Mark Young

Majority Foreign Owned Meat Packers

We will always protect our American

bananas, even though we cannot

build them, said the artistic director

of the Sante Fe all-boy ballet company.

It is our God-given right, & the left

will never take it away from us. They

pirouetted prior to glissading offstage,

slipped on a banana skin, & are now

being treated for fractured vertebrae.

The Vladivostok Funicular Railway

would be considered as just another

Trans-Siberian Orchestra cover band

were it not for its custom-made Y-sub

connector with a Y-shaped metal shell

& parallel contact rows that sometimes

presents as a remarkably lifelike imit-

ation of a nineteenth-century French up-

right piano & sometimes as the grand-

daddy of all multilingual ouija boards.

Lackluster ski_p_ants

Baits are the way to go, especially

when they have reinforced knees

& hems, & snow gaiters for proper

function. A question asked of Trump's

Truth Social AI partner confirmed

this solution, but added the rider

that neither ants nor ski pants had

introduced the President to Jacob

Epstein & that the model for The

Rock Drill was well past puberty.

from a book of the hours

4 a.m.

black blink black black blink
blink blink black blink black
blink blink blink black blink rem
blink black black blink blink
blink blink blink black black
black blink black blink black ember

5 a.m.

—but not
Magritte clouds
but proto-
poems hanging
in the not-
blue sky, but
not in reach—

6 a.m.

piss proud
piss long
piss hard
piss it all
                   away
—absolution

Reel for the Real

(A Tom Beckett Title)

Cast a line & run what you

reel in through a thesaurus

just to see how real it is.

Remember to allow some

variation for the water you

caught them in. Flat earth

will be different to teenage

turbulence, as will MAGA's

misleading polemics com-

pared with magma cast up

from the bowels of the sea

no matter how much the

former is trumped up & X-

altered.

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. Recently published books include Balance, from Neo-Mimeo Editions, Nualláin House, Monte Rio, California & From the Cave’s jukebox, from Sandy Press, Santa Barbara, California.