Page 65 - Vol. V #6

Power Failure
The electricity is out. The cloud-patched sky glows with momentary light above the corn field, rolling hills threaded by a road.
The piebald miscellany of treeline,
a stream cutting its diagonal across
the lime width of pasture.
We’re in the pre-electric world of our forebears. Helpless, we can’t download, or even write.
The food will go bad. We turn to candles,
but none makes reading possible,
and we can only look.
Pastel houses rise and dip on green waves.
An oil lamp blackens its glass bell with smoke. Ticking of a wall clock breaks the silence
until someone starts a generator in a barn, and soon it dies. In even this brief interval, the silent things have come to life,
yet-- when the lights come on again-- relief overtakes us. We resume our tasks, commune with computers, little screens, lamplit pages.The power’s out.
Owens’s poetry has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, from Amoskeag to White Pelican Review. He has published short ction in Cimarron Review and (upcoming) in Chicago Quarterly Review. 600ppm, A Novel of Climate Change, was published in 2015 by Cosmic Egg Books.
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