KEEP PLANNING time / space / about #039 PJ Lombardo 3 Poems

Galaxy of Tax Havens (I) Cushionclouded off a harvest none of you planted A gaggle of marionettes knocks their limbs against each other In the recesses of caesarian architecture Where once false suns melted Down the molten chins Of substitute royalty like the many in this atrium Bliss fraying against your battered brainstem And your sunken hemlock future Caught in numbers, scattered on islands Landless and even more landless But hewn to the earth like concrete over graves The Descent of Inanna (1) Mazed in the echo of primordial fear Knifemen chase knifemen with blood on their minds Aleak down their teeth in the palm of inanna: Inanna steward of injustice and tactical intoxicants Her craven bargains strewn like dandelion seeds along the cheekbones Of cosmosfounding deceit The politics of a babe on a stake and a message in the sky Tolerates no ortolan’s flight EAT reads the banner hung between pungent stars Spiraling rank with the limipness of smoke In the 21st century, where the limpest smoke Rises in the shape of unemployment slips And glossy betrayals, passing, ambient, Soft and throbbing with the zygote of domination I Love Morning Skies Every day the blue beyond wrestles with dogs in a warehouse at dawn’s cusp In maimed victory, she hands herself a daylit palm She counts the few remaining fingers while she chews and swallows the last lonesomest human thumb mirrors clatter in her digestion American families adore it like nuclear airbursts diamonding rain Every day a trickster’s wrench flung from her cloudadoring paw jams itself inside the celestials, their circuitry shellshocked, jagged and so this bleeding, bilious god exhales one blinding contusion She flings it to the trees so they might eat themselves to splinters so every doctor and every novelist alike might starve, thoughtless through her thoughtless starving streets abuse, abuse, abuse, abuse,

*** PJ Lombardo is the author of THE BLUE CHERUB (Cult House Press, 2026). He lives in Baltimore, Maryland and serves as co-founding editor of GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. Read his writing in Tripwire Online, Midcult, The Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. 23 March 2026