dear diary, it can’t only be me who feels like the ocean has no business being so vast, covering such swaths of bedrock and making satellite maps so rich with imposing blue voids. i have to use the map with the streets drawn on and even then, i start to scroll towards endless cobalt and spiral a little bit. god forbid i make it across the atlantic to nighttime in europe because then the water is pitch as sky with only abstract yellow pointillism to guide the wayward digital traveler. dear diary, i probably scroll around apple maps too much, look up too many tiny towns to chart the topography of snapped or house hunters, but that’s beside the point—when i look at the endless abyss of saltwater and then close my eyes, i only see the passenger plane that stalled out between brazil and france, plummeted to the depths. if i do in fact honeymoon in antibes, diary, feel free to sedate me before i can behold the distance between airplane and iceberg, another thing so massive they literally sunk ships, reduced to a speck forty thousand feet away. relativity is bananas. dear diary, perhaps it’s not wise to dwell on how small i am—i feel large and lucky in love, for instance. i am enormous when the autumn morning whispers golden hour, who? and scatters a chill in the air, up my spine through my flannel. through my lungs and back out.
nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and author of this book will not save you (Dogleech Books, 2024), random access memory (Bullshit Lit, 2023), fruits of the valley (Querencia Press, forthcoming), and others. WEB
NEXT >
< BACK
INDEX