Field Notes—Atropos II’s 3rd Planet Visitation During Thema Mundi°
Silk ribbon under jaw holds firm a gat the color of ink. They march toward a final breath.
In 6,050:
There’s black glass where the City of Los Angeles used to be. Orgiastic asteroid impact crater. Vaporized observatory. Hollywood Sign an ashen meadow for cactus pups. Disciples hunker beneath oil baron’s tomb. Watching as heat’s pressurized sheen seeps.
Shadows—the many broken arms of the last Joshua Tree—grope at the horizon during dusk.
Frozen, charred, Angels Flight. In that barren train car, on an obsidian plane, there is a body cast in pockmarked stone. Around noon every July the sun pierces her, a shard fallen from empty heaven. Sends light cascading nowhere.
In 6,050:
Empty skyscrapers. So many mile-high pigeon coops. Gargoyles, concrete washed porous by monsoonal acid bath, their neighbors. Cooing flock. None lacking toes. Fetid puddles. Slate feather snowfall fills streets.
In 6,050:
At the foot of a pine, hollow chest in a hanbok inhales. Hipbone servo stirs. Winedark dust fills their absence in the grass. Sleeves crunch. Stretch. Crackle. More dust rains down. Red soot, caked blood or rust.
They remove a steel rib. Clear tone peals from its rung curve. Echoes off a point in the distance. Silk ribbon under jaw holds firm a gat the color of ink. They march toward a final breath.
In 6,050:
She dons tacky patches, glasses, slips beneath the floor of her mansion carved out of a sewer, falls through time to somewhere pleasant, known.
Her fingertips, pincushions. A nearby lord cherishes her couture. Cinches his daughter’s waist in the weft of an elegant bodice. It’s not enough. Her talents must be under his roof. He sends a poorer man. She hears him skulking the hall. She reaches under her pillow, calm as passing the sugar.
Knives, too flimsy. Find a brick. As she splits the seam of his nose, she feels an electric twinge. All the work of this lifetime’s wrist. Electric pain cascade bolts her tendon.
At least there was once work. Purpose in craft. Material. Labor’s empty shape to fill. In her sewer-carved mansion there are ration packets, rats. Memories of the end. The dullest silence imaginable for a companion.
In 6,050:
Please don’t leave me here. I want to do more than track the stars overhead as they wink out, one after another.
I and my many wings, capable of escape velocity.
I know there’s a hole there. Below my second knuckle.
Air whistles through that gap in spider silk. I hear it. Wind in dry canyon. Absent life’s every breath rushing to fill the gap.
Damned to flap. No purchase afforded. Held in gravity’s latex embrace.
I can still fly. I promise.
°—Glossary
Atropos: The eldest of the Morai, or The Fates, from Greek mythology. She cuts the thread of life. See also: works from 1963 and 1973 by kinetic sculptor George Rickey titled Atropos IV and Double Atropos, respectively.
Thema Mundi: A series of astronomical projections in Hellenistic astrology which purport to show the position of the seven visible ‘planets’ (includes the Sun and the Moon) at the beginning of the Universe. Timed mechanisms inside of Soft Death Mommy are calculated to represent birth, life, and death rates during the next Thema Mundi, to take place in 6050 CE.
Sloane Holzer is a writer and artist living in Oakland, California. Her written and creative work has been published in BOMB, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and them. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts.
