Dave Shortt
Work by Dave Shortt has appeared in the print magazines Salamander (Brookline MA), Mesechabe (New Orleans), Bullhead (Ashland KY), Sulfur (Ypsilanti MI), Nexus (Dayton OH), Nedge (Providence); and the cyberzines Muse Apprentice Guild, The Arts Paper, and Astropoetica.
Zinc
blue tinge in which misery
is consumed
a proposed remedy
galvanized over the day
in collaboration with Venus' copper affectation,
balances on young mountains' fatigue
nodes of lodes, multi-nationally torqued,
emanate rustproof communications, promise
(green) glitter of baby-eye wobbling binary to
minimum daily adult requirements,
diluted milligrams bound up
in chelated heavens, nourishing conductivity
of temporal joys, time-released
into trace beliefs manifesting
in nervous systems in fast recession...
brass instruments seep into
the last pure rivers, drunk
from the source served bottled in
space, preventative for
hair loss, skin lesions,
earth soldered together in memory,
re-designed to shield out
sunlight, stay cool, earth
did offer a mix of hardnesses, densities, pennies
of dangers agglomerate
in fortunes, diplomacy amasses
mental nuggets that pass
into delicately-cut bearings,
cathodic collections of peace
later alloy with struggling
blue-rust war monument architecture...
melted in the mouth, poorly absorbed into
cell ingots, there to minimize losses
from speculation in its own & soybeans'
futures, radicalized vapors
of metallic dinners
waft free in illusions of face
simmering in Paracelcus' lab,
crucial 30s willing to metamorphose
call out to steel from numberless sands
& from what a vegetable lacks
('a coating which increases the half-life
of radioactive fallout',
a pyrite is a chunk of desire
lodged in the wristwatches of free trade,
merchandise exploding in
realizations of youthful galaxies
fuses to well-loved earth's emotional dumpheaps,
batteries leaching into the water table,
recycled wishes match the clumped landscapes of their stars
bonded to inorganic dreams restricted
in befuddling ores
drumming up languages 'dying' unstably
after saying stably simply goodbye earth
Magnesium
greens spark scintillating games,
white wins, reminding
nerves to reach everywhere,
try reaching every worldpoint
before she cramps,
her feelings won't be hurt,
the white powder
is a miniscule cloud
in a processional of weather
in which the body's plans
expressed from the Periodic Table
wed allergies developed inside
a pierced atmosphere
*
the desired panacea left the book
where it yellowed into a
step by step you-fix
involving a specific chemistry of woman
whose litmus colors
seemed to match spectrograms
of very fast recession
*
floating kelp in shallow
seas,
'matriarchal tides harvested for child support,'
all this water fleshed out with
kidneys, testicles, driven inland
to desert springs where small animals allocate
family size & an ethically straight
back, one day
crawling into a porous rib launched towards
stinging, man-eating reefs,
foaming limed mouths,
colors of freshening gills
*
a primordial tremor missing
(don't know what you are?)
(moving on one condition?)
a mine of mines yielding no sweat
in the body's 9 plus or minus wonders
*
nouveau animation, pancreatic,
edits a conflicting moment,
sugary, moneyed,
in which only humans talk, the art
re-hears its thrashing bundles in critical muteness,
alive in its relaxing digestive tract,
smooths the spasmodic chip & slip
of crustal oh me oh my
*
one atom of chlorophyl focuses
the metallic luster of the plants' shield, words
an alloy of this
*
is the writer approaching his own material,
a verdant savannah
sustaining every herbivore
ever dissolved from a fossil?
Thyroid
the body politic disorganizes into anemia,
nation by nation is sapped of iron,
red blood cells regroup
& production lines close in response
to a need to adapt to overcrowding
in an area the size of the neck, swelling
populations of smelter workers
accumulate in fat,
shining filings taken off the heart
numb layoff vigils
into the sleep of antagonized dopamine,
model muscles waste aesthetically as vitamins fail
to bring home a maple leaf's reds
suspended in a heartbeat,
a gang's innocence
is shot into space to observe earth's babyface
aged with walls,
delaying well-planned crossings into her 'moonscapes'
where active imagination advertises gasoline
to drive out thirst,
refined crude skill feeds on itself,
a few generations later disgorges its knowledge
farther & farther away from the Border's dinged bumpers,
while goats fatten on bile
simply disguised as a temporary desert flower
& skills move like a persimmons' copper
by car through coiled intestinal concentrations,
surpassing fatigued rawhide fast-breedings
wreathed in cadmium smoke
(iodine can't find the breadbasket,
stranding 'who knows' in hemoglobin puzzles
trying to recover breath of health epiphanies
'wasted on the young'
(beauty sleeps may redeem
dreams of missed travel connections,
hesitated-over destinations,
late carriers slowly re-direct junkfood enzymes
to their places,
mines are detoxified after relinquishing
luxurious catnaps tinkling
on the Bomb's outskirts
(bodies war & war
to uptake depleted reserves of selenium,
hypo & hyper armies
were prisoner of a protein lacking presence,
a heavy metal exonerates its captor
& returns to apathy in fat,
dumped there with
the lies of governments, it
diffracts a photon into a truce
that immunized all sides
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