Nicholas Alti

Soul or flare, or then a reckoning. Spare pasts
from gashes prior. Polyps of personage,
like tight-packed parcels, plucked apart until
raw as small carcass ready for forks.
In a butter time—pre-present, future eventual—
a pickaxe couldn’t puncture them,
warlords would run away. Partial coordinates
given to an inescapable whorl
of vortices. Where portals pulse like swollen
spores. Starlight a soft no
among firm certainties. Spent parts compose.
Bereft reports galore.
A prion named Osiris. Three halves of actual
mysterious. Glee
in the beak of a beetle-eating wing. A vulture
called heaven
and buckshot ascending, followed by arrows.
Shift. Balance shadow. So bright it’s
invisible. Ointment that causes burns: ready.
Worms to salve open wounds: yes,
acquired and writhing. Together in friction,
opposing in function. It is funny.
There is no lab-made master. It isn’t hill or
area is. This isn’t a lapful of
sour liquor. Soiled trousers? At ease, sailor.
Full-mast into an impasse.
Plaster representation of an ashamed demi-
urge, the unbearabilities.
But such meantime is finite. Day-glow dark,
past tense ultraviolet.
On preorder: new options for ultra-violence
+ premium optics.
Mining for diamond-eyed, mummified angels
again, are we? Simply choose a weapon
by taste before warping into storm. Know all
angles of any possible prism or rip.
Your altered ergot did it. Tore open a torso
and apologized right to the heart.
No two wrongs go unabsolved? Phantasmic.
The world would rather not see.
But the world is easily forced into elasticity
despite byproducts like loss.
Erosion entertains. Pushed against whirlpool.
By now, you’re cold. Dry.
All because other bugs couldn’t play kindly.
Spat venom. Ate eggs.
Am I so niotic, to insist we become incessant
in scope? Sun—iamb.
Frightened wet want to become warm steam.
Going away haze.
Come here, lump. We wrap each other in body
-shaped rugs.
River of roe and rye. Ripe lore of excavation.
Drown hydras if feeling so dehydrated.
Hope a high anger, a whole-horned anglerfish
with a hot-white dangler hovering
above a simple tongue, a coherent explanation.
Unsure if Smith loves Wessen
as much as Winchester adores dear Remington,
some eggs miss this basket.
Like larvae larger than the insects they become.
Groan. Gear finally gone.
Bruised down to grain. Iota by bit. Roundabouts
a pound of prime flesh.
Pure flank. Alpine breeze, a roar of borealis—
hide, like, yesterday.
Listen, dude...your rodomy is showing. Brother,
you’re not mine.
Sorry, Sybil, sibling with half of a lame syllable.
In the chrysalis is a crucifix clutching
a very unhappy skeleton. Crack it like alabaster.
Down swings the sludge hamster.
Rise up, necromancers. Too tiny, too untimely.
You’re an incredible witness.
You just aren’t credibly people. Hardly a hum.
Haunted, this future ghoul.
Crucible crux, limp desire for simple progress.
Cauldron bubbles. Pink,
oiled, sensory boiling. Hypothermic nakedness.
Ambergris earrings
matching a cartilage necklace set: flesh collage
of our feral myth.
Look—I will skull your bone if you bohemian
my grove. Let’s abdicate our cadavers.
Cram inside the same cranium. Seasonal juice
spoils first. Fresh meat bruises easy.
I could’ve said goodbye first, or much sooner.
Holy as a basket a baby might set
out down a river and drown in. What a lesson?
Bye, now, freshly lost legend.