Jen Town The Allegory of a River Made of Burning I. Sometimes rivers burn. We’ve seen it: the Cuyahoga’s unctuous waves catching fire. It was 1969. I was a seed among the stars in a universe that is accelerating, expanding. Suddenly I was a cowboy in a bespangled jacket. The room grew quiet as if on cue, the quiet of a cat sleeping with one ear cocked, each of us alone in our silos of longing, golden like Ohio corn, and beyond this moment, just the space between stars. We take the improbability of our own existence and multiply that by the implausibility of our own immortality and divide by religion in all its glittering and chanting and weeping Madonna manifestations and what’s left is the sum of us in this whirling. You are the whole world, the child said. You are spinning and you cannot reach out to embrace your friends. In each of us a little steel mill churns out a hundred years worth of sorrow and loss—we are the boarded-up windows and broken glass of the mechanized world. Here, we measure the velocity of our own decay.
II. It is morning in the coffee shop and the line is out the door. Inside the glass case, queued up in rows,
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Crab Orchard Review