Alien Nation

Alan Catlin

Rusty Little Words

“Just a pile of rusty little words, all linked up to
make a chain of horror.” --David Peace

All night the classical station plays
seven symphonies by Sibelius,
Finlandia on the rocks, the woman
dreaming in the bed in another room,
not mine, not anyone’s, not even herself.
In the silence between notes, a car alarm,
distant sirens, the stench of rubber tires
burning in the street. Drunk, dozing into
something like sleep, a dream of seagulls,
statues of women all the same, faces pale
as the wind, blue ice and a convex mirror
reflecting up at nothing, an Arctic sea below,
bodies of water held together by frozen
bones, hellish compositions made aural,
neural, as death images painted into a
nowhere sky, slowly revealed as a score for
predawn music of Dmitri Shostakovich’s
Russian winter, the one in the camps beyond
The Urals, on the edge of the earth.

isbn 1-59661-164-2
154 pages/$15

If you locked Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and Salvador Dali in a room together for a week and told them to write whatever came to mind, you’d end up with something like Alien Nation.
--Ray Catina,
poet, author of An Experiment in Terror

Ever have one of those crazy dreams so real you are afraid that you’ll never wake up and life will be like this every day if you don’t. And then you wake up and realize it wasn’t a dream. Alien Nation is like that.
--Emile Ajar,
author of Pseudo

Hunter S. Thompson once said that the Vegas club, "Circus Circus is what the whole hip world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war." Alien Nation is what happens after that.
--Joyce Araby,
poet

Alan Catlin is a retired barman. Over the years he has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books of prose and poetry. His selected poems, Drunk and Disorderly, is available from Pavement Saw Press. He does not look back in anger, but forward, with something akin to terror.