D.J. Huppatz
Honor the Martyrs
as lanternfish corrupted the youth
spooled hope with ferocious love
for a crackle and lisp of leaves who
had a dream and remembered it who
were flayed for being clownfish or
burned at the stake for a rainbow yet
kept the Mysteries and remained
devoted to the radiant amber bear
the lunar couriers whose sorcery
taught us how to evade the bugs
who blessed us in dew tears blood
surfacing from unmarked graves
whose bioluminescence might yet
make the Site of Overflow glow
Build a Network
Unfed nettles along the fenceline, arise. Let’s
file letters until litter enters, whittle decimals,
salute spillage, uncrumple across the lines. As
anchovies escape with history, he whose net
worth exceeds Avarice encrypts bots with a
constant hum of sludge. Pass me shoots to
sew in holes as the needles fold, biographies
netted in oily brine, striving for incompletion.
Open the unproductive spigot: add banner,
twisted ribbons coiled with anxiety to collect
the draining, anchovies threaded through an
unencodable nut to avoid vocoder detection.
It’s like stopping a clock, stanzas of perverse
mutations nudge reverse on bright gradient.
D.J. Huppatz lives in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Recent fiction in Exacting Clam, Variant Literature, Menacing Hedge and Fugitives and Futurists. Author of two poetry books, Happy Avatar (Puncher and Wattmann, 2015) and Astroturfing for Spring (Puncher and Wattmann, 2021). He also writes about design and architecture.