Three Prose Poems by Heikki Huotari

Incognito Ergo Sum

Outside of space and time a mushroom root is man's best friend. Inside of space and time for you my grow lights and warm body emit infrared; my privacy is yours and yours and handcuffed to the briefcase that contains the launch-code blesséd be the tie that binds full speed ahead.

I would suspend my disbelief for neither medicine designed for horses nor for forks disguised as spoons and had I known you were not coming I'd have baked a pie and not a cake.

It's loyalty to one, betrayal to the other, sides of coins and counting down. Great circles intersect alike and twice. Before I sleep I have the universe's origin to nail down and past presidents to blame before I sleep.

My Annihilation Is The Finest

I refer to ships in an armada with the pronoun they. A vertical 2D is to be called a wall.

How palpable upon the highest point in Florida the glottal stop, the shining offering to moths. As an addendum to addenda infinitum, this capacitor and magic basket says goodbye to buffaloes and pallets of one-hundred dollar bills.

Erosion and erasure are but two of my best friends. Oh watershed, my watershed, thy privacy has but begun.

For underwater weaving any metaphor will do and there but for the wrath of God the stages of grief are enumerated incompletely. In strobe light the wheels seem to be turning backwards. Topographic maps are either on or at it. Here rotation, there is an axis and when two are equal one attaches, so to coexist.

Hear Me Out

Ask not for whom hell freezes over or for whom the decibels, the lean, the mean, the vertigo and now depart, get thee behind me Santa to restore to me my basic shape, give to me yoga hot and humid or give me no yoga.

Eigenvalues not all negative, I'm past contraction and the unexpected, but bad averages, bad averages and curds and whey. So sublimate and skip the liquid, fifth third person of the fifth third month.

From angular to linear and back, uphill both ways, zoom in, zoom out, yo Mandelbrot, yo miniature Mandelbrot, Maria ave. Old and in no way, no way Jose, Jose see through me, see me through.

Bio: Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Spillway, the American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs. His fifth collection, When Correlation Is Causation, will be available in early 2022.