Unseeing
On the morning of every day, when days are warm and there is no rain, on days when Lyut knows when it is day and when it is night, he will gather his ingredients onto a small board and sit at the entrance to his cave and make his incense for three days...
For Dwale
Beneath that evening's breeze the sickly sweet And brazen scent of countless flow'rs Awoke inside of you a darkened sleep Of dreams dug deeper than the soil. Oh, we are waking minds who missed that scent! ...
Penguins
Too many suits move in too many lines. They circle banquet tables, hawk-eyed, hunting crudites, canapés, bruscheta. Fingers ferry food -- fish, perhaps -- finding slack-jawed mouths already open, squawking at wayward children or bemoaning...
Unimportant Verse 14
Between our houses, there is a simple fence - not a chasm, not a wall. Chain-link, waist high, bedecked with sweet-pea and set about with violets. Something we can tend, something to feel good about, something between us other than nothing.
Unimportant Verse 13
Every time I seek to change my life, myself, my love, my name, every time I try and broaden my range in this shitty, all-encompassing game, I hesitate. With every change in my life comes the terror of maybe losing you of maybe being caught in...
Unimportant Verse 12
When a light so far above me shines down, I lose my footing, stop, look around, and for once, see my way lit before me. Through you, I learn how I move. Through you, I see how I act. Through you, I judge myself. When a light so far...
Beneath her coat was a whole identity
Beneath her coat was a whole identity: A subtle form of ideas under soft fur, A constantly shifting mass of meaning... And somehow, she pulled it off. She would go for days without shedding a thing, And then, as if a bottle rolling off a...
Growth
Used to be you and I daily would walk through the fields out back of the house and talk for hours, spilling words and emotions. These walks were our daily devotions to each other over the years. The fields, dotted with ponds, were our space. We...
Fisher
Alv pinned his ears back against his head as he stomped down the length of the block. His boots were too much for the drizzle that the weather offered, but it was that or his threadbare sneakers, and some tiny part of his mind had done the calculation...
The Presence Between the Pages
"Every five years we must take down every scroll, stack by stack, and replace the rugs beneath them. We must also unroll the scroll and make note of its condition," the monk rasped. "The latter will not be your responsibility, young one, but we are...
The Hand of God
The day began with the botanist giving the physicist a hand in setting up countless contraptions around the rim of the clearing, describing an invisible net of arcane geometries held there five feet above the ground. She lugged the total station while...
Gigs
_Well, shit._ Winter trudged heavily through the piles of dead leaves lining the gutter, the lynx's broad paws crunching through them. There was a sidewalk, but this wasn't a mood for sidewalks. This wasn't a mood for keeping clean, staying out of the...