build cozy enclaves with warm hearths in the perpetual rain of limbo.
A Scott Buch
I remember distinctly dreaming about the end of the world on January 3rd of 2012. That was the last time though, I believe. The earth was consumed in fire, but then I woke up. However the end is less frightening in my view, then a never-ending..
Fluffer Hooligan
I’ve dreamed about disasters. New York City was flooded and bombed out. People were dying of a flesh eating disease and starving on rooftops. I dreamed of a nuclear attack on a bridge in Portland, Oregon. I dreamed of some kind of anti-matter black hole pixelation destroying everything in its path. I was able to escape it by jumping into this curious pool of water.
Pope Felix the Scurrilous
I always dream the same dream. Reba MacIntyre is offering me a selection of cheeses, but every time I choose one it moves just out of my reach, and Reba sings the Three’s Company theme.
Don Otis
In my dreams, it’s a loud thing that turns everything off. In winter.
Colin
My high school girlfriend and I were on a sort of cable pulled air tram, and it pulled into a gleaming white station. She said “we can stop and eat at the foodatorium or we can proceed to the proceedatorium.” That was the end of history.
Fluffer HooliganI doubt it. But if I could give myself machine components, they’d have the option to be solar powered and super efficient b/c I wouldn’t want someone hacking me or disrupting my neural circuitry. If I could extend my life with cyborg components, I would. But I would not want to make myself dependent on the electricity grid for my survival in such an intimate way unless the stakes were dire.
June
I’m not a cyborg. I can’t afford the surgeries.
Kelsey Goldberg
I am not, I’d have a thigh gap if I was. Cyborgs have thigh gaps.
Jordy Cummings
Not sure.
Joy Happiness Gleam
I suspect I might be but have not confirmed.
Nom de Guerre
Only parts of me are biopolymers and metallic components, does that count?
Lane Powell
Everyone wants to be a cyborg these days, as if interweaving the mechanic, dead labor, with the organic were the only way to impose one’s image or will on an alien universe, or in other versions, to make oneself more fully alien. But for a cyborg metaphor that is not my own I substitute another, for humans were not the first to do all this. For as long as trees have built their houses out of their own tissue, and for as long as mushrooms have sprouted from that tissue, living or dead, there have been cyborgs. We are mushrooms. Our tools are our secretions.
Colin
I have 12 screws in my pelvis.
Red Moose
I have a titanium/ceramic knee.
Beatrix Morel
I carry a small rectangle on me at all times that can deliver dank memes on demand. I think that counts as cyborg.
Pope Felix the Scurrilous
I have had all of my eyelashes replaced with bionic implants. I am no stronger. I am no faster. My vision is no better than it was. However, every time I blink, my eyelashes make the noise from the Bionic Man.
Don Otis
Yes, I am useless without machines, machines are useless without me. Sometimes even with me, or them, if you see. We are one, the machines and I.
June
In this moment we have two choices. We die like squirming worms beneath a jackboot, or we rise up and devour or oppressor like so many swarms of ravenous scavengers have before us. I would surely rather die in pursuit of such a noble slaughter.
Kelsey Goldberg
I’d sing a song from Les Mis. It wouldn’t inspire them because they are not lame like me, but they would stop wavering just to make me shut up. Sometimes you need to be unlikeable to be effective.
Jordy Cummings
Hum the melody of Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nothing to Fuck With.
A Scott Buch
I must do what’s right, carrying on the flame of this perennial fight, even if that means I die trying in countless iterations throughout the multiverse of eternity. I am but one. Together we are many. The beautiful, the good, the true are all One thing experienced subjectively as a triad, although in point of fact they are the same objectively speaking. Our struggle is like a game, which we either fail at indefinitely, or else one day, in the ecstasy of communication, we conquer it down to every last bit! So down with this modern mythology within a mythology, that we have come to accept as the way that things are! One must define its own subject, or else by another be defined! Each human being occupies a duration of time, and we must grant the dimensions of each an equality of value!
Joy Happiness Gleam
They can’t kill us if some are still sleeping in the ground. There will always be more of us in the dirt waiting to drag them down.
Nom de Guerre
Chirp
Don Otis
In English, something like, if I go, you gotta go and fuck and like. In locust, it’s like bzzxx bbzzzzz bzzs. You know…
Colin
Our whole lives, they have done what they will while we have done what we must. Tonight we do what we must.
Beatrix Morel
Buzz Buzz, motherfuckers… No, really. Buzz Buzz is a character from the Super Nintendo game “EarthBound”. He is a beetle from 10 years in the future, who has traveled back in time to warn you of the coming apocalypse, kickstarting your adventure to the save the world. Even an insect can change the course of history.
Red Moose
Locusts of the field unite!
Fluffer Hooligan
We are many, and they are few...
June
Bake sale.
Kelsey Goldberg
Invent a game like Candy Crush but instead of us using a computer to crush fake candy, they use humans to crush fake candy. The humans are harmed in the playing of this game.
Jordy Cummings
Shared interests and sex.
Joy Happiness Gleam
By understanding their exploitation and fight as it is also our own.
Don Otis
Trust no manager.
Beatrix Morel
Erotic dronification porn.
Fluffer Hooligan
Detourn machines towards doing the hard work of survival and also towards pleasure to the greatest degree possible. Find out what robots and machine enjoy doing so they can have some leisure time.
