Houston, Texas

Swelling like water at the bottom of a cliffside. Feeble as the wing of a bird looking for a puddle in the prarie.

Color: Stone Ground Mustard

Animal: A rattlesnake curled in a flowerbed.

Chicago, Illinois

The screen in the window is ripped, and the gusts are waving the pieces like a tired flag. Yet, the view through the frame is a mountain taller than clouds. Cold and crystal.

Color: The brown of a car that didn't move out of the lot last year.

Animal: Fennec fox with teeth clenched in the rain.

Massachusetts

Ice in a plastic cup, marginally clinks against the side. Set down in a floating tube in a pool full of fall leaves. No one cleans the pool, no one empties the water. Winter grips the ice and holds it until Spring.

Color: Gray like the reflection of a northern sea in a blue eye.

Animal: Something burrowed in the front grass, but it was gone before morning.

Antarctica/The Top of a Mountain

A thread in a needle that won’t tie. Loosely gripping thin silver, slipping like a hand that can’t hold over the side of furniture. The sound of the vacuum in the next room when you’re trying to sleep at 2pm. The late sun in autumn that stretches shadows in the middle of the day.

Color: Bread that’s starting to turn

Animal: A cat that won’t look at you.

Chittenango, New York

The TV left on, everyone went to bed. The blue light moving like ghosts. Something outside rustling and rummaging through the trash. Midnight, midday, everything keeps going on.

Color: See through green, like carved glass.

Animal: A cheetah walking from the porch to the front door.

Naarm, Australia

People always asking about WHERE DOES TRAFFIC START?

Imagine every blue car is spinning around like a lazy Susan and every red car is driving as fast as it can, and every other car is standing still, and everything else is spinning as fast as the Earth is supposedly speeding by.

Color: Red and Yellow as a blow torch

Animal: 1,000,000 poisonous spiders in a window well

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Slow as eyes blinking right before falling asleep. The car humming towards something monumental to see in the nighttime air, and you sleep through it. Ice caps melting into rivers, but no one realizes it.

Color: Purple with silver stars sewed on it.

Animal: Everything in a kelp forest

La Cañada Flintridge, California

A wheel with family pictures scotch taped to it. Turning in sand that isn’t sinking, but isn’t letting go. Panic that reason can’t fix. Quiet that loud can’t fix. Loud that louder can’t dissolve. Darts flying in between tall trees.

Color: Yellow smashing into black

Animal: The look in a rabbit’s eyes that got caught in the trap.

Žilina, Slovakia

A simmering pot on a stovetop that shuts off from a short in the internal wiring. A balloon stuck with static electricity to the linoleum counter. Starting to lose air, but still turning like a full planet.

Color: Greige

Animal: A reptile in a terrarium that never comes out of the little cave rock.

Austin, Texas

Gentle whispers in between the siding on tract houses. Cold rain lapping up the dryness of leaves and mulch. Something left outside to keep cool. The look in a horse’s eye through the hole in the fence.

Color: Blue water turning green

Animal: A bowerbird collecting pieces of straw to decorate a home.

New Haven, Connecticut

Yarn coiled like a cobra on the table in the corner. A shovel standing in the dirt on its own, dug just enough to work like a leg. Light refracting onto the shelf through the brittle glass items lined up.

Color: The gray edges of smoke billowing out of somewhere across a foggy city.

Animal: Dogs running in a pack to the edge of a steel sea.

Boston, Massachusetts

Thin as the cover of beads hanging across the doorway. Someone buried a microphone under the yard, and it’s picking up the quiet conversation of worms. What if the sun slowed down and days were twice as long, and nights were too.

Color: The orange in a clear glass of cola held up to a lamp.

Animal: A seal stranded on a block of ice.

Atlanta, Georgia

Shields hanging on a wall. Stillness in the oil painting of a bowl of fruit. Motion like an old toy’s batteries running out in the middle of the night and blurting a warped, warm greeting. Sleepers rise.

Color: Paint spread on a rock that’s too big for the brush.

Animal: All you can see is something rustling in the nest from down here.

Medford, Massachusetts

Sitting alone in a small restaurant and you can hear everyone’s conversations at once. When a grove of trees stands in the middle of a field, and the leaves all spin like bike reflectors.

Color: Yellow, like an unsettled lemon

Animal: Muted porcupine

Chicago, Illinois

Crickets stretching the homemade strings into a symphony of evening chatter. A river without water, it’s just a dry bed of haze and sideways rain. A vine growing up the side of a telephone pole.

Color: The color of the tallest mountain in the world on a computer screen.

Animal: Red-Eyed Tree Frog

Dallas, Texas

Echoes in a cardboard box your parents hand off to you at a gas station. A shadow box of an award that mattered 15 years ago. Cursive written in one long string that can’t be decoded.

Color: The gummy steel of an office microwave

Animal: A poster of a panther’s face on the wall of a room when you were a kid.

London, UK

The most accurate time on the wristwatch of a man walking back and forth across a crosswalk that never changes. The closeness of cards being held in the hand of a gambler that never amounts to anything. Glasses cracking.

Color: Where red and black meet on a plaid pattern.

Animal: A tall bird made of tin.

A planet with a surface like bubblegum. The new technology of bubbles that don’t pop. A broom across a tile floor that reveals a completed pattern.

Color: A teal ribbon turned around a pink ribbon like DNA.

Animal: An iguana wearing sunglasses

UK

Traffic in fast forward. A plant germinating and blooming in a single day on the center table of a museum lab. Wooden blocks building themselves into a tower too tall.

Color: Gray and red

Animal: An animatronic sabertooth tiger

Bologna, Italy

A globe without any oceans. Dry, craggy land from start to finish. Wrapped like arms squeezing tight as a boa constrictor. Twelve suns to make daytime last forever.

Color: The scratch of red behind pale

Animal: Eyes catch the light from a flashlight in the dark.

Tennessee/Colorado

The wings of the finch on the windowsill are made of pieces of letters sent by mail. The sting of the morning feels the very same as the evening. Tired like when old technology stops working for the last time.

Color: When the clear in a pair of glasses has needed to be wiped clean for a week now.

Animal: An animal on the verge of extinction sitting across the valley in heavy snowfall.

Brooklyn, New York

Spilling like a waterfall out of a cup into the plastic bowl. Flying like a bird over the party as a streamer taped quickly.

Color: Green waving as seaweed under the springtime

Animal: A fossil of something that used to walk around the hill.

Jell-o spelling its own name. A frequency from a skyscraper. A skyscraper made from a chain of frequencies. Planets colliding and melting a shape into space.

Color: A swirl of synthetic paints and medicine down the drain.

Animal: Huge Harpy Eagle with a mouth full of gummy worms and real ones.

Austin, Texas

Something lost under the couch, rolled like a marble. Food in the microwave too long. Ten TVs stuffed in those stacked up mailboxes.

Color: Brown carpet in an upstairs room with the thermostat turned too high, all the time.

Animal: A cartoon sketch of part of a giraffe with a nose like Rudolph’s.

Columbus, Ohio

Walking through the terminals of an airport looking for an exit. Searching for a way to get somewhere beyond right here. The lift of a hot air balloon heaving away for a few moments.

Color: Pastel colors spinning in the wind

Animal: A bird at the zoo, unsure if it lives there or can leave at will.

Chicago, Illinois

A spiral staircase of seashells inside the mouth of a cave full of water. A staircase in the middle of a golden field. An old staircase in an abandoned barn.

Color: Cold gold

Animal: The busyness of beetles under lush leaves.