When Acting as a Wave

by Alexander Lumans

One of the icebergs resembles an electron. Another is a map. An unfolded and blank map. One blank canvas. The possible shapes, all directioning. A side-continent’s constellated array. See: light on a pool of light. A bear’s blue tongue. Bears, hungry among blanks. The torch in depthless fog. Blue blank teeth, or one long blueish tooth. A blank archipelago. Daisychained islands, untouched or lost. One island of lightning. A blank satellite field, with row after row of broken light arrays. Blank is other kinds, too. An electron’s past-life. The islands grow lost, for want of good eyes. For want of a tooth, the bear was lost. For want of a month, today was lost. See: a bomb’s outline, a prime example, a broken eyeball, a pile of ketamine. One large Malibu swimming pool which no one will use. For want of a reason, the fog turned lost. Cavities abound in this place. A blank bear’s legal notice to all those concerned, please direct your attention to. Crisis frequencies left out in the blank last night. Forgetful valences. Bread mold on blue rye. Cornea plus irishole. A tributary of one hundred veins: they crack forth blood in the shapes of sticks and/or they cascade from the eye’s other blankness and/or they jag within cartoon physics and/or they have now gone the way of the last lightning bolt. All-blank tattoo of bearteeth. An island without trees. A seismograph reading printout covered in WhiteOut. Hexagons. Bottlecaps. The deepest grief you’ll ever know. Sudden inability to remember what you want to remember; same goes for any skillset required to forget. For want of an X, the unfound treasure went blank. For want of a failure, the light evaded capture after turning itself into a beam. A fish no one eats unless there are no other fish to eat. The spot where a mystery sank down through the ice and left behind a hole in the world. See: the misery signal, left on again. A great place for the gallows. One eye blank, one canary. Field littered with neon-blue glowing skulls or sink-steel robot heads or excuses for glowing eyeholes plus some glowing mouth ones which have all faced the sky because someone noticed a sign from someone else’s heaven: NO VACANCY. See: white hearts, all. Want of need is want lacking necessary loss. See: a frosty mesa, an after-dinner mint, a perforated ticket stub. Or quantum entanglement and cold pills. Blankest particles. The windshield’s mysterious new crack: you see it day after day but you never see it twice.

Alexander Lumans is an American writer based in Berlin. He received a U.S. National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2018 and took part in the Arctic Circle residency in 2015 and 2024.