Tuesday poem #707 : Andy Butter : Ephemeraniac Manifesto

 

 

We are Ephemeraniacs, meaning we are manic for the ephemeral conditions of mortality!

Ephemeraniacs stand in solidarity with all reconstituted parts of history, for example a Neanderthal dad sweetly carrying his daughter on his shoulders.

The last octopus’ last dream is a sacred prophecy of the Ephemeraniacs.

Ephemeranicas love black holes in the universe’s ripped stomach moaning like trees rubbing in a windstorm.

The Ephemeraniacs’ river is the Mississippi River which continues washing over countless drowned corpses even though they are already crushed under sorrow’s ceaseless greased wheels!

Ephemeraniacs align themselves with animists because every object is a fragment of god’s omniscience: Burger King dumpster, left palms, dodos, etc, etc.

Ephemeraniacs are held fast upon the noose of looking, where Jesus and his geosynchronous father-eye bounds around—Ephemeraniacs deny him! (Even Jesus’ boner diminished).

Mortality sucks! Immortality blows!

Ephemeraniacs love a bomb’s nested promise, the shock, the sound, the singe, the spectacle!

One way to become an Ephemeraniac is to watch countless snuff videos of people dying in horrific accidents on the Internet.

What a room full of Ephemeraniacs sounds like is something akin to a thousand hummingbirds bathing in a whale’s aorta. 

The countless nicks of time, the countless runnels of blood made, are a kind of masochistic orgiastic pleasure for Ephemeraniacs!

Every bifurcated hour another Ephemeraniac dies along with another animal species—bound together in sickness and more sickness.

The Futurists? Morons.

Ephemeraniacs respect those that spent 40 years in a cave in the Annapurna Range, who swept their domicile daily, with a rock.

Once an Ephemeraniac watched a Youtube video of a clock ticking and had to remember that it wasn’t just online time going away also real time reeling away.

Ephemeraniacs reject common proposals of anti-grace.

Let’s get real (this is a hard-won insight from Ephemeraniacs) funerals are a supercilious showboat!

Ephemeraniacs love the spoken poem, stupid technology bumping for only a second in all our dumb skulls.

Ephemeraniacs believe in a sentient race of proto-beavers roaming Earth millions of years before humans.

Ephemeraniacs have said goodbye a lot, sometimes to the same brother many, many times Ephemeraniacs don’t want to say goodbye anymore, that’s why Ephemeraniacs seek out other Ephemeraniacs!

Ephemeraniacs recognize humanity’s landfills compressed into a band two millimeters thick in the future’s future’s future geological record.

Andy Butter lives and works in south Minneapolis and is a founding editor of The Call Center Collective. Author of the chapbook To Circumambulate a Sacred Lake (Yo-Yo Labs @ Portable Press), his work has appeared in The Baffler, The Drift, Colorado Review, Passages North, Sierra, and elsewhere. He can be found online at andybutter.com.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #706 : Zoé Mahfouz : MAYA RUDOLPH AND NATASHA LYONNE

 

 

an unlikely Live Mouth
Dolls up for a stint as a
Desert shedding bull.

a lithe black gown
built reason the same way
a Wine flies by
when you walk in the
showbiz spotlight
to make genes a setup trip;

on the group inclination,
years filled in text chains.

give vent to mistake made jokes
to host tomorrow say.

fishy Orange out of weed
less room for Garden fever
decades on the page take up a lot of being,

24 hours distances the realm of
I’m over 40.

the beginning drilled into the eye.
markers are supposed to carve out company.

 

 

Source text : « Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne on Shedding the Bullshit of Hollywood » published in 2021 in Harper’s Bazaar.

 

 

Zoé Mahfouz is an award-winning French actress, content creator, screenwriter, and writer whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She holds a Master's degree in Screenwriting from the London Film School and has received international film festival recognition for her comedy screenplays. Her work has appeared in over 90 journals worldwide, with pieces translated and anthologized in Japanese publications, notably Ginyu and The Asahi Shimbun. Her published work is held in the collections of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford University Libraries. She is the author of the critically acclaimed, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize–nominated ADHD in D Minor (North Meridian Press, 2026), acquired for the collection of Brown University Library, and hailed by Kirkus Reviews for a narrative voice that is "sharp, caustic, and hyper-attuned to the cadences of modern clap-backs and viral tweets."

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan