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Spiral


by stephen hastings-king


When collapse is a wave that curls the floor under itself I give myself to it and fall through a white void where the only differentiation is a black square that recedes at a speed greater than that of my descent; it trails long thin clouds that buckle and collapse in the viscosity of the air, gardens of absence I hurtle through, the boundary conditions of an empire of scatter where waveforms and their collisions open onto plains and cities and languages and the ways each dissolves into possibilities.  In one of them I sit in a chair and read “When collapse is a wave that curls the floor under itself.” I look across a white room at the black square on the wall then back at the page. I give myself to it and fall into the white spaces in a black mark.  Aerial, I turn to watch backward sentences recede.  Beneath them trail long thin clouds that wave slowly back and forth in the viscosity of the air.  I inhale them.  When I look up again from the page and across the room at the black square on the wall I hear collapse approaching.   When it is a wave I give myself.

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