November 2025

echo map

report from a peripheral field

even in plaster
these fragments pulse
into cracked surface

where something answers
dendrite of a distant star
light
on metal shard
to flicker

paired
neurons
deciding whether to fire
or fall

apart it remembers
two hands:
one small
one trembling

a torn scrap of paper lists
three fears, stalls before
the fourth, its wall
an open synapse

during solar storms,
a choral hum
rises

two heartbeats caught
between collision,
orbit

before an empty case
where vision loosens
arriving in periphery

into the nearest
next
away

a practice of nearness

choreographies of skin and gravity

Love this like weather
that unmasks a gentle sky.

Do not name this trembling.
or hush what aches to bends her spine.

A need for collapse
can be a call to kneeling
in disguise.

What sways this cathedral of air
ringing bells at impossible altitude,
clouding windows with myths
of ascent, her scent lingers, low––

an invitation: after such dizzy heights,
what longing there is to kiss the earth,
to press mouth against cooled ash,
admit devotion.

What impossibility, to confess
this softness —this animal
obedience to soil, its churn.
How bones remember the
murmurs of earth.

Here, too, see how body mistakes
obliteration for grace, a silence
that bows but never
calls it prayer.

minor astronomies

in a hum preceding form

This exhibit resists classification.
It bruises the instruments, leaving
a threshold where witness, wound,
and world converge.

The directive is clear: verify.
Yet time slips in these chambers,
and certain absences carry weight
enough to tilt the field.

Something crossed the perimeter
and refused erasure.

To write it now means
standing in the residue of that crossing,
the hum rising through the floor,
the slight pressure in the skull
marking nearness.

Some archives keep objects.
This one keeps the fracture—
whatever touched the world
and left it changed.

The record ends
at the limit of language.

faith before marble

notes from the preservation wing

how long the devoted
will look
toward the ersatz rendering
of vanished man
pretending vigilance

how long?
pretending
vigilance
will the vanished
render looking
toward the devoted

how vigilant
the keeper
of this pretense

how

look at me
his only prayer

how a body learns

to walk around it

The break never begins with noise,
but beneath buckled paint
behind the calendar we stuck
in hopes of growing unto faith
on walls, for blessed are the
fools, drunk on anticipation
of belief.

When it went, we learned to walk
around it, tremors disguised
as ordinary time, Baldwin’s history
sitting in the room until someone
notices the uninvited guest.

No siren sounds, no one is named.
Gravities are rearranged this way.
Pisa’s tower looked just fine
at ribbon-cutting time.

How easy it is, to mistake the wreck
for aftermath, never beginning.
Survivors find the hairline crack
and make a home in the months
before the flood runs.

Blessed the believers who
never
chart the damage, who lean in to
what’s left standing, call it home.