Mindful by Kim Suttell
Miceala Morano | Nightly News
No, I don’t want to know about Wall Street
or good recipes for orzo soup, no missiles
falling like stars or angels into the Pacific.
Last night, I wore your shirt and imagined
how the moonlight would look as it broke, silently,
through the blinds and onto your sleep-softened face.
The nightly news is blaring on about A.I. chatbots
and new movies, how they still haven’t identified
the celestial body out towards Saturn’s rings,
nor the woman found face down in the Potomac,
her name just as lost to the world as her breath.
When Pompeii and Vesuvius embraced, they found
lovers clinging to one another in their ashen graves.
The world is ending, the television warns,
technicolor screaming like sirens against the dusk.
Turn down the volume, I ask. I’ll prop my head against
your chest, you’ll wrap your arm around my back,
as if I am the tide and you are the moon.
Say this is how they will find us after the light is gone
and there are no anchors left to play God anymore.
Say that would be enough for you.
or good recipes for orzo soup, no missiles
falling like stars or angels into the Pacific.
Last night, I wore your shirt and imagined
how the moonlight would look as it broke, silently,
through the blinds and onto your sleep-softened face.
The nightly news is blaring on about A.I. chatbots
and new movies, how they still haven’t identified
the celestial body out towards Saturn’s rings,
nor the woman found face down in the Potomac,
her name just as lost to the world as her breath.
When Pompeii and Vesuvius embraced, they found
lovers clinging to one another in their ashen graves.
The world is ending, the television warns,
technicolor screaming like sirens against the dusk.
Turn down the volume, I ask. I’ll prop my head against
your chest, you’ll wrap your arm around my back,
as if I am the tide and you are the moon.
Say this is how they will find us after the light is gone
and there are no anchors left to play God anymore.
Say that would be enough for you.
Miceala Morano is a writer from the Ozarks whose work is published or forthcoming in Berkeley Fiction Review, Eunoia Review, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Pidgeonholes, and more. She is a 2023 Best Small Fictions nominee. Find her at micealamorano.weebly.com.
Kim Suttell is a collagist just emerging from a career in bureaucracy and spreadsheets. Paper, as her medium, speaks in torn edges, subtle curls, and tiny glimpses of previous use. The grid template references both quilts and ledgers, places where individual pieces must interact to create a new whole. It is the point to limit the format so that color, texture, and fragmentary images make their own movement and meaning.
Instagram: Page48paperart
Instagram: Page48paperart
