He moves
like a twenty-year-old
and the soft lamplight picks his face.
He is all folds and angles. The top to bottom of his frame is tight like an architect’s pencil.
He measures out a featureless story, but she pictures devastated cities, criss-crossed limbs.
A canvas of the dead strewn all the way to a scarlet river.
His mouth is that of an artist who knows
how to transform a murmur
into a bite
lagoon.
Eugen Bacon
Eugen M. Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is a Tanzanian-Australian author of several novels and collections. She’s a Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award winner, Otherwise Fellow, British Fantasy Award winner, a Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in other awards, including the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards, and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. More about her can be found on https://eugenbacon.com/
