Three Poems by Heikki Huotari

CONSTITUENTS

You are a good god yes you are (what I call love does not exist) so get me some constituents and fast. It’s always all about the U-turn, no? There is no wind, there is no spit. If we were Mars and Venus, exponentially decaying, and if half of us were gone, would we come to our senses?

BRANCHING PAST

I need my news updated at the top and bottom of the hour. Otherwise, I need my Lady Mondegreen, I need her ethical example. I would be refined. I would have appendages of one kind and gauzy filters of another. I would not have idle crows make light of loss, my loss—I would suggest they earn their salaries and be out catching criminals instead.

ROOT Z

“My sometime is now”  —Dean Martin

Everybody has a complex function sometime, there’s a Riemann Surface and the winner is a suicidal spiral matching Babel then exactly backwards, as a map. I’ve heard of herding cats but can’t believe it—how shall I subsist? Excuse my metaphysical precision but you’re not the man I married by mistake.

Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a past century, he attended a one-room country school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. His poems appear in numerous journals, recently in The Journal and The Penn Review, and he’s the winner of the 2016 Gambling the Aisle chapbook contest. Forthcoming books will be published by Lynx House, Willow Springs, and After The Pause.

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