Parts of Speech

Heikki Huotari

The folding chairs you found most comfortable
belonged by definition to the smallest of three
bears. The Angel Oxymoron patented the
contradiction, privatized the profit, socialized the
loss. The dissonance now cognitive, The Angel
Oxymoron helped the crazy patient, patronizing,
saying, You're so cute when you're insane.

Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a past century, he attended a one-room country school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. His poems appear in numerous journals, recently in Spillway and Diagram, he's the winner of the 2016 Gambling the Aisle chapbook contest, and his first book, Fractal Idyll, will be published by After The Pause Press in 2017.