“The three sad eyes of the ellipses. Something is lost . . . Three islands.
Small songs in a sea that prefers to forget the land . . . The mouth opens
and begins to speak; there is nothing that can be said . . . One world
followed by another and then another. Tiny black specks at the end of
the galaxy . . . A three frame animation where nothing appears to happen,
though perhaps down on the minuscule surface, there are different kinds
of silences, memories, things forgotten or left. The trailing off, the
continuing on . . . Small black stones in the river of speech . . . Three
tunnels waiting for the three trains of past, present, and somewhere in
between . . . Dots lost and drifting from i’s, j’s, or umlauts, floating
between words in the cloudbound grammar above the teleological cities
of the sentence . . . Notes from a song with neither pitch nor rhythm. The
dark matter music between things . . . Three brother molecules in a
subatomic folktale, though it is unclear which is the youngest, most
foolish, most likely to wed the princess . . . An echo of the full stop at
the end of the sentence. Things end, but their ripples mark the page
with their tiny fingerprints. Here I am, though what I was is
forgotten, disappeared, or unclear. I grip the cliff of the page,
holding on until you get here ready to imagine what I might have been.”

—Gary Barwin, for Craig Conley.