by Shaun Lawton
A starfire came winnowing up from the fanning motion caused unwittingly by three mule men sitting at a polished obsidian table playing Cabron with a soft greasy deck of cards so worn out the hearts and spades had been colored back in several times over the years. They had gambled away their sapien souls in the game against El Chulo, lost over the withered and dried crops hacking out dust clouds in a slow roiling backwards motion revealing the uncurled entrails of a slaughtered pig shark.
Slit open flaps stretched out, pinned with its own serrated hook teeth in a screaming revelation of its inner abortion. A gurgle sucking rolled up nearly translucent worm baby whose coal diamond eyes have dialed open the short distance between it and its dead mother splayed and hacked wide open a monotone receiver - (no answer) - so kid, rictus set, resolved to climb the ladder until several new skins grew and shed, each enmeshed from the stripped hides of jackal daffodils growing wild like fireweed in sussuration, lichen lapsed in a hungry siege vortex.
Attempting penetration of a maximum security business office shielded by man tall mirrors tiled against the lost dwarf star slipping into unconsciousness the farther scientific knives brighten, the less strands left from the cut cord unraveling dead weight pulling gravity grinning knowing who's winning because the few left in the open have lost god, was the rough approximation of what a 273 year old sea tortoise glimpsed in a nictitating fraction of a moment as it gazed into a still eyelet of sheer lucid reflection one blood drop removed from rippling out of focus.
A delicate interval suspended in bright silence blitzshrieked in a gradient ramped in by the frenzied choral overtures of frequency city, and the great ancient corrugated fins stroked twin hooked track patterns in the sand, where hermit crabs have traced and mimicked the nervous history of Cheloniidae already; a crooked, branching network leading across random vistas of moonlit bones of coral where ghost crabs haunt the sidewinder ways and a binary star is visible to the naked eye of an octopus secreting a dried out mucous castle to peer out from under the pier at the hunchbacked manacled procession of slaves furrowed in the brow of a central american wasteland.
Singled out as the only inheritance, and with the edges melting from the poles more every year, the jilted dancing reflections, like moths flying apart in a darkened jar, with the lord of hydrogen dissolving from the sky, Juan Carlos Morte simply lifted his hands to the universe, pulling shoulder harness straps looped twine taut, a jack in the box surprise over oily thumbed cards, geisha veiling the shotgun blast behind a paper partition. Spray art and brimstone rising sunburst spattered spangled and tattered in the age old manner of surrender, taken for waving goodbye, the lousiest hand of goat rummy sporadic chance ever dealt.