Oak City

City of Oaks

Fire Feels when fire feels through the ripple under your nose forget how to bend your fingers forget why your nails have ridges find in time a batch of fireflies left dead

and bent fighting, flinging into time forgoing space and time and dirt when the house burns with everyone you love inside it

minus some brothers and a few despondent things disposing their energies into a pond into a storage locker east of the ring south of the ashes

a ring is just a ring when air is paranoia soft touch

and garlic swing air is still air when it stops falling on your shoulders

pulls you up to fix the right answer the true nature of force:

gravity and truth presence and present, couples truth to the right one, the one we encounter when bending means creasing, binding to dust affected with seduction

magnetic plots to twist, steal, struggle and beat in the most clinical of settings a boxer tips out the juice of his definition, halts time fanning out into sieves of stance

and burden

a ring is just a ring when there is only burden, commitment and burden

speaking to arms as if they are paths to elsewhere just paths to elsewhere and stones from nowhere

a phantom of bright porcelain bowls dusted sentimental with a show

slow show hollow of words

timid and bright beautiful stones guest to patrons persons we never stood and stuck to us like a face made of stones

glued to burden and commitment to do better a ring is still a ring when there is no commitment and no better

no light to follow stones to trace

and no light to ignite a force of boundless truth and endless repose made small in time

made stuck in time

breathing particularities of particularity cowering crowded under the guise of still detail and fine

rings which exist

and have always existed

PHOTOGRAPHY Jack Muraika WRITING Lauren Garbett