Entanglements, a collection of short works, arriving soonish. Here’s a short sample:

Winds

A change, shock, zig and zag, then over the ridge that defines the hollow kernel, down along the spines littered with ossified vegetative remains baked by two decades of raging sun, then out through the basin. The wind moves in a roll and pitch, carving into itself, boiling against eddies, temporarily subsuming into the evacuated cave left by its endless predecessors, and they are all an enduring chain, pulsing with the heat of the morning, craning through the galena wisps like a fan over these craggy peaks.

Across and above, passing in a trance of action, an outstretched hand reaches in petrified impotence from sand while the wind shifts around and through, a chasm through the adductor becomes a funnel and there is a spiraling motion down and across the craqueleur landscape of the palm. A blued barrel lurks powerless below. The wind shifts a few orthorhombic grains into the steel tunnel.

It will soon be buried completely, and no one will remember this ridge, the last stand, held out against inevitability as no war came, no dogs chased the quarry down, and the only evil was suppressing the vastness of loss. The wind was the endless enemy, and the heat that drives it, and the dying of the grasses, the forests—even the cacti—until Mars finally emerged, trapped as it had been beneath the carpet of life.

There will be a pause as evening rolls in, as shadows coil into the canyons, reaching in a crawl up the sandstone and granite walls, and the bubbling congregations of the wind settle into wisps and slow finally into the entropic well of night.… Read the rest