1 Listen: an afternoon thick with cicadas. Thirsty air wicking sweat from your back. Bring a measuring tape and pay out six feet in the dusty grass― because it begins with the horn. Ends with it, too. Lie down beside this imagined horn that is longer than you. Alive like a tree― barked and scarred. Living. Believe in it. Score hoof-prints in the baked clay, each a three-toed ace of clubs. Rest your heart in the cradle of one. Feel the rumble of stampede. With eyes pressed shut, sniff acacia leaves, and scat. The donga-whiff of drying mud. Sun-hot hide a boulder for your spine―lean into the flank. There is no flank. Lean against the rubbing-stone polished through centuries. Generations of shoulder and haunch. Seam your cheek to it. Block your ears to rotor clamour, AK-47s. The chainsaw. Turn from the convulsing ants. Sand rich with blood. In the stillness he tries to stand. Ears twitch at flies. Listen: in the dried-up riverbed the wind grieves. Wait for darkness― 2 What if the only evidence of dark matter is in its appetites. If it’s the colour of thunder, storms it’s eaten. Stars. If people are the colour of river dolphins, icebergs. Of old-growth forests. If matter exists until it’s the snuffed candle of a dark continent. If hunger feeds on, blindly. If West African Black. Northern White. If last horn from the last― torn from the last― If the escarpment rears up as herd. As mirage. What if gone is a museum of stuffed pelt and glass eyes, but also of silence beyond measure. Stillness past weighing. If eustasy is a word we know without knowing we do. So too: Eremozoic. Endling. If ichnites endure in the dry torrent of a ravine―but shivering mineral heat is the only thing moving. If the earth forgets the weight that once trembled veldt grass. If the grass grows tall and craves the horned shadow that moved over it. If the sun forgets the shape of the shadow―
From: Vol.10 N.01 – Private: The Transformative Now
Rhino, absent
by
Cindy Botha