SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Twelve
LES WICKS
Contretemps
Dr Zin has sent messages to Sgt Fsk
because she has bullets
but he retains the memory of a gun.
If he responds we can all it dialogue.
Take a whole world,
when dried & doused in sulphites
it can last for years.
Go on, nothing better to do
we await word of an answer.
Does Fsk even know the architectures of response?
Language nestles in his scars
perhaps despite
those bloodstreaked scabs of coalmines
that smudged part of the county
there's no connection to the grid?
The woman is not one for housework
(what woman is now?)
but she polishes each projectile
a kind of devotion
21st century prayer beads.
Fsk never cleans his windows
dust on the glass
dust in the lungs
he has seen enough.
Perhaps this is generational?
Or a time when action has become cliché?
Neither party pretends to wisdom or vitality.
A Feast Before the Dance
123, 123 bodhran beat.
1659, 2022. Cut, then eat.
Counted down, take what's took
this ceremony is an open-air abattoir
just another hook.
Farmers & Wiccans choose the same field for butchery.
Listen to the Priestess... your fear is a flute
Gods hollow you out
until you are the flute.
These trees have heard howls.
We are born to slip...
viscera, just sprayed everywhere.
A friend of the band she loved his growl
but when Desmond tried to join in,
was told this was Women's Violence.
Science detests salad. Oxygen sucks.
If life is a bit too real
then switch to reinvented energies.
Word got out to the parishioners –
complaints begat correspondence.
But our cheerful butcher has no need to read encyclicals
will wrap the fillets in them...
those sheets catch the blood, hey ho
while hard-working Pagan hands absorb the ink.
McCoy Dialectic
Amens & bad phlegm
Jed gets all prickly round the blood.
An academic called it feudin'
but when there's never peace
how can there be war?
The cousins caught up on numbers...
round & round on 8 impaled on 4
just can't tie down a 3. Jimbo retains a taste for piroshki
he argues endlessly with Loretta
over home-brew baijiu.
They'd say capital & power tools but
that sounds all wrong. Ma gets annoyed –
K won't pick a gender. I'm onside, respect.
Cousin Phillipa has a touch of colour
all issues long forgotten
until we were reminded.
No longer camouflaged we hear her
& her laughter is stronger now.
Of course, there remains an issue.
The original fight was over money.
When money became authority,
some of the gentry had quibbles
so talked at the working class promised
to save them from their abysmal lives
that quite a few actually liked.
We McCoys been fighting them Hatfields
so damned long it's kinda what we do.
Have we gone too far? There are times
I dislike the kin I love
& we're splintered.
All those big quibbles
as we feed the fighting.
To stay McCoy.
Les Wicks is from Australia. His work appears in multiple magazines, anthologies and newspapers across the globe, as well as in translation. He runs Meuse Press, which focuses on poetry outreach projects like poetry on buses and poetry published on the surface of a river. His fourteenth book of poetry is Belief (Flying Islands, 2019), and his latest, ffifteenth, is Time Taken – New & Selected (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022).
