Pictographs by Bryan D. Price

now you are reading naked in bed from a book about yoga it is unashamedly hot in here surpassed only by a rare day in the fifteenth century when someone (or some godlike force) let all the steam out of the core and the oceans reversed themselves I have asked for a similar reprieve—nothing like nuclear winter where language will revert to pictographs and we will all have to start locking our doors and chests again but a very powerful force that will help me to reorient myself I guess what it is I am saying is that I am living in an unfixed reality—an extremely primitive unreality as protean as walking the dog in an atmosphere so identical to twilight that I am convinced that day is winding down instead of up and I am dead or do not exist as if I am continuing out of the muck and back into the lake at the very same time my arms not my arms and my organs not my organs until I see your head and partial body bending toward me through a window framed by a violently pitched roof—it is Haarlem in June (or July) of 2015 the rains have chased all the beasts away and from out of the shadows a gang of men come out to fix all the cobblestones

 


Bryan D. Price‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, the UCity Review, Posit, and others. He lives and teaches in Southern California.


 

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