Imagine a beautiful biscuit in the sunset of a sign.  
Oranges.  Turn the oranges upside down. There.
This is where we begin. Downy theists postulate 
a segmented cog. I bought two packages of lump

crab meat and made a mansion of my mind. You
wouldn’t recognize the lawn. I replaced the grass
with first basemen’s mitts and told my neighbors
the bison had finally returned and were sleeping 

off the frosts of the hills. It’s surprising, but a log
rings out like a pair of swollen tonsils when struck 
with mallets of cut glass stitched to smoked bone.
When it’s breakfast you do what you’re told. Red

means red, and no questions. There are buckets, 
and there is brine. Wildflowers grow in crannies 
at the foot of the volcano and I only have the one  
sack of skulls. Think of the children. They’ve got

hands! And those odd little eyes that don’t miss
a thing. As part of a thought-experiment we were
tasked to come up with a sustainable alternative 
to the egg. We still haven’t found Georgene. Ink

has a way of making an empty ghost of the word, 
spiriting off its essence to the Rim People sitting
in baskets filled with corn silk weaving the liminal 
into a pot metal hat, elegiac, a song of the dawn.

Jeffrey Little | Esoterica in the Slipstream
Contents | Mudlark No. 77 (2024)