Pura López-Colomé

Enormous solids were falling from who knows what heights, who knows what places. I trembled, and in my mouth an inky taste. Precise. Hail, maybe, enormous kernels of ice; coming down, with a scandalous impact, didn't bury me, terrorized, under the covers. It didn't happen, it wasn't that. A below zero temperature circulated through the soft center of my bones. A truly searing cold. Nothing having to do with monsters came to pass. Nothing to do with interminable distances. No brutal incidents. Only the agony of acorns. Only a cycle that completes itself every few years and transforms into a tropical forest a choiring oak grove. Which is the fear.

It would not sound so deep Were it a Firmamental Product— Airs no Oceans keep— —Emily Dickinson Afloat between your lens and your gaze, the last consideration to go across my gray matter and its salubrious deliquescence is whether or not I’ll swim, whether I’ll be able to breathe, whether I’ll live like before. I’m caught in the bubble of your breath. It locks me in. Drives me mad. Confined to speak alone, I talk and listen, ask questions and answer myself. I hum, I think I sing, I breathe in, breathe in and don’t explode. I’m no one. Behind the wall of hydrogen and oxygen, very clear, almost illuminated, you allow me to think that the Root of the Wind is Water and the atmosphere smells of salt and microbes and intimacy. And in that instant comes the low echo of a beyond beyond, a language archaic and soaked in syllables and accents suited for re-de-trans-forming, giving light, giving birth to melanin hidden within another skin: the hollow echo of the voice which speaks alone.