this gravestone reckoning
metallic mentioning
this ocean inversion
folded origami of forgotten time
meet me here one day
a slated promise
a tumulus inkling
heavy as an island
I bless you with a future morning,
an airship. We are dirigible.
Our work is throat-work:
wood, wind in the sails.
Our work is, we over-
look the plain. Treeless,
ghost elephants and whalefalls.
Ghost hayfever, bless you.
Riverbanks, disaster.
Airsickness, woodwinds.
Not our own survival,
the third sleep, folding
ropes. Trunks, folding
skyline, sun-baked ivory.
the world was the same way we left it
the desert’s fissures cracked open
our way of knowing how to speak
our names in multiple extinct languages
the birds surveyed the remaining strips
of forest and flew back into abstraction
leaving behind a wet smear of orange
that faded over time and became a sunset
the wind followed our limbs and turned
them into the masts of grounded ships
wove our hair into sails that creased
beneath the pressure to catch everything
we had previously dismissed as ripples
in space-time where do we go now
that the sky has steamrolled our questions
what is the best shortcut to the nearest
medusa garden whose baritone assurances
of the horizon’s bloodless monochrome
can we metabolize into creation myth
why do our songs all sound like seabirds dying
Some say the invisible is mechanical.
What can’t see sees you.
In this landscape—shadows.
There must be a sun.
An aircraft labyrinth—
what looks like a track—
slides as in a dream.
Nothing inside spun canvas
has a heartbeat. And when
I anger to what’s missing
the white sails stiffen.
This is my self-portrait.
I exert what I am into air.
I did not remember the first sleep.
Airlifted from the other place
where all sleep is collected and sorted
into regulatory shapes. Cloth, paper.
In the third sleep, I needed to find the first,
approaching from the lower end, on hands
and knees. It was slow going because of the sand:
every speck had to be collected from my skin
or I would damage the surface as I climbed.
Like so much else, it only looks impermeable.
I was naked. The sand was very hot. A body
has so many folds, so much secretion. Finally
I was able to begin crawling.
The grey was less hot, but not cool
and I hoped for wind, at the further height
if I could make it past the sails, obviously
placed to trick me into thinking I was finished.
That first sleep was concealed in the paper shapes,
difficult to unfold. The words are so small.
The paper granulates into sand as you read.
When you’ve finished reading you’ll know,
whether or not you want to.
by Ellen Chang-Richardson
(for and after Kay Sage, 1898–1963)
I drape apocalypse in my name
shoot myself through the heart
mute turmoil in sleep abandon
dream archive | travelling loops |
symbiote | symbiotic |
travelling loops | dream archive |
rail lines | without end |
travelling loops | dream archive |
farm lands | barren |
travelling loops | dream archive |
door ways | ajar |
travelling loops | dream archive |
clasping | abandon |
travelling loops | dream archive |
grass lands | without end |
travelling loops | dream archive |
concrete | depressions |
travelling loops | dream archive |
no difference | no difference |
travelling archive | dream loops |
symbiont | symbiont |
travelling | travelling |
travelling | travelling |
travelling | travelling |
we drape apocalypse in our name
shoot ourself through the heart
mute turmoil in sleek abandon :|
by Jade Wallace
(for Kay Sage, who went quiet on January 8, 1963)
Like echoes we are
alone in the desert.
Oracles look at our landscape
and see how we will die.
You in your pillbox,
curtains drawn;
me in mine,
watching the radio antenna
shudder your voice
over barren air.
Copper circuits our days,
a corn snake vibrating
between us. Our days are
dunes we have been thrust upon.
Ozymandias looms, Colossus leers,
and like ants we are invisible
in shadow, waiting for night
to lower the shades
of cypress.
Nothing lasts, you say;
Nothing lasts, I agree.
We watch for birds rising
unruly against the sky—
the infinitesimal feather
that will break our horizon.
It was a long trudge
the straight way perfectly
straight with various dreamily
winding traces
streaking that flat pounded
path of a material
unknown to science he said
snaky threads or veins or rills
as if of fresh blood
running before them
but it couldn’t be fresh
it lay there so long
no matter how far
they trudged no source
no wounded side
of any animal
appeared there were
no animals no matter
how long they trudged
if it was blood it had
to have dried up
long ago they could
have touched tasted
if the maroon on their finger
whorls was sticky like
menses or dry as the old
saying says as dust but they
refrained they were
afraid
though it was in fact
a long trudge they
took on the straight
way there wasn’t much
there they ever came to no
coverts giants caves chapels and it’s
over now yet somehow
remembering it they remember
they don’t remember it they
never made it it’s
the it’s yet to come
it will still happen to them some
day they saw then but now
they were going to
rest after it relieved having
survived were going to
pant silently so they slept and
waked with me here maybe
three times and then
passed on they have
come through as the
poet said he told me and
told me
there were
sheets or sails there something
at least collapsed clouds
that fell and smothered
the garden umbrellas a sea
breeze suddenly folded
and their daiquiris are
inside there unreachable
the nonexistent intestines
of a school child’s
costume ghost we
truly did survive it though
he said we yet might not but
never fear it feels beside
this well that all will be
well and all will be well and it was
beautiful at least thank
goodness for that beautiful truly
there in the
unmoving wind
and light and dry so
at least it proved
the real
existence
of the three universals
Thomas mentions and since
we have to agree on that much
the fourth is
also proven
unity
but we saw
nothing
Beatriz Hausner
(after Kay Sage)
In my dream I see myself wandering
inside the third sleep, its soft surfaces
are a skin covering the still body of night
illuminated by the moon, now full and bright
behind the curtains that conceal it.
Your ghost approaches, its presence visible
to me only, standing behind the rigid sails
of the enormous nave now stranded in the Atacama
desert. "The stillness is about to brake,”
I hear a voice say. I realize then that
I am not alone. I walk into the longest shadow
and feel myself in embrace with your absence.
“All is well,” I say, “go ahead, break the spell,
for I have accepted your nonattendance.”
As I turn my gaze towards the horizon, I feel
a strong gale pushing the entirety of the space
forward, away from stasis, into motion and light.
February 8, 2026, in San Andrés Huayapan, Oaxaca.
Alexander Hollenberg
(after Kay Sage)
I have asked the nation to return to me
my mother’s handkerchief
but it has built me an aircraft carrier.
You should not write poems
about your mother’s handkerchief
says the nation—take this aircraft carrier
instead. It is smooth and grey and clean
and one day you’ll feel nostalgic
for engine oil in your nostrils.
It is useless to think of handkerchiefs,
says the nation, useless to think
of mothers with dress pockets
full of soft, phlegmy fabric. As if what?
As if waiting to be of use is enough?
There is no such thing as enough.
On that we can agree. Not enough
ocean, not enough sky, not enough
ways to write about a war.
I have asked the nation for an aircraft carrier
to bring me my mother’s handkerchief.
There is no other reason for aircraft carriers.
Jacob McArthur Mooney
(after Kay Sage)
You thought that I had asked to die,
but what I asked was to be released
from the future. Its trudge and aphorisms.
You asked: how will we live after civilization?
I admitted: civilization was all that I was here for.
Where else are we? Featureless landscapes
like a storyboard for dreams. The interior life
that we wanted is astride us. Come closer.
Let me inhale what you didn’t need to keep.
Initial sleep, life before life, then an interrupted
sleep called Nights, and then the third:
that one long feeling, like
being cold-launched through time,
a cartoon from a cannon. Wind in my face,
all that spotless gravity,
so handsome and stupid and free.