Heikki Huotari

An Imaginary Pianola

If I had not bought the pianola I would not have put it in the breakfast room. If neither Egypt frees me, my rest is proportional, my rest is relative, my rest at best conjecture, and if all I’d ever seen were verticals, I’d process horizontals poorly if at all.

I’m sorry that I placed my trust in you, my fifth third bank. It’s not the content of my peroration but that I am talking nonstop. Who was fooling? An instantiation culminating in a cataclysm? Who induced the butterfly to move?

Eat only from the tree of ignorance and faulty logic. Is the thing bereft of feathers clinging to the broken bell in Philadelphia this Christmas Eve? Why do they have their wallets out and why is there a line of them around the block? Of eighteen all but seventeen are saved.

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About the Author

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia, he has published poems in numerous journals, including Spillway, The American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs. His fifth collection, When Correlation Is Causation, will be available in early 2022.

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Heikki published Scaffold & Mirage as part of our 2024 in-house chapbook series.