I was wondering about the ozone layer and how no one mentions its depletion anymore
when the sun came out from behind a cloud and I noticed a petal from a cherry blossom from the tree next door (where Diane used to live)
floating past my window
rolling like a paddlewheel and then also, at times, unturning
swinging downward like the pendulum of the grandfather clock my parents had when I was young
– grandfather clocks, evidently, have gone the way of the ozone layer –
paddling and swinging, lifting and not, like confetti in the breeze above the traffic down below but only one single petal so
not like confetti at all but confetto – candy, pink as a hog or the color I imagine pinworms to be –
floating in the clear depleted light out over the street and away toward the dogwood tree arching over, struggling to hold the weight of a
thousand meringue-white blossoms of its own.

Thomas Walton lives in Seattle, and his book-length anti-lyric-essay lyric essay, “The World Is All That Does Befall Us,” comes out later this year from Ravenna Press. He also edits PageBoy Magazine and raises killer bees. Thomas’s manuscript How Can I Say the Lovely Rodents Blinding Me? was a semifinalist in the 2017 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook competition. He has a collaborative book with Elizabeth Cooperman titled The Last Mosaic coming out this spring/summer from Sagging Meniscus Press.

Photograph by Anders Jildén.