Instituted at the desk but not yet overcome by the banality at the end of imagination, you ask the page: will all tongues run dry? You’re invested personally. A light so trumpetlike in its tone knuckles the breeze, but it’s a blue world no matter how brassed. Whole books are left undigested, while the telephone maintains its place as the object of every preposition. The down on an arm can, however, on occasion, stand on end, as if your skin sensed an open field behind the bursting silence. There the wild globe perspires in its desire to overcome the limits of your landscape, like something endangered and alive slinking away from the tiled agenda of a roadside restroom. Your eye now unimpressed by donuts and funnel cakes finds a stellar sequence of moons rising through the pines above a morning. When back in your office you see a kid grate his teeth against a sentence hollowing through the static of the intercom, you inform the clerk in a short-sleeve shirt that the time has come: you must rearrange your life. You command him to cuff you and in a set of disposable restraints, you become a saint, arrested and arresting. Your eyes full of suffering turn to the ceiling tiles, through which your gaze pierces to a beyond of copper wires in vinyl casings—yellow, green, and blue—linking you to every terrestrial being above and below your floor, an elevator of voices, an orphic infinity.
From The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom. Copyright © 2019 by Magdalena Zurawski. Used with permission of the author and Wave Books.