Photograph by Michael Howarth (2023)
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It is no black hole, screaming with suck, as it pulls all creation toward the asymptote it punched through nature. Nor dead desert dunes drenched in the double sussurus of sand upon sand. Nor withered summer grasses, lightened by the lilt of cricket and cicada. Neither Cage’s 4’33”, nor the scintillating silence after the final esterbend of Mahler’s Ninth. This is no pregnant pause. It is the anti, the nega, the ex. The nothing, the nil, the never-was-not-now-never-will. The intersection of skew lines. The brute fact. The opposite of thing. The null solution to f(x). Not even the vacuum with it’s zero-point energy, but instead the answer to “why is there anything at all?”

iambic pentameter Thelxiepeia whispers brittle star

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