Richard Magahiz


	Specular reflections

floors become their ceilings halfway there

   the white cliffs
   melt into syrup
   the sun stacked high

shot full of spots, the mind-stuff of their dreams

   still,
   she had to pack light…
   the stink of hair, burning

the purple ones are ladies, you think?

   confessing
   that sweet abyss:
   “yes, yes”
 

 
	1000 radiant cranes

    whilst though your closed eyes    cosmic rays flash

do walls forget?
...our bedroom, warm
in the sunlight

    slowly, brightly    rise waxy dolmens

this world's oceans
one million eons
illumine

    slick with mute silt,    trenches drenched with night,

October
tongues of dragonfly breath
sterilize 



	A is not A

without thought  
to step past the square edge 
of the moon  

  Hilbert's eyeshade the pure hue of heliotrope   

her fat melts away
not the way
she’d intended

  starch surpliced the boys' knees bent backwards

in the bowl  
of your plastic spoon  
submarines lurk  

  godlike Orion   outlined in chalk  
 


	Digamma variant

features flow,  
twist backwards — then that moment  
melts too  

  bathyscaphe   in Limoges porcelain   

by foxfire splints 
the crabs pick this year's   
handcuff crop  

  der Eisenpferd   his smoke-grey droppings   

at the climax    
the bridegroom smashes  
a moonlet  

  that bone is no bone     it is no bone  
 


	Floor of the Deep

St. Croix nightfall satellites FLASH-flash

felted hammers on taut U. S. steel

morning skies unfurled silk underthings

beneath our dogs shells pinkly crunching

tendril topology  machineel burn

mahogany drums   booming bearpups

at last fiery trails in the northeast

        What it was like there isn't what they say

Fifty or seventy uplifted palominos would stamp and snort against knotted clouds, crystals of bismuth knotted into their manes. Rage, was it? Without a common language we'd never fathom what they might do to someone in their way. Our machines tried playing midwives, not us, and by now we knew they wouldn't be up to the challenge. All I could do was to hit record.

The local friendly(?) aliens were not much comfort. Half of the crew were already convinced that whatever deal we had thought was in play was off, and the others paid too much attention to the stubborn old professor. Clearly (to me) we had to get away from here, to a place where we could convince the remaining machines to fab us a new home. Goodbye palominos! But by this time I was nobody. The people thought so, the machines thought so, and probably the super horsies didn't care one bit.

Boost and burn, baby. Maybe next time there wouldn't be kindly beings from up the spiral arm to help us out of the jam we'd made.




Richard Magahiz tries to live an ordered life in harmony with all things natural and created but one that follows unexpected paths. He wrangles computers as a day job but imagines a time when life might center around other things. His work has appeared at Eye to the Telescope, Eccentric Times 3, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Bewildering Stories, Simultaneous Times newsletter, Otoliths, Uppagus, Heliosparrow, and Mobius: the Journal of Social Change. His website is at https://zeroatthebone.us/

 
 

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