the lighthouse keeper’s daughter watches townsfolk hurry beneath the building fury, the pleasant evening’s promise blanketed. She turns the pages of the storm with every sense, hoping to predict the night to come. Even her spine feels the thunder that follows the jagged tears in the sky, but to no avail. This chapter book, each ending holding multiverses for the next, confounds faith in any easy climax. The speed of it sucks drapes through open windows, its shades of darkness suck the light from the tower, the edge of the whole crosses the bar. Please, she whispers into its ear, be kind to those at sea.  

(after the 2016 painting Night Watch, by Andrea Kowch)