Four Poems by Mark Young

geographies: Cincinnati
 
Seurat's use of long-
term storage for his
broken lines of color
 
was a formal endeavor
to ensure that a wet
weather box always
 
remained in the top
right hand corner of
his website even if
 
paddle boats didn't
make a comeback or
 
hypothesis testing was
temporarily unavailable.
 



 
The gray world of the civil servant
 
Made up pass-
words. Mistaken
assumptions. Out
on the street &
it not yet 3 p.m.
On the wall above
is a shelf with an
icon on it, all dirt,
some darkness.
A man comes
running. He is
followed by a taxi.
 
 



This / side of / the Okefenokee Swamp
 
A nucleic acid strand which
terminates when the snow
does not slope upward, or an
 
additional query that grabs X
number of loops on the page--
either means that the Amsterdam
 
proletariat need to display their
English proficiency continually,
not just in the pilot episode.





Three hay(na)ku
 
for Jorge Luis Borges
 
O to have
the time
to
 
write
a history
of the tango.
 
 
nemesis
 
Stomped
on from
a great height.
 
Known as a
pas de
Dieu.
 
 
Channeling Conrad
 
I can articulate
darkness, but
the
 
pronunciation
of enlightenment
always eludes me.

​

Bio: Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland, & has been publishing poetry for almost sixty years. He is the author of over thirty-five books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. His most recent books are Mineral Terpsichore & Ley Lines, from gradient books of Finland, & The Chorus of the Sphinxes, from Moria Books in Chicago.  An e-book, The Holy Sonnets unDonne, came out earlier this year from Red Ceilings Press; another, For the Witches of Romania, was recently published by Beard of Bees; & another, a few geographies, will be out later this year from One Sentence Poems.

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