Let Me Tell You a Secret

This basalt-paved walkway juts out into deep water, concluding suddenly at an arbitrary edge…but the path continues subaquatic. No surveyor has ever discovered they walk on rooftops of tower columns: skyscraper rivals with how deep they go. Aboveground cousins own whispers of giants and their causeways, yet divers do not explore what lies beneath. Not…

Always Winter?

Tiptoes of snow encroach on tranquil streams that feed the sea. The same drops that touch the Emperor's toes ripple back to the Witch's heels. Her hands turn pretty patterns around her wand. Spirals and helixes create icicle skins to form after an icicle heart, her cells slowed down by lack of invigoration. She, oh,…

The Last Voyage

Now a polar bear’s snout emerges from a woman’s eye. An ear by her brow hears Heaven’s curse as torrents below taunt a chin made of smoke. A lighthouse once secured the shore, but night had reclaimed its stolen star and dawn drew in a slithering storm. Cataracts on eyes watched cataracts of waves bluster…

Mosquito Mine

Lithe aerialist, what labyrinthine patterns you trace across the blue! a master of your kind, like the human Escher became a little bug to crawl his impossible mazes. My eight eyes slow down your spirals. I hypnotize myself with your sinuous life. I mimic my web across the vale like netting just in case your…

Heat Haze

How can the water ripple so gently, without a mind for wildfires coating the sky in sunset hues? Human cause is human doom; only humans can move sitting droplets deposited by gust and cloud absorbing drip of sap smoke, scarf in mouth chemicals, and shimmery boulder heat. When a pond weeps, where does it pool?…

Exodus to Aquarius

The ashen dragon drifts above the golden city and I follow with my composite wings of steel and brass, built without gloves—unoffered— to shield my wrists from the blood my mechanisms conjured in bites and rips. This blood I now refuse to quell rains upon the regime that withheld resources, hypnotized the masses to accept…

A Jötunn’s Warmth

Jötnar do not march when Máni’s full face shows. Behind the back of his ebony skull, they stride. When one shivers in the sun, shade is a blanket. Wing-shadows of geese tickle dots across cheeks like the leaf-trickles of sun mortals bask beneath. Cloud cover is as soft to the touch as a feather pillow…

The Wish

In a dark wood dwelled a djinn who sat on an old oak stump counting his fingers to pass the time. But this was the island for misplaced magic, and two became four became eight… When a fairy stumbled over his feet, his eyes blinked for the first time in 1200 years. He opened his…

Doom

The Tower destroyed, ghosts emerge from chamber ruins to cradle the surf and caress the bedrock still leaning in as though the foundation may be restaged. Lightning has ceased, and clouds soon part — until a throne reappears to be razed. The Tower destroyed, the tarot card torn in half: over and over, illusions of…

Escapist

The more I gain control, the more I resist this world and become a bird of prey machine the farther I fly I become a raptor enraptured by smothering fog, shrieking tempo to every creek ripple, every butterfly effect I leave behind my husk, erased by fading memory. The static Nothing closes in on Fantastica.…