ART
ILLUSTRATION BY NINA WALKER
VITALITY Words launch like asteroids and howl towards the World– a blinding inferno that paints the sky like blood that never spills.
Of frigid, crystallizing grass. Until the sun blazes again, they never bloom nor wake. And still, She resigns to every asteroid
And the World holds Her breath, tilting on Her axis like a crumbling tower and exposing a frail surface, waiting for the familiar embrace of fire.
Because the quiet World is familiar. These dusty asteroids can be housed And the Apocalyptic asteroids cannot. The ones that explode and
Because She knows asteroids. How they crumble to dust and ash, strangling Her, blanketing the sky with noxious clouds.
Score Her surface with craters and blast plants and felines and consume them all with fire and floods and fractures that can’t be repaired–
Yes, the sand seeps into canyons and trenches, slipping through every crevice– wriggling its way into history, a parasite detected, yet never exterminated.
The asteroids born of speech cannot do this. If She must choose between the two, She will resign herself To the familiar World of ash.
The sun winks into a memory, flowers and trees wither and decay, and even the roaring tiger collapses for a deep, weary slumber in a bed
- ANNA BROWN
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