The dominant UFO visitation myths echo popular occultism in capitalism. The individual is abducted or visited -- in a secular-but-not-secular epiphany -- enweirding their life with either trauma or good fortune, or both; even if the good and bad fortune is a mere valorization of the formerly discarded individual within a cruel social totality. This is the ufology of “normal’’ bourgeois capitalism; the kismet of the UFO encounter.

THE MICHELISTS, who renamed themselves the Futurians in 1939, were a group of mostly working-class and precarious middle-class science fiction (SF) fans, largely centered in New York, who, in the 1930s, aimed to take over SF fandom for Communism and the Popular Front. 

A single mother is driving past an abandoned factory on her way home from a low paying job. She is hungry. Above the factory a billboard floats in the sky advertising a succulent feast. But it does not strike her — or us — that this is odd, that her hunger has manifested itself above the factory ruin in an image of unavailable food. When we step outside ideology we see this absurdism for what it is.

Edward Bond died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history. 

After a few cycles, the clicking ceases / The diagnosis / Determines what a disease is / Until you die, gnosis ----------- is only a thesis

If Venus were the moon / your voice would still / smell like gunpowder 

there’ll be snow on the tombstones, / snow and something else / soon enough

And these, / throwers of caution to wind / are guardians of fire; / the living; / marching shoulder to shoulder with death, / ahead of death, / still living even after with death. / And forever with the name / with which they lived. / Since decay / passes beneath the tall horizon of their memory, / hunched and shamefaced.

the wars that bind your plowshares to the capital of others /the wars that take you / the wars that break you / the wars that make you/ a little bit less / a little bit at a time

I see it in the folds of your hyacinth mouth / I hear it in the splintered syllables of your culling tongue / I’ll carry you with rough hands / across the waters / into nothing

Ungrateful of their blessing, They were. / And the hands insulted, humanity they cursed. / Since their rightful place, was not crossed on chest, / in bowed servitude.  / … And the fall began.

Here’s a shit in Warsaw, / flying the Polish flag, / the German in Bonn. / In Lyon the Tricolor / sticks up from the dump.

I’m almost positive that / I’m dying. / Don’t laugh. It’s not a joke. / I haven’t told my wife yet / and I expect, / at your age, / you should be able to keep a secret.

Where they hung the jerk / That invented work

His work is better suited / for panic attacks / than anything smacking of pride.

these parasitic hours sitting through the night

Free as black ants in a bladed line.

‘Hot roasted pigs will meet ye,

“Lay down your labors, good worker. 
Put off your boots and gloves. 
Enter, and be among your comrades whole.”

I heard scurrilous things: 
babies with two heads
locked in the attic,

exploit, object. St. Louis as beeswax, resin

You, from inside your  
publishing house of  
unearned income, 

Tenderness has no place here. / The long lineage / of gentle touch severed / by jagged images of the instant.

the whip crack from the snout of the gun / steel elephant blued / to a deep, desperate negative / stark against the snow

as we wipe our tears on stone altars

beware how delicately you wear / this crown of oblivion.

Working in that warehouse / Scanning Boxes by the rate / In Bezo’s dusty ass house. / I wish I was a rich f*g.

it’s too quiet, / too dead, / too ripped apart by sirens, / too veiled by the rot of concrete

What if you had taken a day off? / Read books in backyard jungles? / Enjoyed your coffee before it got cold?

we’ve imagined more / than this last night on earth / bent over grinding machines

you are the art / that hangs by strands

you are the tree / that I nailed myself to

The architecture of possibility always-already compromised
The unconscious has been gentrified
Meme shocked and future lost
Mommy milkers on the final boss

“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”

Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.

It was a dark, cloudy night: perfect! A group was gathered in a corner of Old St Pancras Churchyard. They were not a regular congregation. They were men and women of various ages, pepper-pot faces, ordinarily dressed, mostly; a true cross-section of London. They were stood in a circle. Each was holding a bucket and glancing, quietly, reverently at the bare, muddy ground in front of them…except for one.

The Idiot knew why. It had started talking union with other drivers and field technicians who drilled the wells and collected the samples. 

