Three Poems, Johnny Byutorie.
Mifepristone is Safe
Do you see that gleaming light of endless possibilities?
It strings your wishes on wire coat hanger dreams,
Because you don’t think Mifepristone is safe
Take all your fears and drink them away with shots of bleach
And vitamin c overdose chasers,
Because you don’t think Mifepristone is safe
Promise to “keep all the little babies safe”
To die two minutes within crowning,
Maybe killing the host-mother in the bargain,
Because you don’t think Mifepristone is safe
Bring more mouths into the world that you
Have no intention of feeding
Yourself or through the hands of others,
Because you don’t think Mifepristone is safe
Watch your scissor-teeth sever the social safety net
Just so you can make sure another umbilical cord is tied
Around a twelve-year-old mother’s neck,
Because you don’t think Mifepristone is safe
See her father-husband smile at his pride and joy
As his other pride and joy lies bleeding out on the slab—
Babies forced as brood-mothers to bear babies—
Because you don’t think Mifepristone is safe. The light goes out.
Pray for the Culture Warriors
Pray for the culture warriors
Bent low in their basement bunkers
and truck cab pillboxes
Hands gripping their rifles and their guns
(almost as tightly as their keyboards, Code Red, and Funyuns)
Against the oncoming scourge of
multiculturalism, intersectionality, and treating people like they were human
Pray for the culture warriors
The only defense against the tide of wokeism, cancel culture, and identity politics
as grown men film themselves smashing Keurigs,
shooting beer cans, and destroying dolls already paid by their charge cards
Pray for the culture warriors
Waxing in the glow of immolated Barbies
The smell of melting plastic hair and barbecued Bakelite peeling back layers
of metal pins holding up a fetid core of irony before their hollow eyes,
the only sight that makes them feel safe in light of their sacrifice
Pray for the culture warriors
Systematic as they cancel anything that makes them consider self-reflection
Firing that which holds candlelight to their own inadequate inquisition
That they might identify it enemy
and purge it from their sight as a mirror darkly
rather than have the imposition to turn and retreat
No, they are always vigilant,
never sleeping—
always Awake!
Such is the sacrifice that they make
Pray for the culture warriors
Our digital soldiers
going to where no one asked them to go
Where they are unwanted
Unneeded
A No-Man’s-Land if you will—
Because for them, Kenough is never enough—
See them as they storm the complex
of their own mind and demand to see the tunnels of blood-libelous cabals
and are confronted by standing army of mop and bucket
after stray bullet nearly strikes customer by two inches for the crime of eating DC pizza
(The cleaning supplies had it coming)
Pray for the culture warriors
Our keyboard grunts forever castigating into the dark
for enemies to fill the doldrums of their own lives
Praying for a foe that they may one day slay
Aloha shirt–clad and armed to the teeth
Bedecked in Boogaloo looking for any excuse
to leave the reserve and turn the suburbs into
gore-soaked turf littered with the bodies of those they find intolerable
Any swatch a mark darker than Sherwin Williams’ Oyster Bar
They want to see us begging for our lives,
reaching into the loam of our graves and bleeding in the dirt
Blessed be the fruit.
Hallelujah.
A-Mammon.
Rossastroscuro
The light flares slowly in the middark,
Mist rising to incisive cusp of ancient mountains in repose
There is no color save the smudge of red in the shades of grey amidst the black
Like lipstick on a dirty mirror with charcoal teeth smiling from the gloom behind the silver
There is no mirth there, no humanity
Nor what humanity has rubbed off on generations of domesticated captivity
But an animal rictus grin full of sharpness:
Full-on threat display promising to rip and tear—
And then the slow red pulses in the ebontide again, a buoy on the waves all too brief
Before shadow reigns once more as if it never left.
There is a hunger to the darkness
Somber shades float corpselike in the moondead sky, box jellyfish roaming pitiless sea,
Fetid breath rising from a beast older than bones
Sanguinated night bleeds through on repeat soaking silence with clinging arms
As an unthing moves with the patience of eons
Eldritch lumbering beneath languid eyed blanket of long dead stars
It slouches metastasizing with crystalline clarity
Cavernous depths howling a cancer that has
Festered since becoming
Since became
Since was
Since being.
It bays shivering naked and raw with anticipating entropy
Grasping with clawed fingertips where a gullet roiling to consume rock
To consume flowing fire
To consume all that ever was or will be
Shudders oily and bereft of light and life
It swallows all
Has swallowed all
Will gorge existence again with ravenous efficiency
And it will forever devour insatiate as things older than mountains do.
But not before
The crimson eye
That terrific gazer warming the air with thrumming putrescence
O enveloping clot bursting cosmic
Into ageless, waiting space carrying memories of those returned to formless dust
✹
BLINKS.
Johnny Byutorie is a multidisciplinary author whose works have been published in the Hog Creek Review (during his tenure at The Ohio State University), Something Else, Cardinal Arts Journal, and FUCKUS literary journals. He has graduated Summa Cum Laude with a bachelor’s in English (majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in Literature) from Jacksonville State University, has just completed his Master of Arts degree in English, and looks forward to teaching in the Composition mines in the not-too-distant future. He has a love of horror and its gradual rise as a genre worth serious literary consideration. His many influences include Pullman, Pratchett, Peele, Jemisin, Jackson, and Mothman.