Field guide No. 1357
Seashell spiral beneath the asphalt
Pothole, mother-of-pearl edition
A pothole in an empty car park opens onto the pink, polished whorl of a giant seashell. Somebody finally dug deep enough to find what the road was paved over.
Field noteAsphalt crumbles away into nacre, as if the road had been laid over one enormous shell’s spiral.
- Specimen
- No. 1357
- Genus
- Generated
- Kind
- Impossible (the round square kind)
- Where it doesn’t exist
- a rain-dark car park at dusk, a pothole by the yellow line
- Nearest existing relative
- a nautilus shell
- Filed in Fresh slop as
- Surreal
Also impossible, also breaking material
Lemon flames on blue enamelJuice runs out of segments that are burning, wet and alight in the same slice.
Chestnut on fractured blue waterWater that cracks into slabs like glass, still wet and rippling. A liquid can’t keep broken edges.
Violin strings bloom into grassStrings are wire or gut, made long ago. These are green and growing, and still fixed at the pegs.
Salt crystal seam splits teal waveA hard crystal seam divides a curling ocean wave. The sea has taken on a fault line.