“IT SEEMED THAT WE HAD TO DIVE IN TO HAVE A LITTLE EFFECT” by Stacey Tran (5/10-5/16)

We assemble diagnoses of the days that mediate our outline. Those insecure pledges were revelatory. As ordinary as rain is to the walnut tree. The more sensitive the light, it exposes even us. Every seam has its own emergence, but not every seam has something to show off. Beyond the gulf a yellowish gain. A gathering of deductions made by airing out legacied expectations. Minor chords motivate the progression toward a center. The attic was a glimpse of a devotional galaxy. Salmon slip out of a flood as we suspected, a standard account of refusal. The sentence grew long and packed a feast. An attempt to appease the ongoing corruption. A crowd of people eating bags of boiled peanuts. A movie set in a sugar factory. What can a dose of rainbow not repair? The act of decorating defends virtuosity. There is a poem glaring from beneath the rubble. We scrapped our ambition to protest the penny, the hostage, the reporter, the party, the spoiled, the tower, the deficit, the balance. Throw it all off. The orientation of home is no longer defined by a river. It became an illusion and then we were held temporarily by pottery. The public became a fog, a facade of reversals. As if the defeat of absence or crisis must be defined. A goat grazing among the forget-me-nots heeds its keep. A game played with cherry pits after school. We mimicked the mess of illegibility. A motion, a creature, something in air, opaque with rules. What stains a random decision has no advice. For sermons exist, war prisoners exist, the state and its lice exist. A disgrace of declarations up for auction, a record of glaciers, budgeted dreams, censored love. Now onto the work of a true excavation.

Original artwork by Kristina Buckley.