The Myths of a Moribund Age
by ANTHONY SQUIERS
In remote Northern Michigan,
where Douglass fur line the frontier
of the vast North woods
There is a little army base
where soldiers are trained,
in the techē
of defense and protection.
Behind a cyclone fence,
crowed high with razor wire
are technologies
and tanks
and a little Christmas tree.
In December, it is illuminated
at the gate,
reassuring all seers
that even out in
the lowly outposts, of civilization
great violence can be generated
in defense of the myths
of a moribund age.
Anthony Squiers is a writer, scholar, and literary critic. His debut novel, Madness and Insanity was published in 2009 by Irish Eye Publishing. He is currently Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr and has written extensively on the social philosophy of Bertolt Brecht including the forthcoming book An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics (Rodopi). His writings have appeared in a wide range of print and online journals including, Logos, eFiction Magazine, Recoil, Communications from the International Brecht Society and Eclectic Flash. He live is Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq.
The Month, Last (November 2011, Class Positions)
by HOWARD MORTON
‘Thursday: Nobody phoned me today’
Edda circled estranges like Mousterian flint
‘Max agrees the clown is the focal point’.
Tent syntaxes disinter the runes of prehistory, again pace
undead ideas through the latest declension in subprime Louis Bonapartes’
sat outside St Paul’s Occupy still feels like collective anoxia squared,
each day the pain of you leaving quickens.
Ridiculed in bad faith, unguent Pauline demands
prove arsenic for a clergy besmirched by coin tricks, the farce of
dispossession is gratitude to the FTSE 100 of language options.
I tread shapeless through the orchard where catechists
have left an open grave for utopian tracts & their appendages.
witchery settles like mayflies on that spring line pool:
‘probably the centre of the pre-plague village’.
Whiskey mesmerises neat, grasping apotropaic private property
garden lights as queer as sexual longing, if the emergency passes
a revisionist terror has slouched in the wake of survival.
It cleaves the ceaseless ribbons of you unto
dialectics, prayers for redemption tread only on vatic disembowelments:
‘to the person who buys me a tea set, I offer my hand’
as the rest of us were bemused by North Laine curiosity paradises.
Unorganised Lincolnshire
by HOWARD MORTON
High grade cultic halcyon
October 1917, Mayakovsky lugs
twenty something binge drinkers to Churchill
Gardens & sets them levitating above black squares.
Groping a stile at dawn,
revenge blanches, a senile cartoon
transfer grins at scarified agit prop longing
to wound the reaction membrane around Rosa.
A shot subject trails
afternoon tea, art congresses
in 34 reach me through stowaways
retching the guts of Krondstadt.
Delicate nails claw red
the enlisted face of a century’s watchman,
nightly séances pick clean grotesque
cheekbones in their stillness.
Howard Morton grew up in Lincolnshire, and has studied in Brighton and Leamington Spa. He currently lives in London, and works in a couple of bookshops. He can be reached at phantomlikeobjectivity@gmail.com.
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