F  L  A  U  N  T

WHO NEEDS A HEART WHEN YOU'VE GOT A HARD ON? --------------------------------------------  **THE QUEEN** Admire the regality of her bearing. Worship the blush of her limbs. God save her, before god takes her, the god she was, on Earth she was, as in the heavens. A blue dot that contained her. The indifference of the infinite, has no bearing on the internet, nor upon her imperious posture, that gained her likes by the dozen. Every alley a catwalk, every catwalk a port-cochére, every port a harbor, every ship a knight. In her youth she was perfect, in her senescence time became her crown. Sapphire, amethyst, and emerald. Ruby, silver, and ebony. Light's on. Light's off.  **THE POLAROID** This is how we grasp our moments. Time wavers and burns like flame and we dip our finger, scorching the skin. This photo – a blister in time. The color will soften as time unravels it. The light that fades, as the life fades, and as age unmakes it. Focused photons that jackknifed through silver salt, aggravating chemical layers and saving time and storing time. Burning an instant into the moment it becomes. That moment once held, and now between wounded fingers. As the chemicals denature the outline wavers, that final dying moment the outline of what it was, billions of miles away, in a universe more contracted than now, in a pocket of space and time, whose photons race away beyond our cremated grasp to an infinite we dream to hold.  **THE PAINT**  Such weight that embodies pigment – black, white, yellow, brown, blue, fuscia. A particularity of atoms that absorb and reflect photons restricting wavelengths and energies to particulars. Yet such weight. Splashes of color, oceans of color, skinned for his color, lynched for her color. These two eyes, infinitesimal beacons trapping a narrow band of electricity so a few pounds of gray matter can decide that this is blue, this is hue, this is you. When the cancer kicked in, and his liver stopped, his pink and honey skin turned to yellow. When he died he turned white, then gray, then the blue flame cooked and charred him to black ash.   * * * All images from Jeremy Kost's _Like One Of Your French Girls_ (2017). Self Published. Written by Gus Donohoo