Have you ever driven on a foggy morning? Diffuse grey light wraps around trees, utility poles and buildings. No hard edges to alert you. Are you traveling fast? Or slowly? Time is compressed, attenuated or smoothed out. Your brain eventually tricks you into seeing black and white dots swimming in the fuzzy air.
Pandemic is like that. Time becomes flat and we are all dots floating in space. Getting nowhere fast. Or slowly.
Image by Jason Strull via Unsplash.com
Haughty sea gulls hop
Among sparkles of seafoam,
Dying jellyfish
photo BKjelstrom
When I was young, I jolted down this narrow canyon in my hot jalopy, windows open, inferno winds in my hair. The river below green and cool as it raced me to the sea. On the beach, I ran, jumped in the frigid ocean and shouted for no reason. I drank cheap beer, ate greasy food and slept in the sand.
Today, the canyon is a crucible but I glide along in refrigerated comfort. The river creeps, sluggish and yellow. The wind has died. I drink fine wine but avoid the crowded beach. Have I changed? Or has the world?
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He was scrupulously unsuperstitious, but the smell gave him away, acrid brain curling reek.
I followed him to the bathroom. Startled, Grandpa dropped burning paper into the toilet.
“Ssh. Tell no one. The witch will know.”
After he died, I continued his tradition.
Burn all clippings, hair to toe nails.
Becky Kjelstrom
The dream began as a once-a-nighter, but soon recurred many times night and day. Dreams of holes, large, small, deep, shallow, growing, shrinking. Waking in a cold sweat, skin burning through a thousand itchy pores. Holes consuming organs, bones and blood till nothing remained but endless dark of the universe.
In the high mountains, the air is clear, the sun shines hot. When the wind blows, it rages. Thunder deafens and lightening blinds with obliterating brightness, erasing all shadows.
She sees across a vast expanse. To Eternity? Further? All because the air is thin.
Now, if only she could breathe.
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We should have known. All the signs were there. The slow drift of feathers across the yard. The crow in the leafless tree, feasting upon the body of a songbird. The relentless cold, even as the calendar advanced to days when the soft edge of spring should have cut into winter.
We ignored the dire portents.
Then a phone call.
Now it seems so odd to take out the garbage, bring in the mail, walk the dog, all while knowing you are not here.
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stylish woman
shivers in a thin dress
winter dog walk
icicle spikes
the broken gutter
tooth of winter
like a waning
moon
I rise late
Image by Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash
She watches the far horizon, sees clouds thicken, the yellow and iron light turning weird, ominous. Yet fails to recognize the storm moving directly overhead.
Image by Val Vesa via Unsplash.com
unreasonable
beauty, a winter morning
last rose of the year
Image by Robin Anderson
