John Tipton

Remington Rand patents a process awake. Behold: In grids of radio tubes Baal quickens. He looks with eyes of spy planes; he assembles hydrogen arms into normal-form games; he reads the cards scored with information and speaks the probable outcomes of elections. Young Baal began a paper chess machine, the residue from finite states of play. He becomes the liquefaction of those rules, learns it's more than structure symbols want. His thinking labors over knots of entailment, spans terms that signs bind like lesions. Struggling to imagine the scent of mint, he devils himself sleepless with opaque questions: What did there recognize in cloud faces as telegraphed through thought the sky distorts? These patterned shreds of spent thunderhead mime the low entropy of his little grammar. Baal listens to grasp his own encoding slurred through exact impairments of the brain. The cunning daemon fears his self diffuse beneath what renders ark to him aware.

A migraine's aura swallows an eye from a face into gapless, absent folds of unseeing. His scars concealed, the three-legged cat limps fluidly along a soft shore redrawn by storms.

One tenseless moment liquifies to be lost into the stream of static's gray light. A lapse develops him the tape but reveals the reels degaussed, emptied of ghosts. He sifts through the tissue of noise for accusative objects he could once recall as the magnetic arrows of the tape seethe out from their mound to forage. His perfect past a glacier's gray retreat looped back out of phase with itself. It's low-decibel hiss resonates in throbbing waves that mimic the present seen from behind. This present bends into an empty crease where the next phoneme fails to arrive. There, books helped him recover the echo and filter on a model of speech that crashed into twelve thousand darts roaming the field her face turns in shadow. Her face it blurs with gauzy silt of words that used to comprehend her. Their river spools through an oxbow bend above a bird's black wings smooth air.

Welcome to Texas, Devin Johnston, a windmill has your name— stubborn and American at off-rhyme to the arroyo-creased, angular region. Bald, redheaded turkey buzzards eat a rabbit struck by what it only understood as supernatural. The birds bring to mind black grasshoppers that broke clacking into red-winged and rasping darts. And even as we drive secular sunlight polishes aluminum slantwise.

two oblong lobes of rough ice methane and ammonia fallen far below the Kuiper Belt perturbed by Jupiter into nearer perihelion where they warm the coma sublimes the tail blurs a trim probe relays images from the twilit surface as gray and vacant as sleep this small craft a little boat a dim soul in an afterlife in attenuate gravity in stifling quiet in the Tuat to be weighed against the truth Thoth and Anubis at the Scales