On a good day, when the world egg and my mind’s egg are isomorphic, I can taste time in its own language, and my legs move like an orb weaver’s. On all the other days, when our edges are out of phase, overlapping by half, the edge of every tide pool, out of sync, overflows its water. Inner and outer cicadas compose a canon that doesn’t end where it began. Our respective margins, unable to contain their primordial frog leaf stew, overspill the rim of the earth’s cup, goofy droplets of treacle spinning out like millennia into the firmament. Those are good days, too. There are many things slower than molasses: glaciers, for example, and bison, and this, our flat earth, bisecting the void like a stone frisbee on meth, tearassin’ like a slug outta heaven.

Manal Kara is a Moroccan-American self-taught artist living and working in Gary, IN and Chicago, Il. They have exhibited work extensively in Chicago and New York as well as internationally in Istanbul, Vienna and Berlin.