Un bâton de marche, 1-O-Kind-
Orig, noir, grown in the Ozarks,
has already provided us plenty
of greens & radishes a bit ahead
of schedule due to the heat & a
wet spring. Plus, the flooding of
1993 had a lot to do with the fai-
lure of the falafel mix. Thought
to have started with the 1991 e-
ruption of Mt. Pinatubo in Luzon
in The Philippines. Now caskets
float down the Missouri washed
loose from a cemetery, engineered
defenses collapse; & even though
the Swiss cheese model of acci-
dent causation posits that failure
cannot be traced back to a single
root cause, & fallibility is an in-
escapable part of the human con-
dition, we still search Ebay for a
sturdy hickory stick to go out &
beat some convenient heads with.

…

Mark Young was born in Aotearoa New Zealand but now lives in a small town on traditional Juru land in North Queensland, Australia. He is the author of more than sixty-five books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, memoir, and art history. His most recent books are a pdf, Mercator Projected, published by Half Day Moon Press (Turkey) in August 2023; Ley Lines II published by Sandy Press (California) in November 2023; un saut de chat published by Otoliths Books (Australia) in February 2024; and Melancholy, a James Tate Poetry Prize winner, published by SurVision Books (Ireland) in March 2024.