four poems
David Lau
Savage Detectives and Suicide Girls
The parasitic situationists lasted ten years.
They captured the colonel with a blow to the head.
They clanged with illusions like a street fair.
The coast was proxy war zone of pleasures, fears.
They mimicked the painted, elaborate dead.
The parasitic situationists lasted ten years.
They came after the end of the Party. It ever nears.
They left raw marks. Stoke, channel, harness. They branded.
They clanged with illusions like a street fair.
They sought the police who wanted some ears.
Autocorrect is a bitch, they said as they snitched.
The parasitic situationists lasted ten years.
These years turned, made them harmless like gears.
They feared every new war; ascetic, purified,
they clanged with illusions like a street fair.
Its jawbone for sale, their future had just a few spears
of grass to eat, consumed by fire they administered.
The parasitic situationists lasted ten years.
They clanged with illusions like a street fair.
How Their Juuls, Vapes, and Phones Were Dirty
Steely, dirty, the moon crosses the reeds in a pond
the second dream of the high-tension line step
down transformer, the 5G Literary Guillotine.
Stoned with interference,
she wandered the lawn recited verses dawn.
She was up next day not till night, four days that way
until she dug her grave at the pound. Where
the wine was traditional, she wore a party top.
Later she showered against the artificial
rain wall at the mall. Commercial
rates were down. When I met her
she showed me their phones for a time.
Image: they were crowded outside the white-collar office,
image: they were leaving the factory
in overalls, image: they were writing in a mental
institution in Beijing near fields
in their fifth month of a sequester,
image: they were concentrating on the maiden
of orchid blossoms. The gauze of killer
silk and fish scales revealed her
posts about kids and fuchsia bulbs.
An assassin surrounded with idiots,
she soaked up a white concrete sun
like the ocean deprived of waves.
Passionate winds of internet affect called
out to her from a path
through the wall of ping pong tables. Nothing
but parties, she sucked on the lit end of matches
for the cologne of a candy star. The world was quiet
her last night while she disfigured their stones.
Canonical Form
Your family lived in the surgical mist
protected by a layer of city. Different
districts, brick steps in the park
the neighbor Egyptians coded,
were blazing to touch like
this smart city’s pixels
beyond the edge of the gameplay.
In the crumbling industrial region
your camera penetrated a surface water falling
from a rocky cliff. No below, the now’s
outlawry left on a swift horse out of plague town.
Grand theft was gently anti-Cartesian,
the old phone against the new phone.
Breath of a Wok
Time travel on the way to the market,
river tempo, eddy, whirlpool,
knife in the left-handed apiero—
you end up earlier than before you begin
but unable to start over, April Theses,
wormholes, Jacobins
drink bad beer and sleep rough
on the floor of a super-civilization.