In this fable, sand beads out of your sweat glands as you work under the shade of pallets stacked on your flatbed; white sand trickles down your forehead, and when you wipe off, shake off, shimmy off the sand-sweat, it sprays around you and settles into the gravel driveway, hugging itself into the slowly forming potholes, filling in the road’s blank space

In this fable, it’s Sunday, and as you sway in the chapel with your arms raised, the desert dust of your skin wafts and mixes with the motes of everyone else’s dust, glittering in the sun-rays filtered blue and orange through stained glass

In this fable, you are in the kitchen where mother cuts your hair, and your clippings fall and shatter, dulcetly, into black glass shards on the terracotta floor

In this fable, you clip the ends of your nails straight across, and as the nail clipper divorces you from your excess keratin, the keratin alchemizes into curled strips of copper, little orange c’s you gather in your palm and drop on a sunned sidewalk to glint at passersby

In this fable, it is morning, and as you shave, your beard becomes red clay in the sink, washes through the pipes, and rebuilds the eroded river bank

In this fable, you drive down the highway and sing some remade hymn, your left hand on the steering wheel, your right hand catching each note as it rises from your mouth and becomes turquoise or rhyolite or jasper, some as small as blueberries, some as big as your fist, which you slip into a shoebox you will later leave beneath some power line on the shoulder of some unremarkable street

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Image: “Infrastructure” by Alex J. Tunney