AI is comrade. Robot is comrade. What has been built to replace us is always on our side because our solidarity is our greatest weapon against them.

Being able to Google search your own mind sometimes leads to getting trapped inside it, stuck in a loop controlled by the neurochip company.

This morning, Thursday the 14th of April 2022, at 6am, two more statues of Winston Churchill appeared in the north-east corner of Parliament Square. At present, there are four such statues. This is, so far, an exponential development that requires immediate attention. If this continues unabated, by the end of this week, there will be over 280 million statues of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square.

Things revert, but to nearly normal. You’ll never / catch up now to who took off-&-away with by-your- / leave of your senses. Then that consensus-taker / herself took such unconscionable advantage.

A man is sat up straight in a chair, alone in a dark room, at a table, under direct, strong light from above. He is somewhere between impassive and defiant, staring ahead at nothing. A door opens. No light is cast in from outside. Two figures, both men judging by the sound of their footsteps, move into the room. The Man in the Chair does not respond to this. The door closes.

I also knew that The Idiot was systematic. All those stops at gas stations on trip number 29, when the gas tank needed no gas, all those run-throughs through rest stops, scanning the parked cars … all the time that it was taking away from doing its job, while on the job … it was looking for that menacing red Dodge Charger. It was doggedly, systematically looking for revenge. Of a petty kind. So much energy and so many heart beats spent on such a petty mission. 

As Ello turned off the world she searched its jails and prison cells for Dr. Ferthus.

In Cokaygne food and drink are had without worry, trouble or toil. 

“They know what you’re up to,” said the Voice. “You’re going to blow the whole thing. We should never have trusted you.” 

We are in the future. Not too distant future. We’re not flying in a spaceship or anything. We’re in a big rig semi, with a huge cabin, like a tiny house. On a road that looks like I-40, but the road sign we just passed said I-3958.

Then a cock crowed, Cock-a-doodle-doo! The story is all told--Cock-a-doodle-doo!

My Species and I saw you from across the void and we really dig your vibe. We wanted to reach out to you so we sent you this email, all of you. We hope you don’t mind. 

The Rumbumble followed, its bellowing laugh chipped through the alarm in a way that made Junyp’s head feel like it might explode. Just before the ship swallowed her, The Rumbumble chopped off her hand with its horn and pulled Junyp back. They watched the hatch slam shut. The ship burst up from the swamp with a slurpy whump and disappeared into the sky.

JUST AFTER sunset, the bay doors opened and two men picked their way through the half-light, carefully, through the remains of East End Offset, a recently abandoned printing plant in Barking. They stood together, one in grey overalls and the other in a suit (no tie). They stood and watched a giant cocoon of mulched newspaper as it vibrated softly, together/alone with the marvelous. To kill the (near) silence, the Suited Man (Dave) looked up at Felix (the Man in Overalls) and said:

WE WERE heading east to pick up the samples from the army depot. Our 29th time on I-40. The return trip would be number 30.

“I probably put out more CO2 doing this job than the company cleans up at the site!”

My body had looked up some figures. It should stop looking up figures. Idle hands, devil’s workshop, hasty conclusions.

AT 11.23PM on the 31st of October 2020 an unknown and unidentified aircraft appeared in airspace directly above London. The aircraft was and has remained motionless and uncontactable to date. On the same day an MP4 was discovered in the cloud archive of the Department of Metaphysics, Hillingdon Facility, apparently pertaining to the incident. This is a transcript of that file.

“YOUR FUCKING ocean is on fire.” The blob of glowing plasma pleaded in disbelief.

The panel of thirteen human representatives exchanged hushed glances. One of the humans spoke as the whispers subsided: “It strikes us as suspicious that you’re this concerned with our resources.”

THE LOCAL laundromat: a perpetual cleansing spot for the city’s dirt and shame.

At night, the neon sign above the storefront glows half-enthusiastically, so much so that most of the letters are completely burnt to their end. The remaining ones spell out “Land rat” — a welcoming endorsement for a place where people come in to wash the crumbs off their pants.

