“Five Days” by Helen Amon, X: poetry

Five Days

There are drums and there is dancing and hoop skirts turning, whirling, people high up on stilts, trying to keep their balance as the world shifts beneath them. Five days! Someone yells, and everybody cheers because the booze has been brought out and corks popped and cakes tall and tiered are passed around-- passed because there are five days until the end of the world and nothing left to do but dance, nothing left to say except to scream, We are here! Now! And maybe the pavement will run red, the city slowly bleed out, but for now the horses’ hooves pound the cobblestones, the portraits with their feathered faces raised above the sea of strangers All wearing masks with features frozen in delighted surprise, the gold on those painted porcelain faces glimmers in the street light, as the sky turns a bruised blue-black, and lanterns wink one by one in the darkness. The sea of bodies in the uncertain air move as one off the plaza and down the street, over the bridge and across the edge of the city, past the church that rings loud in warning: There are four days until the end of the world!

— Helen Amon, X: poetry

Right: “Crawling Over the Ridge It Goes” by Linda Qu, XI: photography