Matt Massaia
A single grain a second. This ice cream kind of night, the horizon
the softest flavor I can imagine and explaining to Dylan that beach
glass actually isn't sharp, it's actually incredibly smooth because
this whole place is actually sandpaper without the paper.
The beach glass a jellyfish fragmented, or a cut-away lamp
abandoned on the shore, or maybe given to the drowned to hang
around and listen. Bird track trails for hours, we were following
them and I was looking for a piece of beach glass to show Dylan,
and when I found it and he turned it over in his hand he was surprised
that it was so smooth. This nature filing down the sharp edges
is the easy human thing to say. The beach, the proxy agent of that
old binary nature. A beach that can't catch a virus the way
computers can, but still file down Grandpa's Heineken, and this brown
yellow piece of glass, this honey that I've captured here, that splits
my hand open. Yellowstone could erupt—it's long overdue for busting
loose, but the nuclear winter would create a cloud shield, subverting
our careless carbon suicide-bomb. We'd freeze for seven years, sure.
Most of western North America and its populations would probably
die or else contract pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,
but goodbye global warming, hello wool sweaters if I can find a living
sheep to collect from. This animal that owes me a debt, this thought
that won't be returned to me. I'm terrified of anthropomorphizing
the sheep or the volcano because I wish to not do them violence, but
fuckers I can't trust that you wouldn't treat me by remarking the curls
of my hair are horns, and calling my feet hooves, but who can I be
to say what language you're using. It doesn't matter how a word
like “nature” is defined if that definition has already swallowed
everything, like my mouth on my finger, sucking a sharp spot dry.