Also into you by Bryan D. Price

There is something unmanageable about subtlety in such dark times. Soon there will be nothing to recognize as familiar. Landscapes of our youth have long been forgotten in the service of mobility. It is in our historical cruelty to blow indiscriminately across the maelstrom. I have lived among beautiful people but never said so to their faces out of embarrassment. Some have gone missing, deeply so. There has been no accounting made of these apparitions. It would refute the sacred act of remembrance to conduct such investigations, but we are not delicate rememberers and so we clamor hungrily for numbers. I have irrationally abandoned numbers and at times even letters that fail only less awfully. Being on the outer edge of this catastrophe has pushed our reconciliation. Under unspeakable duress I was confronted by a memory. All daylight has passed. The touch of falling ash is as obvious to me as the scrap of dead moon. A stray car light moves like a fish across the horizon. It glows in my throat as I watch it make landfall and listen for telltale sounds of entrance. I turn my head a bit and you look as if you had witnessed the abyss. The dark is not dark and sleep is not sleep and night is no longer night in this place, and yet we are like smoke now, high above the smell of certain death.

Bryan D. Price teaches history at a community college in southern California where he writes about time, memory, nostalgia, utopia, and its opposite. His work is forthcoming in DIAGRAM. He lives in Santa Ana, California.