No one’s listening because the noise is so great. Distorted syllables, fragmented images, the contortion of color and shape, a face in the wind, a body on the rocks, trucks and trains, airplanes and the single-file procession of cars on the highway. Invented sequences, the plunge of war and destruction, fibers of sweetness spread over the cracked earth. No one’s listening anymore because the noise is deafening. Someone put out the streetlights, tore off the signs, stripped the billboards. Humming, murmuring, whispering out on the edges. No one’s there anymore, no one’s watching the colors streak by, the voices plummet, the sea rise. Tiny rectangles tilted towards the sun, flashing, glowing, growing darker and darker. The grid is down and no one notices the steady progression of snow and ice, the return to a child’s book when the year slips and slides and great orange bears stand by the bedside, speaking and singing, and no one comprehends that penguins have come back, and owls stand guard at the upper windows, a fleecy silence calmly over all.
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Andrea Moorhead
Picture Kushal Poddar
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