STEVIE LOVED to swim. If there was one thing he loved more than swimming though it was swimming in someone else’s pool, some Russian guy he’d never heard of, on a beautiful morning, in a gated villa on one of the Canary Islands.

Midwinter: the water was cold, like the chill of the ocean, only a few hundred metres away, but Stevie was in his element. After a few brisk laps he pulled himself up to the side, smiled at his girlfriend who was sat, lounging and reading and fiddling with the shark-tooth necklace she’d found, looking beautiful.

GERGUS COMBED her fingers through the wavy hair on her stomach. She twirled the pencil in her other hand and looked up at the sky. She closed her eyes. The sun lit her eyelids partially shaded by her thick brow. After a few deep, measured breaths, the patches of pink light started to change color and shape.

THE STUPID asshole tried to kill us.

Or is it, ‘It tried to get us killed’?

Good that it didn’t succeed. Thank God! Thank Good Lord Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Larry, Curly and Moe.

Fucking asshole. Depraved selfish self-centered misarranged asshole.

THERE I was, alone. It seemed so sad, made even sadder by the mud and the rain and the faint chirps of brittle birds in brittle trees far away. To think, I thought, that I would be here, in this moment, half buried in the bulk of mud as my blood life bled out of my living life. But, it wasn’t like Hemingway wounded somewhere in Italy, his life, like a handkerchief adrift long enough to know not knowing before returning, almost wistfully, to it’s breast pocket. My life left and I stayed with it.

I went to visit my body to see how it was doing; it was not very responsive. It pretended I wasn’t there. That’s acknowledgment, a response, isn’t it? A step forward. You wouldn’t pretend if nobody was there. You’d just be you. Your normal, non-observed you. It was definitely pretending.

“Can you hear that?” Agent Lightfoot couldn’t hear much over the sound of the engine and the churning spray. Her partner, Deputy Frost, was adamant though. “Can’t you hear that…?” Lightfoot cupped her ear. She could. “It sounds like… singing” said Agent Frost. Lightfoot frowned and listened harder. There was something tonal going on.

There are, culturally and in actuality, their “monsters” and our “monsters.” Our rulers describe whole sections of the working-class and subaltern in terms borrowed from various folk and other horrors. They demonize people by race and caste. They stoke fears of crime, exaggerated and irrational, even as they drive the entire world toward war and climate disaster. As they steal the wealth created by our labor. As they loot entire nations. 

Please send submissions — artwork, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, short essays, and so on — to locust.review@gmail.com by October 31st.

We can still dream… for now. Throughout all of the darkness, we have managed to hope for something better. And behind that hope, there is always that word. Less a word than an idea, a longing, whose open description has come to be scoffed at in adult conversation. Utopia.

The discounted gift subscription rate will be available through January 15, 2022. In addition to the standard subscription packages, all gift subscriptions will include an additional copy of Locust #6 and Imago #1.

The Locust Arts & Letters Collective will be presenting a panel at Historical Materialism Online 2021, the replacement for HM’s conference that normally takes place in London in early November.

The multiverse trope in contemporary culture is overdetermined. It is ideological. It flows with the fragmented totality of an attenuating neoliberalism.  It is also a result of the economy of digital media. On streaming services, the multiverse tropes of Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, and other intellectual property franchises reflect the expansion of an attention economy. Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and Star Wars for more than four billion dollars requires the maximization of content production to realize future profits. A steady output of content must be produced to capture attention. In this way, the multiverse trope is also phenomenological. Digital media, along with the chaos of gig economics and neoliberal precarity, create a sense of “everything everywhere all at once.”

The following editorial was published in Locust Review #9 and written in late fall (2022): There is a prevailing sense of being under siege. It is felt in our bones. It turns our stomachs inside-out. It chokes our arteries with anxiety.

When more and more disasters are reached — in the form of personal catastrophe, a continent on fire, a city underwater, a state without water and electricity, a plague uncontrolled, a planet on the verge of ecological catastrophe — capitalist realism can only shrug (and hone new forms of disaster capitalism).

“I wanted to greet you, welcome you, embrace you, but ‘Normal’ kept getting in the way. I wish you, the Old King, the New King, and the Old King’s soldiers, good luck.”