Poetry Heath Brougher

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: HEATH BROUGHER

Heath Brougher is the Editor-in-Chief of Concrete Mist Press and co-poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. He received Taj Mahal Review’s 2018 Poet of the Year Award and is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. He was awarded the 2020 Wakefield Prize for Poetry. He has published 11 books and, after spending over three years editing the work of others, is ready to get back into the creative driver seat for a bit. He has four books forthcoming in 2022 and 2023.

A New Contagion

Overwhelmed by a zeal to tear every star from the sky as such a mighty presence only wrought feelings of tinniness and inadequacy within the shallow caverns of their souls.

They were the Pavlovianly-conditioned herd and decided such action would officially become their newest contortion of Truth as they would lasso every last monolith’s magnanimity and dim the luminous brilliance by inserting a dull lack into the luster of these once-vibrant existences and blend and bleed monochromatically into a mangled societal reality they had all agreed to agree to agree to insanitize and mix with the mediocrity of their falsest mirrors.

This was only new to the herd though. Every gleaming sun on high knew that if they dared burn so bright it was only a matter of time until a member of the herd came knocking on their door.

(Heath Brougher)

Imitation of Life

The Spirit of pigeons from 1800 pastorals emanates from a yonder hollow. Flies with thick, paint-heavy wings.

A morning of aerial scissors snips kites from the bone-colored polka-dots of the air. A giant plastic goldfish no longer swims through the sky.

In a rare dream, I bought an umbrella that rained acorns. But that never really happened. It was only a subconscious projection experienced within a spurious limelight.

(Heath Brougher)

World of the End

They slip further heavenward ever since they invited dead hands to pierce the porcelain doles of their virgin veins with the Needledip.

Now, each morning they make the frenzied trek across the same old rooftops strewn with dried blood-droplets from yesterday’s euphoria as they continue their wrong-way direction down a no-way street in order to devour heroin for breakfast. They’ve been living off of toast and should they eat something other than their expensive medicinals it is usually toothpaste for dinner.

They are trapped in a continuum that might feel like anything is possible but instead an insidious illusion had doused them with varicose eyes unable to see they’re tiptoeing toward a sleepy death; a narcotic noose; slowly digging a hole to China, white as Dracula in a world clogged with monsters beckoning them to the world of the end.

(Heath Brougher)

Gonna Lose

A boy floats down Glendale Rd in York, PA— his girlfriend [I imagine her name is Cricket] proceeded in her 1999 Jane-like summer shorts or 2002 Shannon-like tight winter jeans. Two pieces of twine adorned with an anglet to prevent her shoestrings from falling apart. She walked into the gloaming downstreet. She reminded me of love and vitality. She resembled the perfect mixture of Jane and Shannon.

I assume Jane and Shannon have disappeared forever into the legendary landscapes of my sacrosanct youth.

(Heath Brougher)

Built to Engage in Fisticuffs

She dangles round my neck. Her face is seen in caricature hung in my living room. Darkness comes in waves, as does anger. I hadn’t screamed for years and now it has become a daily ritual.

When I go into public I dare someone to fuck with me. When the rage rains, there is nothing I’d love more than to put my fist through a face.

I would pretend it was god’s face to enhance the experience.

(Heath Brougher)