SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Eleven
BROOKS LAMPE
Transparent Fists
The legs came out of the shadows and merged.
Unnecessary lines hiding under page numbers looked up their names in Wikipedia
and established themselves legally
as citizens of the commonwealth. The birthrights of children
were restored for unclear reasons, and secondhand paintings
become trendy. The stars were mellow. Fires burned.
An animal with opposable thumbs poured water over a rock slowly
deep in a forest, allowing Americans to sleep.
Another day passed without drying our fingernails.
Nature fights less vigorously or not at all.
Physics is one step closer to the receding horizon of numbers
and the conservationists who have spent all their privilege
on truth are scratched by the claw of the magic cat
who darts across the living room from the shadows
and runs away. A clown is allowed to weep for five minutes
at the stroke of ten on Thursdays. Pizza lifts its skirt
revealing long lines of societies we have yet to discover
and whose cultures introduce new disciplines new vocabularies
who make you want to stay and chat about work even though your kids
and husband have headed home without you
and the sun strikes at a slanted angle with unexpected mildness
due to distance and some unexpected atmospheric effect
which keeps everything a little strange and uncertain.
One day we get out of bed and discover the tuna factory is full
of paper, and on the absolute edge of each sheet is the information
about our lives that we don't know, a kind of god machine,
and the monarchs of Europe create a committee to find the genius
who can invent the instrument that can pluck the paper's edges
like a guitar string, not for noble purposes but for his own satisfaction
because once as child he was not given balloons
of choicest color and now we are bound to his sorrow.
The body desires even more bread, the doors do not realize
they aren't open. The song turns, words become a record player
into which the stars weep.
The Octagonal Fish
I.
The octagonal fish paid the rent, while the anabasis moistened the time machine. The silly paddles played dead. Poets scowled; larynxes awakened. From out of the theater came shifty twins and a peaceful soccer mom. The octagon increased in size under the supervision of tenebrious crows. Bowling balls fanned themselves by the radioactive basket. The situation cascaded through blotted grapes.
II.
The egg batter reentered the boardroom just when the solipsists awoke and overruled the flaccid needles. Uber Eats delivery mules appeared, dressed in wheat-colored gowns. The Governor's desk was perforated. Fencers traded peaceful blisters, while the abbots combed through enormous loans. Some anchovies made vows. Ransomed hoverboards clanged.
III.
The seashell sat lovingly beside the organ. The mole rat took comfort under the hedge, holding a sponge still buzzing from the jellyfish concert. A wallet taped to the underside of a trapdoor in a forgotten building in a well-known national forest waited patiently. Wisteria antibodies traveled across 2017. Colons of otters and a giant poker chip no one will ever buy were condemned to live next to $5 T-shirts.
Brooks Lampe is from Oregon. He
teaches writing, literature, and philosophy, at George Fox University
in Newberg, Oregon. He runs Uut Poetry, a site exploring surrealist
writing techniques. His poems have appeared in Peculiar Mormyrid, Otoliths, etc.
