STONE
That underground stone. That neolithic stone. That autocorrect, deep knowing
stone. That predictive outco妈e stone. That reading-the-stars stone. That
sticks to divinate stone. That 妈arker of where buried stone. The to妈b of it
stone. The alleviate the past stone. The affect of repetition stone. The cold in
your pal妈 stone. The no heavier than abstraction stone. The word in your 妈
outh stone. That fear of forgetting stone. The shaded place to sit stone. The
end of the world stone. The tangible ethic stone. The neurological stillness
stone. The race of nation states stone. The cold war sy妈bolizing stone. The
tower of infinite knowing stone. The wo妈an without feelings stone. The
atone妈ent in a lit place.
THE DESERT SAYS
The sun takes seven minutes to reach. It is taking a while. It is forgetful. Sand is. Wind is. Wind
never forgets. Water doesn’t. Be born here. Nothing has changed. The cacti gloaming. The
sand yellow-brown. Be underwater, a billion years ago. Copper underground here. Nuggets
turquoise (gleam). Erect a Saguaro, in which a small owl is burrowed. Imprint of an old life.
Early weavings of copper in the American Southwest. Where lightning hits sand fractals
emerge, crystallize as thought. Dendrites, white stoichiometric teeth. What odds.
What a warm place for a plane to land. Sand is a million tiny words. Sand promises, The end
won’t be all that different from the beginning.
For stone to metastasize it must speak English well. For stone to metastasize it must have
living family here. For stone to pretend to be orphaned. That’s nonsense. I’m underwater now.
Twenty nine first Christmases. That’s the American dream.
There is no Christmas in the cave house. Grandfather’s loess plateau. Loss plateau. It is the
same color as Tucson. Iowa’s geologic twin. The hard bed bread-warm from the hearth. A goat
in the yard. No circuitry here. Just red manifestos and a promise.
Don’t romanticize, only knew about it after the funeral. Don’t want to talk to anyone on WeChat.
This is the great globalized age we live in.
kathy wu (she/they) is an artist, poet, and designer living in Providence, RI, on Narragansett land. Her cross-disciplinary work sits within histories of science and technology. She has been published via The New School, Dialogist, Rain Taxi, and anthologized via Fonograf and Nightboat Books (forthcoming). She has been artist-in-residence at Blue Mountain Center, Black Mountain College Museum, and Pao Arts Center. She is an assistant professor at RISD, and has an MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts.