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Get Alex S. Johnson’s writing in the FREE PDF file 2013 poetry chapbook Akashic Shotgun				You can also order this as a 2013 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book Akashic Shotgun

Order this writing in the book Drowning (a Down in the Dirt collection book)		get the 297 page July - Dec. 2013 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

The Witch Engine (for Antony Hitchin)

Alex S. Johnson

Faster and faster
stirs the witch
engine


courtyard of rose
blooms the inner circle
where toads mutter
secret alphabets


sweet cluster of bells like
grapes on a
tinkling vine


the film has to do with
precepts for a new mold—they gasp when
they see it, a crying blue shame


crystal
contagion
tar wolves


they write the sex
of girls aloud, wings locked
to the wall of shadows


the comfort of soft, elaborate
mansions mothered by time alone


septic TV


in her hands tough bits of
colored glass, meta-vocabularies:
white storm. a frontier of
bitter numbers. mindless swill that
perseveres.


ointment.

Paris in the spring. Prophecy
poured on the lay lines.


parasite.


They enumerate Bluebeard’s fogged gaze:

no hope for the sentient
in theater of ibis


wisteria winds through
panes of hammered glass


alone, once, is an acid green meadow
exhumed from a factory replicating
mannequins from the fin de siecle.

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