Throw water on it

don't touch it

I woke up surrounded by dust. Grit covered my eyelids and blood vessels branched out in every direction. My lungs heaved in and out like a newborn baby.

A glassy gray sky encroached over the horizon. I heaved in again trying to catch my breath. I held out my hands to the sky to see if I was still alive. My palms carried clean cut gaping holes where my life lines used to reside.

I sat up eyes wide.

Over the field of suspended sediment, power lines cracked the earth as massive hammers sunk them deep into the molten core of every element.

Words began to form in cursive below my body through microscopic aftershocks of the 3rd kind.

(we don’t know what the earth looks like in a vacuum)

It read “lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines” as a tessellation in every direction.

(I am only the curve of you, you are only the curve of me)

They felt like slithering snakes rustling my follicles, but I could not find them I could not solve them.

[I could feel the current run through me and complete its course over and over. There was no water to disrupt it.]

(I am added and subtracted, multiplied, and calcified and corrupted. I am a tessellation. I am only here to be productive)

When I look behind me, I am a different line. I could not possibly match or intertwine with what’s ahead of me.

I am different. I am lonely.

beget beget beget beget beget beget beget beget beget begotten, don’t you forget

The sand throws up its hackles in the wind.

you are corrupted

(I am added and subtracted. Multiplied and calcified and corrupted. I am a tessellation. I am only here to be productive.)

I rose from the hallowed ground. Sand sizzling beneath my feet. I scooped the sand in my hands only for it to fall through my lifelines as waterfalls.

(You cannot see it. The power lines forming words in your eyes. You cannot pass it on. We are merely particles, we are the nothing you have to go on)

Smoke billowed in the stagnant air, upon the horizon, as a dare.

Gas masks sprung up from the earth. I crawled toward them and clawed at nothing.

Lines lines lines lines forming in every direction, they form points with no connection.

I am broken, I am shunted, I am multiplied and calcified and corrupted. I am a tessellation. I am only here to be productive.

Throw water on it, don’t touch it.

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Roxanne Byrne 2026 ©