We live in the after (or perhaps it’s just a rumor, I don’t quite remember)
Not the afterlife, let’s not be trite: but The After, what comes next/ on the other side of the mountains, in the five o’clock rain shadow
And if I squint to push through the photokeratitis (our name for snow-blindness though it can come from other sources)
I can be a witness (welding without the proper mask can also induce the condition)
As a large animal with pale, red lips and a heart condition that only manifests on leap years
Descends on chameleon wings (today’s the day)
Thin/over/down: alternative to a photograph
A field where the snow does not melt (even the frost on the railroad tracks only becomes brighter)
A death mask, made from a being that was still fully conscious: is it still a totenmasque? (as they call it in the preferred language for such things)
Names aside,
It can still hear the highway
They do have a word for its opposite as well though it’s perhaps less immediately thrilling
To note that trucks can only exhale
And while the Inuit invented goggles made out of Caribou antlers to prevent the condition
We are not far enough north for that
Because machines only breathe in the one direction
And the wings,
They don’t
And the wings (with diesel powered ripcords, never yanked hard enough like teeth to go into the atmosphere)
Nobody (not even a helium-slowed minotaur) ever expects the light to be what finds them out
–Art by Milan Vopálenský & Esmahan Özkan
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