Mutagen Plus Mainstay Equals What

Peter Milne Greiner

Dot dot dot, quoth I, all odyssey and no Greek
root, but nothing in the super cold
desert heard me     I play a corridor across
it on my ceramic flute, two pretty

different didgeridoos, and finally
the theremin app     I bring my forty-one English
words for wind to the actual
Fountain of Youth out there, from which I drink and get

Typhoid     I smudge the nonsense or consensus
of my blood on the mesas
after the sunburst, the saddle blanket, the color gradient
The spirits and the totems gather and we sign

the Magna Carta     I lay down the flesh of the cactus
at the shrine, bits of spodumene and a splash of water
I light the seven fires and incant silently
to myself extant fragments of The Plea of the Burrower

What descended upon me then was enveloping, but not night

Peter Milne Greiner is a poet and science fiction writer. His work has appeared in Fence, Motherboard, Dark Mountain, Big Echo: Critical SF, Tagvverk, Luna Luna Magazine, and elsewhere. A collection of his work, called Lost City Hydrothermal Field, will be published later this year by The Operating System. Peter MG lives in Brooklyn, where he works at a hotel and independently studies island geography.