Gorillas in the San Diego Zoo Test Positive for Covid-19, or, Trump’s Upcoming Rally at the Alamo, or, Raw Carcasses, or, Just Another Love Sonnet
what if zoo animals throughout
the world begin dying off][,do
we open the gates oOf[] []zoos]
so all [heal[thy]] animals geta
chance at survival maybe Eve
whales beaching western France
minks in denmark, some dogs so
goes meat packing plant deaths
]faster variants with millions
of mutations in England, South
second become more deadly then
]mind of the virus [() ) ( ()] ifor
1st, become more transmittable
then more dead[rememberAlamo[]
merkel is closing down germany for 4 months
the virus is struggling from within [mutating] in order to increase its deadliness-dominance
the president and all presidential candidates must wear bullet-proof vests
trump is going to the alamo
he flirts with consequence
a long and happy childhood exactly
do a spoof musical ‘Andrew Jackson’ – where trumpers are his followers while he wipes out indians…
country, country-rap, ballades, 80’sVogue dance
William Fairbrother
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
The chaos/unpreparedness/sense of impotence the rich world has found itself in has revealed (should have, at least) which honorary place we truly occupy on this moving rock, and regardless of our own well-renown poor attention span and even poorer mnemonic capacity, these years should continue to inspire writers and speakers for years to come, unpicking what, why, how and who did or say what, why, how and when. Covid-19 (there: first time I write the name down) is the latest brand, and aren’t we all addicted to brands?
Meanwhile,
The doctor rushed into the chair screaming, “Mammy!”
“A buzzing in the ears perhaps?”
A power saw screams offstage…
“Enzymes,” says the doctor. “The new look will be the anti-enzyme look. That is the look that is not dominated by one enzyme… Meanwhile…” he shrugs, “there is work to do.”
He knocks out a wall partition with a sledgehammer. The wall opens into a Mayan Tomb. (William Burroughs, Naked lunch.)
Review by Jared Pearce
The tension between the sort of news-bite bits of language and the way the poem stumbles into a flurry of images that on the one hand demonstrate an awareness of the political scene indicated in the poem, and, on the other hand, become less intense than the scariness that the potential disease itself so that the poem ends lurching into a kind of evolution, ending with 80s vouge dance, parallel to the way the disease is, presumably, evolving, just as the political scene is evolving (and/or devolving). Keeping all those plates in the air makes for a fine comment on the news/political and even medical/scientific/cultural scene of the past eighteen months.