Heath Brougher (Western Voices 2023)

Bio: Heath Brougher is the Editor-in-Chief of Concrete Mist Press and co-poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. He received Taj Mahal Review’s 2018 Poet of the Year Award and is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. He was also awarded the 2020 Wakefield Prize for Poetry. He has published 11 books and, after spending over three years editing the work of others, is ready to get back into the creative driver seat for a bit. He has four new forthcoming books, including his first book of nonfiction.


Politick 

You are tantamount to the chaos and killing occurring in spontaneous riots. You feast upon your brothers and sisters. You have the audacity to consider yourself “the chosen one.” You cause the summers to end early. You rust the silver linings. You have never raised the bells. You’ve only brightened the blight. You are jargon and rotgut. You are racism and radiated rats. You are searingly superfluous and continuously cough craziness into the world. Your existence makes this human experience a darker place.

***

 

Talons

Does absolute zero smell

similar to the abyss?

 

I ask because my shadow

can no longer be contained in a pixel.

Not even a spent half gallon of pi.

 

It's time to break

from living in the biggest buckets

we can fit on our heads.

 

The end of death will never come to fruition

but we can try to sight as much light as possible.

 

Enoch and Ah Pook go their separate ways.

***

 

 

Wicked Whereabouts

Within and without the sheepfolds and lurk-lounges you attempt to escape/evade/elude/invisify yourself but, even with the guise of a noon dressed as midnight, there is no way to hide the scourge of your materialistic makeup. You are nothing more than swine bathing in pools of insanity. You are on the outside of Humanity’s inside joke. We wish we could weep for you but after all you’ve done our tear ducts are parched as a ragged desert bone.

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