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ISSN: 1941-4137 |
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Volume Four Issue Two |
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The Language School In the basement, beneath what was the chapel in the old cloister, before God reorganized the nuns into city dwellers, I found a manuscript of impossible visions, recorded by an angel or girl, in what looked like blood, but was perhaps the thickening of ink in my own arteries. The language was one of sighs. I held the book out and listened to the distillation of traffic outside, the background voices of energy hitting pistons, turning wheels in thin songs. Up above, on a chalkboard in one of the many rooms without windows, I mapped out the nouns and verbs of the interaction of angels with humans, and found no sign sufficient for the past exchange. But the place was empty and I was alone. What was spoken there on the many floors of the old monastery, was a language I didn't know, which had fastened itself to the darkness and silence, waiting to break open on the altar stone. |
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