Nowell by Joshua Wright

A stony scaffolding seems to unfold and, unfolding, it holds in its bosom a granulated nightscape peppered ever so sparsely with ashen bodies that seem to float like bits float in the water in a plugged sink. Joshua Wright

A sprig of parsley was hung today in the kitchen of the morning. Are the people you knew when your eyes were meeting the rising sun the same? The boots you wore whan you called them by name are lost. Little broken branches, like little finger bones, shiver in slivers of lunar light like thoroughly throttled paring knives.

A scatty dog, for a game, growls at the visage of a boggled rat.

Blue once splayed through panes of glass framed in frost as powdery snow sifted upon a silent night. The famished confusion arises when the vittles are few.

Three wooden camels lie like butchered camels on the ground. A star fell through the white canvass. A dented bell fell. A stained angel fell. A half-melted candle fell. Down, down, down the well, gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Radio transmissions, impossible to place, waver in the four corners of the air. A bare-headed and badly bearded priest wanders through a wilderness wherein a thousand or more ravenous beasts howl and titter and tear his fallen collar to pieces. A rubber ball that seems like an eyeball mimics the partially obscured moon.

The fidgety witch from the forbidden crannies of the frozen swamp that are demarcated by signs which nobody can understand and which nobody dares to cross extends through the threshold of the kitchen wherein a feast is in its final preparations her hand with coins nestled in the violently wrinkled pocket of her palm and with brittle yellow fingernails rips from the uncooked goose a chunk of meat and she chews and she tickles your chin when you sleep. That is why

the ornamentally bare-footed orphan does not rest ever, but wanders through the emptiness of department stores at night, following the grace that seems to forever belong to tomorrow and, constantly stalked by yesterday’s wounds, he peruses the tags that unaffectedly state the price of this or that or that or this. Defaced mimes from places akin to places that nobody knows peer and jeer and mock the lonely browser.

The witch, fidgeting implacably, chews the raw flesh of a boot, burping and slurping through her many cavities , giggling at the theatrical buffoonery of the festal guests trampling each other to get below the stove where the coins rolled when she let them go.

Through a particularly flurried dusk the priest, against the pelting frost, the priest, who was once himself a little boy lost, came in the woods to a clearing. There was a cabin in the clearing and smoke puffed gently from the chimney like smoke from a grandfather’s tobacco pipe.

He knew this home. He knew it from an ornament from long, long ago. Maybe from before there was even such a thing as time. He knew the icicles and he knew the figures in the window and he knew all the words to the songs they sang.

He knew he could go no further, for a beast blocked his way. A lamb emerged from the snow and bleated. Then the beast let it be known that all was cordial. The priest took a step. The lamb bleated in the silent night. And the witch whispered subtle words…