Only This

I tear and cut paper to small pieces. Move them around. At some point, fingers relax, eyes tire—time to glue bits, fix eternity within imaginary space. I’m not a journalist: no duty to truth, just liberty to arrange and paste. Nor am I a mapmaker trying to get someone somewhere—my grids exist nowhere else. Shape and color together by happenstance. Like strangers on a park bench. It isn’t friendship—no words pass among them. Yet neither is their shared locus mere flotsam riding blind tide. Specificity, this time, this flick, refuses to disperse, tacks down for good. Or ill.  I heard of a woman who took the fourth, final, place on a stone lawn-seat beneath a venerable willow. She removed a box of matches from her purse, struck one, set her lacquered hair on fire. The others, did they save her? I asked. The teller turned away.

Flare

Richard Baldasty is a poet and an artist who works in text/image collage. His work appears widely online, most recently in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Spelk. He lives in Spokane in eastern Washington state. Find him on Twitter @2kurtryder. 

A Song for Richard