Reading in the living room at three a.m.
after a nightmare I can’t remember.
Just the bright cone of my lamp & everything else
mere marches of night’s empire. Beyond my window
the farm to market road unspools, & thereafter
waits a field dressed in blue. O the quiet,
O the buried dead of every species.
Texas is a two-page book—land & sky.
I see myself walking. The grass chatters under shoe.
Half a mile from these apartments, a horse farm
soon to be sold. O the development,
O the real estate, O encroachment, O market
how keen your talons rending the earth for new rentals.
Those little unknowns that are still wild frighten me
less than what I know to be tamed & paved.
In bright or in weird hour, the sky is always
shaped like an open mouth. The open mouth
is how we express horror.
What I call horror
is what’s invented
when I’ve run out of real danger.
Oh look—there’s nothing at all in the grass.
I am a character wedged between two pages.
I am the most terrifying thing on the horizon.
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Jonathan Louis Duckworth (he/him) is a completely normal, entirely human person with the right number of heads and everything. He received his MFA from Florida International University and his PhD from University of North Texas. He is the author of Have You Seen the Moon Tonight? & Other Rumors (JournalStone Publishing) and his work appears in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Vastarien, Pseudopod, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere. |