from my unpublished second collection
It’s talking to you, and not just you but a thousand others, millions, more.
The lake is a telephone exchange. A nexus in some galactic relay, technology we can barely conceive.
What it says isn’t alien but inhumanly detailed, and best represented by numbers.
It speaks of the placement of atoms, and what we’d call their mass and velocity: if you find tears in your eyes, it’s not because you’ve remembered your childhood or decided to forgive your own father.
That’s not what math is for.
When the shoreline reaches where we’re standing, the city of Chicago may be unrecognizable as any kind of human habitation.
Out here is geologic time. We have boots, these down fill coats. We have gloves and scarves.
First published in The Fiddlehead
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