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 ISSN 1556-4975

OffCourse Literary Journal

 Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998


 

Poems by Heikki Huotari

Activate The Actuarial

            For lack of follow-through a pantomime is sacrificed. I'm oriented – call me clockwise. In and out of amber light, my resolutions may not drape from tables. Beside the word “dictionary” in the dictionary is a picture of that dictionary.

            From the great ape who has nothing, what to take away? What is continuous is what continuous prefers and as a spiral does its optimum, commemorates the end of expertise. As god is disappointed in some subset of us so god does what any god would do.

            We're almost to the toll both – time to add some axles. To be parallel or perpendicular to gravity is natural. It's springtime in Alaska, when the fahrenheit and centigrade thermometers agree. From intersections of supporting half spaces I break away. As by their bite marks ye shall know them, I say gather bite marks while ye may.

 

In Dog Years

            The dog says, I'll have what the cats are having. Arbiters of taste are suiting up to go outside and be extended. The intruder washing dishes knows no oath. The chairs are chained and glistening so give their grievances some air!

            If in a hoop of hoops I would have independent axes of rotation, I would work the room and play a priceless violin. Without a cautery the nerve would never end but fray. If snowflakes played the odds would they amass like random samples or be self-sufficient? Those who choose to live in vales of tears need not complain.

            From half a conversation one extrapolates then turns one's back on one authority too few. One's mathematics put to music, to one's fate one's lost one's way. Up to equivalence, up to one's musical electric chairs one has to stand.

            Are nanoseconds lining up like cattle to the slaughter? Singing teeth and not cicadas of the brain so your omission should you choose to not accept it is to do the opposite of everything I say.

 

On The Collapse Of The Arecibo Radio Telescope

            As Casandra's not a prophet, correlation has causation as an obverse or as clouds and flowers have no preconditions, I have no dog in this food fight: Satan, raised, is praising me. As none the wiser, tread or riser, gravity or M.C. Escher will decide.

            Paraboloids were whispering sweet electro-magnetic nothings when their foci fell. Their pro-nouns implied there were two or more of them. As rocket science is not rocket science when I walk on water, water stays walked on. May dogs forgive me for the injuries I cause to cats and vice versa. Heart, shall we sit this one out?

 

Name That Dirge

            To Doppler shift with nasal next the siren scientifically induces me to be the black swan. Why, imaginary deity, have you selected me? I either ran the light or lived there twenty years. Extraterrestrials examined everyone but came to no conclusion. As in greed agreeing, brevity is focus, eyes line up for once. This evening I will be your server and your pronoun. Satan, in the kitchen, recommends the direct flight.

            The logic of compression is not compromised but falls like tennis-ball sized hail. The veil is lifted. Follow-through and warm-up touch. A Christmas tree is decremented. Details feed the flame.

 


In a past century Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. He's a retired math professor and has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Spillway,  the American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs. His fourth collection, "Deja Vu Goes Both Ways", won the Star 82 Press Book Award.



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