please think
about a murmuration of starlings

good and now
scan the symbols

perform the relevant computations
share the coordinates
…

A paracosm works only for the people involved in it—it produces nothing useful for anyone else, and the pleasure of being in it is so intense that I suppose it is has to be perverted, if you think of how “perverted” can mean “to divert from a natural course”—like we’re all supposed to be doing something else with our time, our lives, our minds
…

There is never a face. Never a word. There is the whisper of cattails.
A ritual has always just ended in humming shadow,
electric shadow, rainbow static cut by a grounded lightdoor.
Burnt and blackened scrolls. On the walls faded mandalas.
…

In the bible, we learned that Jacob had a dream in which he saw a ladder covered in angels. They came up from the dirt and from the sky swarming, darting. Earwigs sleuthed and fed inside my tonsils. A shape… bustling, buzzing, vibrating. I started to get goosebumps.

Sometimes as he choked me everything would go black but I could still feel and think and envy her, and that was enough to know I was alive and wish I wasn’t.
…