featured poets & artists

patrick ryan dunn sullivan

is a mathematician, linguist, and poet living indefinitely on the Korean peninsula. He is a professor of English at Busan National University. Previous Publishers Include: Silent Actor, Poetry Super Highway, Futur Simple, Sein und Werden

Fire

Fire, fire in their chests,
Fire, fire beneath burning fedoras;
Fire in the mind,
Fire in their actions,
Those are friends of mine;

Fire, fire in their hearts,
Fire in their curly wigs;
Fire in the deed,
Fire in their desires,
Those are friends of mine;

Fire, fire in their ribcages,
Fire, Fire in their flaky scalps;
Fire in the dream,
Fire in their suffering,
Those are friends of mine;

Fire, fire in their blood,
Fire in their boney crowns;
Fire in the ego,
Fire in their lives where fire lives,
Those, Those, Those are friends of mine.

Flash

With the memory of every being that came before and after me encircling the walls that mark myself from the other,
I, laconic man, lay lightless in a prison thick as gale drawn wind.
Gravity presses my living body, brittle bones mercilessly against the concrete sun scorched earth,
And will not be happy until I am hammered flat;
Malleable man into thinnest of all possible sheets.
Contoured cogito ergonomically to the Earth that pulls me and my friends into its bosom with its gravity lasso---
The same hook that bridles cheek bones of Moon Number 1 and the Plutonic snowballs---
A hook owned by all masters, including these walls.
I look to the last phosphorus dawn when the rising Sun consumes the lingering trace of man,
Violently hurling my maleable man into the planar fields where cast demons and eagle-headed gods
Lay their boneless bodies to dream of us and our trappings within frozen gravity blankets;
Liquid wind as ether for thoughts riding wavelets near the speed of light in search of infinite curled dimensions.
Oh, warm memory of my mother, on what wave do you ride today?
What is your current location, and do you have a memory of your own?
Oh! Mighty celestial laundromat! Wash the cells of my souls clean with the acids of dreams!
Paint my surface for the new ritual!
Let me dance like a meme through the annals of time and exist at high temperatures,
Like lucky gallons of clairvoyant iron.
Shall we purify the cosmos by lassoing perimeter stars
Into one great centralized communist collection of superheated gaseous being?
With all that is knowable gravitating towards a relative center,
We laugh as the coins fall through holes in our pockets.
Streams flow straight up toward the nether regions,
Shooting birds with volcanic fire hoses and uprooting the crust of every planet,
Like the path of a man scraped off of an 80 story sidewalk.
My eyes roll into the backs of their sockets;
My insides fly out of the small of my back,
Lassoing the spine as they go;
Scrambled like a euthanized laboratory frog at the hands of a demented, childlike Cosmos;
Consumed and defined by its own external chaos.