Issue 29: Sam Wilson Fletcher

1

Hyaloclastics: an Excerpt

for Ellen Dillon

Terra firma yawns at being turned down. Enough steam and odd parity for the middle to avoid. Like that but less tiny I’ve decided to look up to the cross flow membranes of my cabern salient the clouds of my guts against the imagination a slightly rancid data storage device or verse bounced across the globe into the wall. Compared with constructively interacting forms how terrifying it is being back in the deep with liquid morbid luck. An initial idea. The ghost below the waterline. The helm meets the resistance of my imagination. Promises to sing of being alive like a high energy distress beacon calling to the shore and switching on and off the dishes of noise. My soul bill and wings finding the patch as we bob closer like bog butter giving them access gollops honestly a compound floats away which I believe is frantic at my tidal range. In the end I will likely regret one person. This ship is walking or extended in ignorance two enormous propellers. Out of shape our passing granites heaving like saw blades have widened side rails a rhythm unfamiliar to oceans. Pangs at the threshold slithered living together with a hand shaking the chains that make me nauseous. Worse eating through its cloud phase I was told topside the stress I hate them for. The world alert on heartfelt shadowy bands of pink the damage and sweaty but solid I think. As they melt it has been said intelligent saviours will surface from all sides spilling from the water.

2

Guillotine Curse

Feathers fleck her teeth from the parboiled horizon. In the saw of a syndetic weave, wind in your neck incensed throughout unwindowed lower decks: a tax on the turbulence of actual human bodies. Only grace the ledger like mood ants troubled flatness, infusion of self or light sea or thundering hope, calving. A punch packs weather, people passing on likeness neck first against the edge of a tray of complimentary sodas exploding and buns, when a ship lurches and threshes ahead to land.

3

Larsen

The father of deep time with a sideways motion ungerminates the text crossing the mind. A water cave in separate books.

Left to weave behind the flint wandering I purged the funghi airwaves on wheels the hard ankle bar enlarged and broken open past mouth flesh to where the ears greyed like a rasp all doubt, several eyes, a myth beach shaggy with dust. Little sled against the cold, rib runner of the dark I calmly wondered what I brought along.

Evading capture, too bony, I sculled across the bay. Bow rope tethered to meniscus from the skin of the occidental diary I grabbed it on my sheet. Chatter began among the herbs. A mineral metres thick forthed like a notion, ocean. We torched the oily feathers. Ice theft and hatching were exhausted. In each vessel sat the knapped kin of my speech.

I scanned for the distress beacons, hiding my resources as I pulled away. My heartache a visible crimson. Again I had worms for lunch, sick to the stomach of the permanent brash ice the scum cabin of my guts, a dungeon in my lap. Red tides established. The local minimum taped. Touched by claws to tears. Expanding the patches of unprotected reddish snow into the sea.

For the moon an afterimage, for the maze a pyre remains.

With yellowed tape I secured my legs, secured my zip, drained the skull cup. In boots I patrolled the channel surface shimmering like sequins. I was as tall as the bank. I waited at the edge. I will wait here forever most likely. The waiting bullshit of memory. Unclaimed properties. Heat saviour. This dark of mine, the wavelengths of disrupted vision.

On the water a caucus took shape, of my own reflection.

That night on the ropes sleeping I rode the tuned folks, roared with the drum, motioned pressure dunes, ice chanted at scale. Quiet then was every proud edifice broken into, for the asking.

Next the island with its sudden gusts. I blew it. A tonal break. The ice bark where we, where I pumped the cold. A strange dawn. I miss you so. The soak the smell the image on my brow. Hard to forgive. With a red gleam like the last of the gold.

I whitened as squat forms arrived, emerging from the feeble shed. They took the beam.

Desertion hung above my head. Slightly lost I ground my brow against the rocks, painless. Only one degree throughout of hope, precious little. The factory still impassable, the colony microscopic.

Axially I walked the continent, spat up outcrops, stood purple with cold with the oar of permanent water in one hand. An unworshipped water muscle. With more than half my tongue I berated lichens and the larger swells of snowfall. Claws slickensided walls. Condors paired harassed the cruise of iron, dispersed capsized.

Moving forwards I rotated the site. The crag was at an ebb. From my spine a precious liquid dripped. Unsnowed I pounded the shell hints like atoms of gemlike rank.

Whispering I evoked the spokesperson. Rendered they stood up on their entrails. Blinkered between the scooped bubbles they observed only the intrusions, dirt. Softened the bones fell from its anus.

Lifted slightly I yawned with shock. At that moment bloodslick, bulbous, a touch here, a myth repaired, unseen hopes revealed. Pyres burned on the Drake. An inorganic planet on all sides.

~

Today I listen outwards perceiving its immense physical scale. I read the scorched ground it alights like a threat passing through open water at night.

With effort I rise from my pillow and plow the columnar channel, my soul bottled under the bed. In red boots I spacewalk the soundwave its function long forgotten. It was realised by childless men.

With eyes on the signs I watch for the milk of high midsummer for pink ice. I curl up on the sand. I expand through the bellowing winds almost black, pursed.

The landings are sphagnum. The bullets lathed from bones. The settled place is always elsewhere always anywhere, at the raw end. But now surpassed.

I feel windowless. I see through the icebergs. The glass intestines of a seamless battle. Cream to carve. From the interior mast I see the barrow tops blue green with the heavy tread of the meeting place. Bendless rooks. Asymptotes of moss. I ruminate.

Still the wreckage of beached schooners tells me nothing. Beams like pistils. Icewater thick with cold, blood, my kin accused of global outburst. Floods from the outermost edges of gravity potential.

Cast from the temple in rags. Hungry for horns the whole town prayed. With crosstalk appraisal from the sacred horsehead I prayed the gig back into its socket.

Spiders on this sheet of nature. A forest of decision trees, ruins, megafauna in the shallows. The slow fadeout of an incident in the sky. The bull that kept us warm exchanged for the outrider.

Breathing the ancient salt gas of the mortuary I see the rope unties itself. Beyond time I see nothing is synthetic. By animal light I read the impressed walls of the temple. I sift through the dimming scuds, the whale slicks.

Rigel lately over the continent. A frozen whirl.

Spring escapes the ice bind. On insect feet.

My favourite tree too. Its column unnamed.

[Sam Wilson Fletcher was born in Lewisham, London and trained as a scientist at Oxford and Harvard. Recent publications include New Adjacent Possible Empty Niche (Veer2), Six Poems (Earthbound Poetry Series, Vol. 2), Dark Ecology (anthology: 100 Poems to Save the Earth, Seren Press) and Maybe This Is About Grief (Magma). Recent artists’ residencies include an Atlantic crossing and expeditions to Antarctica and the Canadian High Arctic. Text, stills, video, field recordings and icemelt samples gathered during these residencies together form the basis of a forthcoming book / exhibition / film / performance. The above texts are excerpted from the book.]

Copyright © 2022 by Sam Wilson Fletcher, 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.