Imagine a spring day arrayed in full detail, April, the first few leaves burgeoning to be eaten by swarms of locusts. Subtract the locusts from the number of blades of grass, multiply by the number of observers observing, and then, dividing the light into its component wavelengths, solve for the remaining contours. The answer is flesh, as it tends to be when sunlight soaks the last chill from the bones. What remains is only landscape. Pretty, sure, but it won’t bring back from the teeming life of mud scores of premature dead. Paint them if you can. Siphon blood from the river to recover brothers smothered by battles fought because whatever that other species of people possesses endangers Something Important that exists only on a spreadsheet locked in a file cabinet forty-nine stories above a plot of ground denuded and concreted until the remainder, never reconciled, recedes from memory. Paint these the color of bleach. To calculate the vanishing point, multiply time (all any of us has), by one human life raised to the power of arms merchants, banking dividends, a secure supply of the hydrocarbons killing us all. Divide by compassion (zero) to solve for security that is death. Or so one would hope if mathematics still functioned, but here the most delicate shades of green are emerging from the grey-browns of winter on the same day as a town half a world away. Paint your blue-sky dream. Cover it with smoke, one hand tied behind your back, the other clutching a landmine that could explode at any second. Make sure you notice the exponential spread of flame, delicate flakes of burned canvas riding thermals from the heat of your hills, meadows, family – your entire life burning on such a beautiful day. Know that if a story is sad enough, the evening news will erase it. Say nothing and enjoy your new landscape. Say nothing to those swallowed by the mud, nothing to towers built to block the sun, nothing to workers, architects, developers who raise new cities. Say nothing because here we are desperate to forget the scrape and spark, the sulfur of matches on our hands.
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Ben McClendon teaches writing at Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa. He earned his Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and studied at Northern Arizona University. His poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Yemassee, pacificREVIEW, Chariton Review, Redivider, Rattle, and elsewhere.