Exposure, by Cyndi Lloyd

Too Soon For Thunder, by Kay Sage (USA) 1943

​Exposure

Do you feel it? The dry, parched land sucking away any remaining life force. Can you smell the decay? Taste the sand? Feel how it pulls moisture from your mouth. The only remnant of Nature: the sickly green undertone in the pale burnt umber-grey sky. That undertone seeps into the landscape of camel hair-coloured shapes. Straight lines, as though a folded paper airplane, flute into a fine point. Pyramidal, teepee type structures in different sizes. And the one, looking like rolled paper will eventually crumble to its ankles. One can’t help notice the sanguine cloak around the figure in the foreground. How it offered no protection from what had been wrought. What remains looks like a gingerbread person, hollowed out, with piped royal icing—a desiccation of arteries, vessels, sinews. No vultures, maggots, flesh flies, or dermestid beetles to continue the feast. Already the figure’s shadow has fallen over the edge of the wall behind it. Lost into something else. And what about that half-moon shape on the vertical edge of the paper plane? Perhaps a pregnant belly. Too soon, the wind will gust again. Strong enough to blow us out of existence.

Cyndi Lloyd

Cyndi Lloyd is a poet, writer, and artist. She earned a B.A. in English, from Westminster College (now University) and served as editor-in-chief of the 2012 ellipsis…literature  & art. Her short-form Japanese poems appear in worldwide journals, such as Modern Haiku and Presence, various anthologies, including Red Moon Press and A New Resonance 13, and have received editor’s choice awards and placed in various competitions. Lloyd was haibun co-editor of Drifting Sands #1. She resides in Riverton, Utah with her husband and dog where she enjoys taking too many photographs.