Photography © Edward S. Gault

 

Nominate

Just to justify
that’s not the dog
I don’t know what it was all spent on
we can’t afford that though
I do not want to capitalize that letter but
algorithms snort like hippos on some beached shore
and they will eat you I think they will
stomach the small blue bowl of you that didn’t
get a chance to love you like
that’s too embarrassing
and I don’t think Princess Leia was his sister in that first movie
the life of superintelligence crawls into a barn
I’ve run out of time so I guess I won’t see that movie
my guts splattered upon the screens of some stupid rope
against the surreal anarchism of some hat
it is irritating because it keeps saying it will change the world
or at least change the beard
for another broader beard
here at the end of the squirrel
that bites and sings
folds across dreams that don’t have glasses
I am not emptying out
I am automatic infested with honking and staples
and the ugly weight of still being something
fester in the bamboo and luxuriate
out the window.

 

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) has a bunch of chapbooks forthcoming, among them: No Devotions (LJMcD Communications), sort of about Mary Oliver, and Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom (above/ground), sort of about our current text deluge. Also he wrote a book about the original Wonder Woman comics. And his daughter is a prize-winning playwright. He tweets too much at @nberlat and scribbles longer at Everything is Horrible!

Edward S. Gault is a poet and fine arts photographer living in Brighton, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Oddball Magazine, Spectrum, Wilderness House Literary Review, Interlude, Currents, and Encore.