Like a glass hand, a cluster of icicles sistering song, we grip the air, sound ferried across shadow, across a field of stones, frozen and hard. Welcome or warning, this clinking whisper reminds us of lost stars, burning so hot they forget they are gone, their heat its own cry, what claims us, wants to be held against darkness. Sight becomes touch, gaze as immortality grasping back. We reach for it, hold the ice-burn, palm atmosphere even as we feel its reverberation settle, even echo echo in wind, flashes of the future past, shadowed movement and glint, an end.
We bury our feet into hills of sand, this desire for mountain unmoved by the shifting of our feet, tectonic plates that threaten stone toward dust, that disrupt the rhetoric of the lake, all pulse
and pounding. What will be forged in the shoreline, where water presses against what we’ve built, this mandala of our body, ready for wear and loss. Maybe destruction is neutral, like a wave,
like gravity. We have always been waiting. We have always been drawing lines into shrouded ground, forming a language that speaks in symbol and chalk. This is how we build what we imagine
holds warmth, its force and weight spreading wide. This is how we ignore the signals of our body, the pull of the world beyond straining the patchwork of fabric and seam, until even boundaries
seem to tear. The next summit and then the next, one grain compressed into another, again, again. Morning flares. We begin.
-- Amy Ash is the author of The Open Mouth of the Vase. She is an assistant professor and director of the creative writing program at Indiana State University. Callista Buchen is the author of the chapbooks The Bloody Planet and Double Mouthed, and the full-length collection Look, Look, Look, forthcoming from Black Lawrence press. She is an assistant professor of English at Franklin College.