{ARC W48}
theres a foreign parade from where the corns gathering,
where a mother and father hold hands,
theres muddy cistern shadows dancing across it’s shape,
soil on the lens, sun went down about noon
and galloping horses shred,
dismembering all it’s mantras
and dismembers the might of leaden high beams too
bleeding into patches of dead acre corn.
peering through the eyelets of a rabbit proof fence,
stones rubbed the foot of a driveway in hollow repetitions.
a black macaw wrestled into the gutter by a stray,
fake stripes badly dressed, buckets of red rain,
pinned by his paper thin claws -
gnashing jaw plum the feathery drain.
my tongue pressed to the back of my teeth.
I parted the corn,
and as my hands move about many principle bells speak from one square collapse of earth -
an unusual hairless growth,
young sprigs the obsolete wires of a theatre display
like the flattened feather relics I’d find at the cold shoulders of port phillip bay,
beads of water sickness spun into a comb,
fathered a prosaic form sewn centuries within me
separate paths spun to converge in a state
of paths that had been trod before,
or as if the ground covering forced to vacate.
I stood on a tall rock but the centre wasn’t clear,
just shocks of farming sinew, corn stalks twice as tall
a darkened spiral nestled somewhere within the stock.
the surrounding corn seemed to stand still
a choir of multiplying grain driving towards higher ground
in a forceful fit of haste towards twilight,
all in an attempt to escape the dust bowl,
to escape the pervasive heat that seemed to pre-exist and become trapped
I bring an ankle length to the bruised recession of crop,
dark matter forests a baseline of inaudible drones
I’m sucking to a cluster of loose hydrogen
an abscess in the ether thrown across a highway of lights,
I’m violence infiltrating a tender embrace.
I’m patterns in the dirt and the land running from itself
then the ringlets of shining viscous molten to amber to hazel race.
to hazel to silver.
I’m ringlets.
an incandescent hush
as if I had ownership of the scene
as if I’d written about it once.
I felt lust trailing,
an incandescent hush
as if I had ownership of the scene
as if I’d written about it once.
a century stretched long,
on before the bounds of myself
I continue to obtain hearts, walls and ceilings.
a matrix-like displacement of appendages -
appendages that looked like dicks,
where my arms should’ve been.
a hillside boulder in the distance caught the glare of the sun,
an atmospheric drouth
oppressing the earth's vitality -
and at that time I thought to myself that I could see all the moons hidden molluscs and writhing eyes completely uncontrollable to the sky.
as if a thought of heaven would see this reality and know how many of earths secret courses were abandoned by nature.
I looked down to see my legs draping one another,
feet beheading the tussocks of corn
and toes wrestling with barren soil,
my breathing and tread intertwined,
lapping at my impossible inference;
a clatter of repressed vegetable adoration.
and my gown dust pitter-pattered, coiling into shade and eye folds,
triangulated passions.
the smell of something portent stuck to the air;
like a snorting pig in the dark,
or a vagabond star renting the air with it’s thousand-throat-cry.
.
a shriek of hurtling aerial fragments flew towards me,
crushing me beneath its fragmentary body.
I watched as a scarlet red-ball of suffocating jets soldered what's left of earth's defence in the lost part of its reflected light.
the stench of blood and burning sulphur as consciousness lingers..
and salt plains sucked away.
the soil
and remaining corn
from their beds,
hands holding eachother.
the soil
and remaining corn
from their beds,
hands holding eachother.
the new equator drowning in compounds of cyanogens and gaseous alkalides.
Bryce Flaskas.All rights reserved © 2026 Bryce Flaskas - written permission needed for re-use.