Field guide No. 636
Chestnut on fractured blue water
Cracked like ice. Isn’t ice.
In an empty swimming pool the water’s surface has split into separate plates with dark gaps between, like a cracked windscreen, and a single conker floats on one of them. Nobody is getting in today.
Field noteWater that cracks into slabs like glass, still wet and rippling. A liquid can’t keep broken edges.
- Specimen
- No. 636
- Genus
- Generated
- Kind
- Impossible (the round square kind)
- Breaks
- Material
- Where it doesn’t exist
- An indoor pool, lanes empty.
- Nearest existing relative
- A swimming pool.
- Filed in Fresh slop as
- Spaces
Also impossible, also breaking material
Chance of webA delicate web holds a whole dark cloud between old columns. The forecast is caught in the mesh.
Balloon trapped inside marbleA balloon hangs inside solid marble. The quarry has kept the receipt.
Peeling rust, goosebumped metalIron pipe under the rust is living skin, and gets goosebumps, which machinery has no nerves for.
From sugar cubes to granite bouldersEach cube is sugar at the top of the fall and granite at the bottom, and no single cube is ever both.