Mark Young

Tantric sandwiches

Getting caught breaking curfew

when you're living it up on the

far side of the moon is not a good

look for Walpurgisnacht or Hog-

manay or the Feast Day of Saint

Perpetua or any other rapidly

disappearing local celebration.

Donkeys don't always dance in

tune; & the detritus of past events

no longer retains the magic it once

was rumored to have. The bus is

running late. Bats clog its head-

lights. The marble cake that the

shelter is made from is unlikely

to be as tasty as it was said to be

when baked five centuries ago.

is said

An application of orange marmalade makes any military intervention more palatable.

Glossaries of words used in pornographic novels will often duplicate a right-winger's
          vocabulary.

Embarking on gender reassignment surgery will sometimes increase the piquancy of
          sweet & sour sauce.

Next year will be worse than this if the increasing presence of despots continues.

The late nineteenth century gothic novel Dracula has replaced Sun Tzu's The Art of War
          as the preferred twenty-first century military handbook.


Often considered a prime example of the risible becoming totally unfunny, the rise to
          power of the current U.S. President had nothing to do with Magritte's ability to
          make the invisible visible.

Reminders of the war are everywhere, but the Prince of Peace keeps telling us that he has
          stopped the war, & that any residual damage is greatly exaggerated.

Absolution is often bestowed upon war criminals, if the powers that be consider that
          what they've done is not criminal but rather protecting the state. &, of course, the
          powers that be.

Nearer my doG to thee sing the sycophants as they kneel before the prince of pizza who is
           sitting on his gilded throne in the Awful Orifice.

Georgia is a state that Trump carried in 2024, but he can't accept that he lost it in 2020.
          So he has instructed his goons to send in the clowns, to look for the 2020 Fulton
          Country electoral records in order to find proof the state was stolen from him.

Eyeless in Gaza. Or. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

An overloaded docket

Social sales are held on the Potomac

each Wednesday night. Abide by the

dress code. Always dress nicely &

wear the right shoes. Make sure the

shoe shape resembles the shape of

a ladle, is simple & mess-free. Add

horseradish sauce to any paint you

carry with you & keep the mixture

inside sealed plastic bags. Multiply

the number of spoons you need by

the state of the weather. It's a tradition

to get two spoons out when making

quenelle. One spoon is peak technique,

two spoons is more beginner friendly.

Keep on the lookout for rabid ocelots.

The antecedents of exhilaration

Locked in a dark room, waiting

to be let out into the light. But

light, by itself, may never be eno-

ugh to set the world alight. Might

be exciting to be illuminated again;

does not, however, provide that

spark that kickstarts exhilaration.

Often the impetus can seem to be

counter-intuitive. A state of — per-

haps  — depression, suddenly over

turned by something unexpected.

The oncology of green vegetables

Apoptosis occurs when kale is con-

sumed. Works better when the juice

is taken fresh rather than steamed. A

cacophony of big words erupts, some

familiar, others not. These are not the

ingredients of a child's rhyme — glu-

cosinolates, isothiocyanates, caspase-

dependent pathways — but they are

constituents of sulfur-containing — &

thus bitter tasting — cruciferous vege-

tables, a list that might seem a bit like

a poem when read alphabetically, all

the way from aragula & on to wasabi,

weaving around radishes on the way.

Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for over sixty-five years, & is the author of around eighty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, non-fiction, art history, & an artist's book. Recent books are From the Cave’s jukebox & synecdoche, both from Sandy Press, Santa Barbara, California, & Curtains from Neo-Mimeo Editions, Nualláin House, Monte Rio, California. A new collection of visual work, in the key of G, will be published by Sandy Press later this year.