Category: Reckoning 3

The Mortmain

Henryk Król was washing dishes, looking out at the setting-sun light shuddering through the trees—considering, without real conviction, whether the trees should be trimmed to let more light through; whether he had any right to trim the trees, as after years of residence he was still unsure where his yard ended and the forest began—when the boy knocked on the . . .

Flowers for the Living, Flowers for the Dead

Strange how even in the dark, the eyes find shape.

“The walls are made of flowers,” Amelie says, nestled against me. “White flowers, bigger than I can hold.”

“White as clouds,” I say. “Bright and soft.” Our voices are muted. Collapsed into the space we occupy, just as the space has collapsed into us.

“They smell . . . they smell like . . .

More Sea Than Tar

My father thinks it’s a good idea to row through these floods. To move a paddle and be above the water, finally in control of our bodies—that is to say, not drown.

But sooner or later, we’re all going to fall, because we can only stand so tall before we’re sinking: to our legs, to our knees, to our torsos, to our heads. Till there’s nothing left and we breathe in particle . . .

Displaced Water

Somewhere from the diagrammatic stolon

of overgrown seagrasses, a voice carries

to the surface—to live radical compassion,

not just speak of it. The spiders still have not forgiven

me. The fish kill cited in the civil suit just a bead

in the course of stories scrolling by in my palm

like air pockets in rain—over 600,000 displaced

in Sri Lanka, two hundred dead . . .

Eruptions

The land knows

what we refuse to learn:

 

sometimes you must destroy

what has come before to create

new, unsullied things.

 

***

 

There are places my feet have trod

that are gone

never to be loved again.

 

The fire consumes

slowly, with enough time to flee

yet still relentless in remaking.

 

***

 

The ash like snow, blankets

the black . . .

Tiger

As a one-star Inspector General for the UN’s military police, I was uniquely positioned to assign myself any case that I chose, particularly after many years of hard assignments. I had chosen the matter of the mysterious Doolittle, a sort of multi-national guerrilla artist whose work I had encountered in my time amid the water riots of Bangladesh. The machines . . .

Stylo Starr Interview: “Fight or Flight”

Michael: What made you want to accept this particular commission, for the Reckoning 3 cover? Your enthusiasm is heartening and contagious and precious hard to come by in these times, and I’d love to know where it comes from.

Stylo: Thank you! I love telling new narratives through found images. I’m able to do this in many mediums; album covers, clothing, . . .

Extinction Gong

The Extinction Gong is a ceremonial automaton for the Sixth Mass Extinction, the human-induced process of planet-scale biological annihilation first formally recognised by scientists in 2014. Taking the form of a large traditional ‘Chao Gong’, its rear face is fitted with a mechanism that beats to the rhythm of species extinction, . . .