Bethany Startin Zeal

A blackbird is code for escape. A dreaming city knows no word for aftereffect, or the motion of time, or how it will happen when the world burns. Below the magic city the earth becomes dry, a husk bled out and the men with blank faces. The glyph compels you upward, dream stones blending into solar flares. A floating continent means what is beneath is of no consequence, to be discarded or burnt up. The machine conducts the movement from horses into birds. A pendant doubles in time: I am talking dreamscape, cities mottled and half-gone, the inauthentic grasslands. How we count the unmarked paths, or how the miles become granular. How the city burns up everything we have dreamed. The twins’ sister reminds us, we can be poet and butterfly at the same time.

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