25 April 2008 | Vol. 8, No. 1

Apocrypha #9

by RICHARD FROUDE

But her skin carries tatters. And from the window, from beneath, fossils press against the surface of the plains. The rock is moved upstream through an intricate system of pulleys and flesh. Those who are cast out. Those who bleed.

I would tell you this directly. I would assemble a presentation of Polaroids and morals, protract the particular angles of her refraction. Serve canapés and arias and make allusions to a definition rooted in shape: the deltoid, the ellipse.

Lacking an alphabet to appropriate this flexure (which is where she maunders): a fable whose protagonist is light, the outskirts of an oral tradition, these are anxieties indigenous to our region.

Arrested by steel, we heap sal