The red moon went tail and was all. A clutch of yard birds eyed up the giant pocket watch hanging from the hen house wall and consulted their arcane charts. Practically everything that was nothing else was like a buzzard knife and wailed. Almost immediately, boots, and that sound, the inarticulate condensation of a sizzling sixty cycle hum, walls-off and into skinned foment. Under a gone sky gone midnight muted smoke jar we dig simply to save our skin, we dig and we’re cane buck why, thirteen piles for thirteen dodges and a pale whisper off in our blood, in the outback, huffing the dozens down. There is a crazed old bear with a limewood leg skulking through the forests in search of its lost limb, and for the woman, sitting by a window, spinning its fur into a bedspread and a new pair of feet. The water is different here. Above the tilia trees a pair of jackdaws hang frozen for a few seconds in the air before falling, like thoughts under a dark blue light, this night now and it’s nothing is as it once was. We wait in a puddle of claws, forlorn and ill-advised, as a cumulus cloud wheezes away on a bed of throwing stones atop the hummock, sits wondering about where it all went, how the sky opened to a sudden stop, that was not a stop, but a pause, examined, with a subtle insistence, the atrophy and quotient of raw cost.
Jeffrey Little | Crux the Alcove Geocentric Contents | Mudlark No. 47 (2012)