Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024
The Politics of Things, poem by Eugen Bacon.
The Politics of Things
He stole into nightmares, found a looking glass, peered into a person’s
mind and marked the spot—cementing the mood of a dream into actuality.
He made you think about real things, like how the girl at the café said
your hair looked like creased weevils.
Like how rain sought you on the day of a final interview,
drenched your borrowed suit with unasked questions,
then the phone rang and rang, went to voicemail,
you sent a text but no ellipse showed
a response was coming.
Like how guilt skipped the gym, ate its way into a whole mud cake,
three tubs of ice cream, even Ozempic couldn’t fix
and someone put a mug on your desk—it said,
stop singing. please. never. sing.
Like how the month had barely begun in the coldest winter
and bills were a menace, you had nowhere to go
but a choice between electricity or bread,
bus fare or toilet paper.
Like zealots at the supreme court,
fanatics inside parliament,
loons outside campus.
Like staring into clouds and fretting over what’s ahead,
what was here, or behind. Emergency room visits, power outages,
heatwaves, hurricanes. The sequence. Never. Stopped.
The next morning, a perfectly sane girl, not you, toasted week-old bread,
pushed out a flat-tyred bicycle all the way across the horizon,
up, up a cliff, to join a queue of suicides.
dreams culminated in bodies soured from living
tear stains flesh tatters bone fragments
crawled in port lights blinking closer
than you wish
© Eugen Bacon
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in other awards, including the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, as well as the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.