The whole earth is yellowed,
pages flipping comic book style to progress.

The cloud of gas growing,
seeping in through nose holes and paper cuts.

Bodies breached and turned to bone.
The narrator miles away,

in a bird sized body watching.
Around him there are a hundred cowboys,

calmed by their guns. Waiting for the horizon
to catch up with them.

Previously published in The Planet Formerly Known as Earth.

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Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson is preoccupied with absence. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous places including EDGE, Liner, Black Lantern Publishing, The Conium Review, Labletter Annual, The Literary Review of Canada, Menacing Hedge, Going Down Swinging, and the anthology Killer Verse. Her first chapbook, Victims of Ted Bundy: Washington State and Oregon, was published in 2011, by Jeanne Duval Editions. Caitlin’s “Incident Reports: The Vanishing” is also in Reprint.

Object(s) to bring back to life: “I would like to bring back unspoiled, barely discovered, travel locations, so that you could go somewhere and not feel like tourists had asked the locals, the same question, two thousand times before.”