STONE TAPE THEORY
We were surprised to find
the door to my old building
unlocked, so of course
we went in — to see
what wasn't different, or was.
The lights had burned out
a long time ago,
but the halls were the same
and didn't feel empty
as they should have,
the handprints not yet gone
from the wall.
When I was younger
I fell in love
with an abandoned house
on the way out of town
— imagined a specter
into being there,
disrupting the dust
with a white cloak,
a skeletal set of knuckles,
walking the staircase each night
in the last witch-infested
instants before sunrise.
Relativity tells us
time doesn’t necessarily
follow an easy line,
but it takes world-moving
to make it slow or bend
or curve until two points touch
— almost-warp speeds,
the heavy comfort
of a planet’s gravity.
In the middle
of energy and matter
it’s not always simple
to explain what we’ve observed,
or exactly why
we return to ourselves
like radio-static dreams
— a little bolt of electricity
cached in wood,
a soft slab of limestone.
About the Author:
Conor Scruton is a poet and translator living in Milwaukee, where he teaches English and does research on ghost stories. His work has appeared in Salamander, Whiskey Island, Superstition Review, and other journals.
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.