Heath Brougher (Western Voices 2020)

Exclusive: Western Voices, 2020: Edited by Scott Thomas Outlar

Bio: Heath Brougher is the Editor-in-Chief of Concrete Mist Press as well as poetry editor for Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. He is the winner of Taj Mahal Review's 2018 Poet of the Year Award as well as a multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. He has published nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Bleeding Backwards (Diaphanous Press, 2019).

To Ripen 

Human sensory organs

stretched out

on the furniture

atop pacifist

planks of porch

on a newly born

Spring’s gloaming

among the tulip hats

preciously purple.

A rising custard pie.

Endorphin enclaves slowly

bringing on that taste so ripe

to those already basking in the uplifting

seasonal fragrance and fragments

still far from fully-blown.

At least that’s what the Robin Red Breast

and tiny fluorescent leaflets had to say

about the beginning of the next beginning.

Filthy Creatures 

I would harm a fly

but only by accident.

There is enough apathy

within these mired and trumped walls 

to wipe out a nation of magnanimous spirits.

Stepping among the filthy, cracked

sidewalk as golden bricks

are shoveled into a white house.

The fly in the ointment keeps blaming

the other fly in the ointment. 

I, the pacifist, finally decide

to lay down in the middle of this land

and die from the unrestricted greed

and noxious air which has enveloped

the entirety of this Human Experience.

Moronic Mirrorism

The moronic mistakes 

of mirrors have led

people into a realm of abstract contortions

of their perception of reality 

that are infected distortions,

in fact, the exact opposite 

of the Truth since mirrors 

are the epitome of liars.

They show the exact opposite of you.

They show you in reverse. 

With these omnipresent 

piles of stones replacing brains,

the wind and clouds

remember the sound of tulips blooming.

Setu, April 2020