home
Three Poems by Adam Stutz
Promotional Campaign
Live from somewhere— anywhere— oh shit— help us— Bring finales! Brattling swords! Bleaker prospects! Blunt force! Window-less in this theater (fastidious merchandizer of malodorous meanderings of malformed leeches + rambling thoughts: sunflower wrecks worm-like wax the weeks of usury travel filled w/ extortions + columnar falsehoods + colloquial distractions denting the armor’s thick skin. The fields are gnawing w/ cold + we have arrived at the superfluous structure of failed dialogue (lighter fluid mistaken for compassion. Check the gritting teeth (the last self-portrait the dash crash rabble running up tabs + talk-talk— the world’s a word too expansive for the small cuts on my finger but it’s still a world evolving. To pull the line from the syllables I see bobbing on the horizon half-sleep my fish mouth finds dangling in the brackish swimming pool of my hopes where I forward matters displaced by a loose survival mechanism. The levity of simple breezes (new shelter “an eyelash lining a cheek like a prayer”— is the morbidity that comes from breathing for one more minute.Fifty-Nine Minutes
The next campaign is a wave— a wanton window into the old century’s viciousness. As we arrive the same omnipresent questions once worn in brocades on the chest remain (the republic. We still continue to fall slowly into embellishment + the stains of years punctuating the decorated gangway of hallucinations in faulty promise. Our stooped shoulders form a means to an end— a canvas of scars penned w/ the kinds of anxieties only night words can bring. To comprehend creeping loudness + sickness colored-in at the edges— the hollow skins + parentage singing in glorious techno-babble. It’s all pulled from the demagogue garbage collection. It’s pushing along malignancies in a pandemic of papercuts. We love the romance we fabricate under false justice embedded in constituency— we lay disarray like art into ad campaigns + re-design our vessels into pigeon calls— an electric bleakness. We are a heated condition of tiny hand blowhards brandishing hate as commodity— dressed up as affection for the consumer— a remuneration collected in votes. We now build simple fishbowls in seconds + new fevers + seraphim w/their plucked-out wings (cracked + violent. We melt into strangers. We step up the soft tissue wounds conceived in sewn-up languages. Onward we are the march of clipped wings— steered by a lost navigator + we become inquiries + a blueprint for the new mourning where the faces we hang in the closet fail to ever settle our overrun life. We continue to nurture iniquities running up the clock face— waiting out the period for fifty-nine minutes to end.Development
I hold the dear brilliance of my shining anxiety in the waiting room: familiar line in tow: I am teetering (don’t slip office: a familiar worship room: I plant my irritation in an upright chair I can trace w/ my eyes closed: Roughly: an affirmation on a coffee mug is towing a familiar freeway + the desire for the first night: a kitchen song latched in a moribund envelope of necessity: into spin cycle high-end programming for all of my imagined dramas: the violence of skins gate closing/a protection: unspent measure of molar grinding The decay of my teeth: the sculpting of dereliction + sporting cardigans: I imagine a small balloon of sex nests next to me slumbering down: (two lines I skipped I yield to false images a million miles: a love a silence of desire that needs to shriek yes: progress
Adam Stutz is the the co-curator of the Non-Standard Lit Reading Series, with Mark Wallace and Jeanine Webb. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Equalizer: Second Series, White Stag, The Cultural Society, A Sharp Piece of Awesome, Prelude, Be About It, Deluge, Dum Dum Zine, The Pinch, Where is the River, Dream Pop, and Last Exit. He is the author of the chapbook Transcript (Cooper Dillon Books, 2017) and The Scales (White Stag Publishing, 2018). He currently resides in San Diego, CA.