Three poems by Heikki Huotari

Expected Value 1

God said let that be a lesson and it was a lesson then God rested. If the president did it then it was not just not prohibited but mandatory. At whatever's unexpected, a refrigerator or a handkerchief, an untrained horse will rightly shy. Intention is a tangent stranded on a path that's in the past. While one side murders, one side slyly jaywalks. One man's drive-by is another's modular arithmetic, his hands at ten and two, his hands at ten and ten plus four. The thought experiment may feature one or more observers. Open the door of the airport and you may as well be in New Jersey and, at least, alive.

Expected Value 2

I'm laughing not because of but in spite of, i.e., hardly bravely. Superimpose on what is what might have been. Consider the iron filings of magnetic fields, they induce vertigo but then align. Let's get the moon to do it or at least let's get the moon's approval. Even gyroscopes rely on figments of imagination. Doppler shift is to Bernoulli principle as Rorschach ink blot is to ship of Theseus. The polka dots connect themselves. On being greeted I become aware I've been away. It's unanimity, a common enemy and juxtaposing. I know to throw only dinner rolls and mashed potatoes. I don't blame remainders. In the Kalahari there are scavengers at every scale on every side.

Expected Value 3

You may have won a million-dollar prize by now or may have been convicted in absentia of a heinous crime. Exaggerated claims require exaggerated evidence. As sex to gender so position to velocity so to describe is to explain. If harbingers were equally judgmental everyone would want one. You're admitted to the othered's club but not allowed to listen to the music of the oblate spheroids. There's emotion but in shrinkage or in breakage. There's opinion but in augmentation of despair. You fail the test of time before the test of time can be amended. If it flatters you, attach it. Don't think outside of a dog. By miracle or by coincidence the saxophone and violins survive the fire. Derive it off the Rorschach ink blot and it's used.

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published poems in numerous journals and in five poetry collections and has won one book and two chapbook awards. His Erdős number is two.