Freshen the blooms at your sea-rusted altar

My poem "The House Snakes" is now online at Uncanny Magazine. I had been trying to write a poem about Thera, but a different arena of the Aegean Bronze Age insisted. The results owe something to Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958), like a difference of opinion. As a child, I always used to visit the chryselephantine snake goddess at the MFA regardless of her authenticity. minoanmiss has returned the favor with beautiful art.

The afternoon's mail has brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #69, containing my poem "Your Starving Days." This is the one I wrote in half an hour for the Strange Horizons Infernal Salon, prompted by the card from Negocios Infernales that reads A seed spends most of its life asleep and the memory of asakiyume's tooth corn. Its title comes from George Mackay Brown. The rest of the issue is stocked with writers like Anne Karppinen, Marissa Lingen, Mike Allen, Alexandra Seidel and more, all on the relatable theme of not quite human. Check it out.

I am not happy about the accelerating omicron surge and all it entails, but spatch has fixed our bathroom sink.

I've been dreaming about the facts

Late this afternoon, we got out of the house for the first actual walk I had taken in more than a month. There was dry splintered ice in the gutters of the streets and the paring of a crescent moon in the same blue-sinking sky as contrails lit like fireworks by the sunset. No one but no one that we met was wearing a mask except for us, which is why my face is not on display in the photo spatch took of me up by the high school. Later on he went for a walk of his own and returned to window cats.

( Boy, don't tell me I'm crazy. )

The wind keeps smelling like snow. I wish it would. I am going to try to find something distractingly pleasant to watch or read.