Colin
We can find the places where our needs intersect and build the barricades there.
A Scott Buch
We are arrogant to assume a human being is the only possible species of being. A robot with consciousness is not a “robot” as far as I’m concerned.
June
He would spend eternity trying to ring up a long line of customers, but the mechanism of the cash-register confuses him, and there will never be anyone there to help him understand the supposedly simple task he felt was worth only minimum wage.
Jordy Cummings
Data entry forever with no piss or shit breaks.
Joy Happiness Gleam
My employers would be drowned in oil and fire.
Don Otis
They would be freed and forgiven. Unlike how they treat us. Then maybe they get eaten by a bear.
A Scott Buch
They would have to start thinking for themselves.
Fluffer Hooligan
My current employer doesn’t need to be punished, actually, it’s not that kind of situation. My past employers however, are another matter Some of them should be put through ordeals and tricky mazes, and then just when they despair we’ll expose the giant film set they’re in, kind of like the Truman Show.
Kit Fenderson-Peters
That information is classified.
Colin
I am unemployed currently but the last guy’s head could have proofed up like a loaf of bread.
Red Moose
Cleaning halved brussels sprouts in 200 pound increments.
June
Lenin is like an angel to me. His smiling face brings me great comfort in trying times. I look at pictures of him holding his cat and I know that everything will be okay. Everything will be okay. Everything will be okay
Kelsey Goldberg
The new gods would be a boy/girl/gender-non conforming band comprised of a plumber, a carpenter, a fireman, a cop-killer, and an indigenous chief. They will not only grant us solidarity but also union mandated dance breaks.
Jordy Cummings
Too soon to tell.
Joy Happiness Gleam
Everyone will be the new angels. People who make things will be the prophets. We will grant each other solidarity.
Nom de Guerre
There is no god, angels are bogus and they can’t do anything.
Fluffer Hooligan
No gods, no masters, just a rapport with other kinds of life so we can establish reciprocal relations of pleasure and abundance.
A Scott Bruch
No supernatural being is going to grant us anything. We will make it, or rather it will happen of its own accord, in the sense that all right action happens of its own accord.
Beatrix Morel
They will be gods of play. Gods of pleasure. Gods that respect our time, grant us more of it, and empower us to fill every moment with art. I’m not sure if they’ll be able to grant solidarity unless Twitter is destroyed in the revolution.
Don Otis
The holy dead will be our saints, the prophets sang before us, God will be revealed by the fungus.
June
The charred remains found in great pits after the grand human insurrection would be a bitter and smokey delicacy that would fetch a high price. The high price would be attributed to the complete lack of policemen after this insurrection. The chewy texture would be quite pleasant on our wide, double rowed teeth, and the charred ends would be very satisfying on our leathery tongues.
Kelsey Goldberg
Like all food it depends on the quality of the meat. Cadets are killed when they are really scared after being locked in a room with their girlfriend who they used to beat who is wielding a pipe. Being bludgeoned to death makes the meat tender. This is a delicacy that every worker is given for free on their birthday. It is served with a lime and cilantro (the people who think cilantro tastes like soap did not survive the revolution) dressing. Cops who ate too many donuts are great for a quick and greasy meal. They have replaced bacon in our post-revolutionary diets. Sergeants are tough and gamey after too much time in the wild, they are an acquired taste but this food critic thinks the real appeal is in the act of hunting them down rather than a reflection of the meat itself. DEA agents are slimy but are a wonderful addition to a stew as they are full of flavor. We do not eat homicide detectives, they are forced to perform (for no money) for crowds of true crime fans, who still exist because we haven’t figured out how to reconcile our prison abolition stance with our love of serial killers no longer being allowed to kill. They are only three homicide detectives left who have not died in captivity. They are available for birthdays, anniversary parties, and commune retreats.
Jordy Cummings
Chicken.
A Scott Buch
Bacon.
Nom de Guerre
poison, caustic poison.
Beatrix Morel
Despite the human’s monikers, they do not taste like pork. The flavor is bland with an odd saccharine aftertaste, as though the flesh had been marinating in refined donut sugars and entitlement for decades. We much prefer the flavor of the wealthy.
Pope Felix the Scurrilous
Lobster Thermidor in a bearnaise sauce with a fried egg on top and spam.
Fluffer Hooligan
The police officer tastes of toxic masculinity, fear and hypocrisy. Even the women have internalized the sour flavor of toxic masculinity to a certain degree because that rotten taste saturates their training. I do not eat the human police officer, but I will play tricks on them.
Don Otis
Chicken. All this stuff tastes like chicken. It’s like they got bored.
Colin
Stringy, dry, notes of burnt PVC, it tastes like how seeing domestic violence feels.
Joy Happiness Gleam
Human policemen taste like salty and sweet. Slightly bitter on the back of the tongue.
Thanks to all the Comrade-Readers and Artists who participated in our first “Irrealist Worker’s Survey.” The second Irrealist Worker’s Survey” is coming soon. The Locust editors want to take this opportunity to announce that we will soon be launching a new project: SWARMCAST -- a Locust Review podcast. SWARMCAST will feature discussions of irrealist art, poetry, and stories, as well as performances and readings from Locust Review artists and contributors. The SWARMCAST will be released early for Locust and Evicted Art patrons at and above the $5 monthly pledge level. In addition there will be exclusive content available only for patrons. Coming soon!
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