James Grabill
The Idea of 2029
Classical ambition will stand behind and in front of an espresso counter. A conversation will spike up under ‘50s band shells of old assumptions that the new world never ends and no number of kids would be overdoing it. Counter-intelligence satellites will direct more off-world parabolic dishes toward street-corner spreads of rumor-mongering in speculative cosmology, as mystery and natural wildness disappear further with flora and fauna from before Earth was peopled. Before the church married its own establishment, priests may have been hearing a single-skinned shaman drum through the wall. Seeking strength, they practiced chanting the invisible closer, hoping to live more fully, calling the sense home, and they still will. Coffee cups will be refilled, where long-term discussions continue on their own steam. Blue potatoes will be spaded up somewhere behind brick apartments. Split-middle willowing will swim with the truck of civilized yields., Baseline torque from where the oil-lamp right whales dropped will still leach into love and fear. More than ten years will pass in an avalanche of melting ice, rewriting the encyclopedia. Presence won’t be the only human effect in all the blinding blue blazes taken for granted. The next era will feel sorry for this one, thirsty and hungry enough as it is, in small rooms where anyone has been.