Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025
Is This How You Pictured It? – poems by Eugen Bacon.
Is This How You Pictured It?
Random edicts dispensed
with the need for artists and lovers
because the universe needed
streamlined solutions.
Robots replaced doctors and priests.
New capsules, amputations, implants,
placebos and brains
in three dimensions for—
the most outspoken to—
encode statistically
beautiful humans,
constructed with
replaceable
parts.
We can’t remember how to feel.
Shadowless seasons
cartwheel along
dream-a-day
calendars.
No more vulnerable and needy people—
just the elegance of chromatic
mandolin music glittering
in high pitch along
pristine streets
as instruments
of war.
Nurses in starched uniforms
play lacrosse in
a manicured
graveyard.
All things are a price
she met a myth and a chant—
now time is a melody
for the epilogue of a new night sky
the antiquity of cosmic love
an ultraviolet replay of mindless songs
drifting memories,
death spiralling hot
to beat the sunrise.
© Eugen Bacon
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a Solstice, British Fantasy, Locus and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick and Ignyte Awards, and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was also announced in the honor list for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List a sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’.