2021
In the beginning, my home was a barracks
filled with strangers.
With picks and shovels in gloved hands,
we dug sephine from the earth,
from glimmering veins of pale crystals,
soft like melting snowflakes.
2021
In the beginning, my home was a barracks
filled with strangers.
With picks and shovels in gloved hands,
we dug sephine from the earth,
from glimmering veins of pale crystals,
soft like melting snowflakes.
This is what Jandira told me—
The invisibilities will ascend from ground and green,
from fields of stubbled corn and furrowed dirt,
from the Amazonic jungle
through the tree lines to the turbulence above.
Now I’m perched in a jacaranda,
and set to fade like Carroll’s cat, the great auk and the dodo,
with my telescope trained on the far horizon
where the welded night’s creation is rising with the dawn.
‘Lighter than Claire’ has appeared in the summer (north of the equator) edition of the Colored Lens and is available at Amazon. It’s also freely available online. The story has various sources—a plate of pasta, ‘Mambo Italiano’ by Flabby and Carla Boni (playing while I was writing), Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” and the evolution of the species, at least the way it works in my imagination.¹ Continue reading