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Relocation.

"Eventually, even Pavlov found that when he heard a bell he had the overwhelming urge to feed a dog." --Julian Jarboe, Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel (2020)

CORTEX #1.

"IN THE MOUNTAINS

Sometimes the pain has me,
and I love the past through dark stone,
glass of merlot the ruby
pulled loose

of its dime-store setting. Calendars
tumble through illusions,

the elusive deer leaping the barbed wire
near Meridian, Texas, too
inhumanly lovely

to assassinate; or the moments lifted
by unusual zephyrs late nights
when we drew ourselves

too near Nature’s danger, forest depths
jade in Cherokee eyes, splendor
in moonlight tangling,

lovelock

in bare-branch embrace, a magnetism,
euphoric poison as days process
to train track clacks, scintilla

swimming through forty-two years lost
to the disappearing child–
fugitive,

irremediable, nor remedy for collapse,
entropy, the weather

as noted from your Airstream, nine full
years colored by aftermath. . .
Who reclaims

the fragments when the stars succumb?
See them? Shards glimmer,

dewy droplets lightening the tip of each
sharp, slain, wintry blade of grass."

--Gordon Hilgers on Fb

Circle out of diamonds.