as we wipe our tears on stone altars
Read More
Crown
beware how delicately you wear / this crown of oblivion.
Read More
I Wish I Was a Rich F*G
Working in that warehouse / Scanning Boxes by the rate / In Bezo’s dusty ass house. / I wish I was a rich f*g.
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I Gather
it’s too quiet, / too dead, / too ripped apart by sirens, / too veiled by the rot of concrete
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What if You Had Taken the Day Off?
What if you had taken a day off? / Read books in backyard jungles? / Enjoyed your coffee before it got cold?
Read More
Last Night on Earth
we’ve imagined more / than this last night on earth / bent over grinding machines
Read More
Abstract Art
you are the art / that hangs by strands
Read More
Bitter
you are the tree / that I nailed myself to
Read More
Withdrawal
withdrawal…
the worst is the parasitic organism
organism of the gut dying gunfire organism
the hallucinatory organism of railway seasons
hypnotic golden morality organism the kind
that justify them worthless carnival shootings
of jazz and tejano toned people; far away omitted poor;
momentary people...
a flu of noise bullets picking at the silence
death from spiral barrelled throats
weak cities black dimes accustomed to accumulated crisis
country horses force submission
fear not the gallery
be as empty as the dead exist
never count again years of defeat
gnaw the backstage rats grown fat with nervous words
seize the jealous ankles and mechanical muscles
of capital
the old god
the dead god
all that’s left is roses
This work originally appeared in the print edition of Locust Review #7.
Laura Fair Schulz, The Song of the Barren Tree (2021)
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Mimetic Society and its Consequences
The architecture of possibility always-already compromised
The unconscious has been gentrified
Meme shocked and future lost
Mommy milkers on the final boss
A Most Deserved Anxiety: Four Poems by Joe Stapleton
A most deserved anxiety
The great pig of the North
Reeking, blood dripping from its snout
Glances warily about
For it heard the scream
Exit Interview
You needed me more than I needed you.
I retired Friday of Labor Day Weekend,
eight months after I told the boss off
for the first time, four days in a row,
my product manager told him to sit down.
I Am an Embryo
A collection of cells
and half-formed tissue.
I have no thoughts,
no will,
no urge to change the world.
Black Dime
REMEMBER WHEN you stung like a bee, leaving your ink all over the kitchen floor and the orchids in the kitchen window never seemed to notice how drab the sun had become over the years? It makes no sense. All languages die in the gap. So, don’t speak. There’s no reason to give voice to our discontents. We are driving and the bridge is a snake crossing the snaking water ways. I became possessed with your hand on the back of my neck. I know you by the smell of lavender and tea. Don’t blink. Never blink again. We have all the time there ever was.
Read MoreDisintegration: Three Poems by Leslie Lea
flashing neon signs:
DRIVE-UP EUTHANASIA
CREDIT CARD ONLY
OPEN 24 HOURS
past-life recall:
centipede exoskeletons
trace dark lines
of rigor mortis
150,000,000
In these United States
This Union
This US
Trammeled & trampled
& put aside
For later we will
For our country we will
For our cities
We will stan & star & stand & fight
Dead Worker
I was a worker or so it’s said
a worker that took too much
too many breaks
too many handouts
too many quiet moments alone in the shop bathroom
Weekly Planner
MONDAY
On Monday, the news anchor will mock me,
call me ugly and talentless.
She’ll laugh
her cruel laugh,
and provide unassailable proof:
You have lost loved ones,
which can only mean
that you
and your love
are disposable.
The Dramatic Days of Lesser Socialism
(or, an unfortunate series of unrelated things)
or lesser evilism
spectres of want and tragedy
our rape of revered ghosts
our politics of melancholy and cigarette smoke
the distressed voter
the incurable and dying worker lashed to incurable and dying pay scale
The Robot's Love Song
Come file off the rust of my grommets.
I have been longing to blow smoke into your apertures.
You remember the frozen steel of that stiff winter night,
How gleaming oil coursed across the gouged surface
Of that thing I have