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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
It’s freezing in the desert but there’s nothing there to freeze.
The ground slides & swells. Where have you been buried?
Under which dune did you say? In the morning winter leaves.
Hush I can hear the aphids aphony & almost a word in the wind.
Time. Shovels. I’m late. I’m latent. I lost my list.
It was only "difference." Hailstone a lodestone on a leather lace.
Is there a certain lack of polarity? Is it family? Here I am.
In the cold moon’s blast zone on clean sand & up is the deep murk.
Up licks my foreign shores. Tide of light. Hailstone beckoning
me to the brown ground. Something there, deep in the drift.
It’s a piece of snow. Where have you been buried oasis,
O trace H2O? Hush already I can see evening leaving.
Atop this cactus the bees are hibernating. Hush they are dreaming
their communal dream, nothing. Sweet dreams. A storm took you here.
Your hive of snakeskins & spiny things. Sweet dreams bees.
Every morning winter ferments. Agent my eyes. May the bulb
of winter be planted deep enough not to burn may the blossom
return may the pollen swell & slide may the nectar mollify
*
There once was a hole in a stone.
Try as we might we could not see
to the other side. I put my
hand in the equator. It was
wet & quite warm. I placed my toe,
my leg, in the glazed equator.
My clothes listed from a brassy
hook in the wooden tie upright
in a stone. The air much cooler
now than the equator. My hips
slipped into the flat line of the
equator. You basking under
your tiara of succulents
on a stone, toying with a stone.
My red beard spread on the skin of
the equator. I drank of the
equator. The salt in that line.
I lowered my brain into the
planar equator. You began
to slide & swell above my sure
face, calcified, the equator.
I love you I hummed I can’t swim
*
1) Take an orb, fallen into your habitat.
2) Slice an orb in two equal domes.
3) Take a leather line (a shoelace or such).
4) Place a line between two such equal domes.
5) Make an orb, product of your habitat.
6) Vice it by hand ’til it is compact & good.
7) Wake. The concussion of summer, searing the shadows.
8) Pace & watch for weather while the stone
9) slakes far beyond its molten core.
10) Chase the lodestar all (summer) day
*
Hush I think now I may
be the future:—
me well & working
at the technology hut,
you floating in a tall,
complimentary glass
beneath our domes
biogeodesic,
springing & falling
the same thing,
only difference, poolside—
our chair giving & low.
Ben Doyle is the author of Radio, Radio. He will live in Granville, Ohio, for the next few months.
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