Issue 32: Hamish Ballantyne

Tarp for 10,000 Microphones

triangulate (seafarers term)

loneliness by fixed point in

firmament—even but a crane    

looming

        geomer daring suburb arise

vomit a saline galaxy in hair of wind

        who didst bring me

        hence

        to dance

               *

wanted to wake

you before all my wanting

in past           before

dryer buzzer signals

folding hour

zero gravity days

of fall

raise your head

gut flecks mountain

*

euclidean maroon

tungsten by vallejo

malaria    obscenely rice

generational Thursday

thursday thursday thursday forever

not now nor ever sunday hammer

*

the quest          thinking about

a quest             it is best

peruvian super-reality

friend on friend

what was left

of their bodies

   bathed in look

pasolini made us make him tomatoes and sausage

in the alley between two dreams

all the dead bring

us skulls  to kiss

*

cannery strikers ran

the thousand fingers over lips of

empty fish cans

   lifting god throb

seeking the resonant frequency

of sabotage        overshot

implosion

twice hugeness

drone

cacaphone

let the dead bury

the dead       let their ghosts

exhume them

*

a continuous effect only experienced

by those grouped in its wake in region

shaped of a cone

when it comes you will know for the sound

percuss the flesh

first prise corpse from coffin

then windows

then work cans

sonic hands

         *

at what rate to set

out           for what quarry

on a thrice graphed journey

the map depicts

not a place but a rate

of change of speed

a curve like the one

I daily discover beneath

your ear

*

the curve of the visible ashtray

windowsill        weeks         when

you don’t want to see me

   though accustomed    from bus stop bench

(ashtray)

would speed through them

     up to

no good

wrong people

rain people

*

read Lockheed Martin leads race

to reduce sonic boom

to shoof of car door closing

               no clamour

of the shoof the ooh is the wondering

throng       at the source of lust

                          of pain   of tomorrow’s paramour

*

speed of sound in silver of Potosí

more than 1072 parisian feet per

           second

        paris inch

the paris bench on which

he opted out

1936

of the goblet elbow of a patched-up shirt

*

                          escape velocity

            of is my favourite

  wind up garbage

            tock

                   tock

hobo means homeward bound

*

rotten metronome

mistook

        for running

steps

woodpeckers’ tongues wrap up

and around and

cushion brain

*

            findings:

bang head on tree: to write (jog

                   memory)

on ground: forget or die

           find

   before my eyes

sliding pillow between her head and cement

thinking woodpecker (red)

or running

                  out

Hamish Ballantyne is a writer and translator from Vancouver Island, living on the unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

Copyright © 2024 by Hamish Ballantyne, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author