Barefoot Museum

A hall of dream artifacts.

red and gray reptile on tree branch

A basket, a wheel, a shield. A barefoot artist enters. Some ceremony begins, an incantation. A spectacular lizard climbs a tree. Whose eyes have looked through these masks?

Do you have any neutral artifacts? Someone asks, but there are none.

The left side of an angel rests on a table: a single wing, once attached. Someone has painted it recently. It is drying. Nearby, the artist draws the anatomy of a seraph, hollow bones radiating from the spine and feathers like fingers, and maybe this is what you came to see, this simple diagram in pencil––down to earth, a practical rendering in painstaking detail, affirming something that otherwise seems to move in and out of spaces like shadow or the morning fog or your next breath.

Author: Stacey C. Johnson

I keep watch and listen, mostly in dark places.

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