ANTONIO OCHOA
from Small Sargasso Mountains
(1)
Big head. Small head. Pinhead. The head of a needle in the forehead of one of the circus performers. Madame Blavatsky’s reenactor had been trying to stitch on him a third eye of blue and green velvet. But he ran away before finishing, purple thread flapping, almost horizontal. “One of us, we accept you,” he yelled after him. At the entrance of the dining tent a man with a flag in each hand was rhythmically moving his arms. With a smile, he clarified as we entered, “today we are serving alphabet soup in the skulls of flying squirrels. You will be left hungry as only conjunctions fit in there. But don’t underestimate conjunctions,” he concluded, yelling. Still trying to carefully remove the needle from his forehead, the performer mumbled as he walked by, “or prepositions.” Blavatsky said that as children, when they used to cut the head off a flying squirrel while it was eating nuts on the branch of a tree, ten sprouted up. But in the after-dinner ruckus I couldn’t hear if it was ten walnuts or ten heads or ten branches.
(2)
I never thought of dissecting one of the heads, but, advanced in years, I came to understand the need. And what I saw is that there’s not just stone inside the stone. Multiple mineral minds in metamorphosis melting. And they sing. The primordial power of the stone heads is the song of erosion. Rain. Wind. Sun. Rainwater digs holes of different sizes. The wind’s action is threefold: it smooths the stone’s surface; it sands microscopic spirals in each hole; and it sings. In the narrower, shallower openings, the songs of anguish take shape. In the deeper, wider ones: happiness. Sunlight reminds the stone that it’s the sun’s sister. 
Small Sargasso Mountains (NIGHTBOAT, 2026)
This is so wildly and deliciously imaginative