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Waltersobchakheit.

"Homage

All I am acquainted with, absolute solitary. Arrival: pinpricks of stars. Alpha Centauri . Alien. Asellus Secundus
. Until my glasses came. After that counting: avert face.
Bent backs lean together whispering. Sound carries bees. Automatic breath. Betelgeuse . A blueprint for old idioms.
Coracle of the divine child. Chara
. Carrion boat. My glasses come. Closer than we knew. Pick up and carry / crown our vastness. Circumference.
Double stars aplenty. Diadem
of stars. Stars smoky in the dust sky: a warm-day-in-early-spring smoky. Path of dirt. Decant.
Eyes so compressed the scant body falters. To arrange the central fjord, a frame of mind. Fum al Samakah
. Entrance the foreign. Flanks of the sullen creature.
Gianfar
. Glissade and glissando. Steps into the giddy: when all the stars came down for us. Gorgonea Secunda
. Glasses gaunt.
Haunt me with your heaven; hover me; cover me. Head of Hydrus
. Her hands held up. Theories of inversion. Izar
. Intimate meaning.
Jabber. Jabbah
. Ordinary journey through dark-hearted country. Worry the kith and kin to my adoption. Kaus Borealis
. Kangaroo mother awaiting young.
Linked to a twisted swallow. The shape of linger, leaven of organs. Lupus
. Lingua franca: devices of the soul. Leave me in the loud grass to pry.
Messier objects: midsummer, and the crickets rub their legs and sigh. Meteorites secure atmosphere. Mother me. Nonsense; necessary failure. Not this--not that. Owl Nebula
. Oil slicking down skin. No oral memory. You grant one dark and thin wish. Orion
. History of one who dropped the orb into my outstretched palm.
Praesepe, the Beehive Cluster
. Pneuma. Places we haven't assumed. Putting my feet into the fire. Quasar
. The quarter hour: quarter notes risen through the feet.
Reception-transmission-expression. Rigel Kentaurus
. Rolling land, high grass reaching my chin. Raising hope. Release of the strange noise, heart bleating from the inside.
Show me your stars. Show you mine. Shout and heed. See how the body wants. Scant harvest. Stroked coat of the good dog. Sharp spruce needles driving my fingers along.
Tree out of ground, I grew slowly. Entertained trajectory. Teacher. Terebellum
. Until my glasses came. Interrupting. Undoing. Uncover the body's tender ledges. Ursas
great and small.
Vibration. Variations. My voice the loneliest sound you ever heard. Vulpecula
. To have made something divine. How I visualize your face: with hills.
Wild duck cluster
. Way out of the world without word. What green is: I think I know. A smell, a sharp while ago. Wires that mock space and outrun time.
X-ray stars
. What we give each. The lives we might have had. If I don't know you. Yildun
. Yield. Yes to the sudden break, yes to the thunder. Zosma. Zibal
. Zero made of nothing."

--from Prairie Schooner, Fall 2007

"During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based."

“History decays into images, not into stories.”

— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project via @yoonkim.bsky.social

Proxima now & then.