Now and then the indelible parts of that December night are shaken free and start falling again. It’s Finals Week and our lithographs are due in 48 hours. With only one time slot left on the sign-up sheet, tonight my printing partner and I must run our editions on the Fuchs & Lang in the basement of the art building. Every minute counts. We carefully choreograph our movements. One works a dollop of ink smooth until it spreads like sticky velvet around the roller. The other keeps the plate damp with a sponge so the ink only clings to the image. Each sheet of creamy white paper is placed on the inked plate and hand-cranked through the press. Early on we realize that one time slot won’t be enough. Three colors take us long into the night. We hide in the dark when the night watchman makes his rounds at 1 a.m. and then again at 3 a.m. We finish cleaning up just before 5 a.m. and push the door open on three inches of new snow. All of that stalling and falling to make every surface so soft and clean and white. We are the only two awake—the only two alive.
lives midway between San Francisco and San Jose. Her short prose pieces have appeared
in 100 Word Story, Mid-American Review, Moon City Review, Quarter After Eight,
SmokeLong Quarterly, and Wigleaf. In 2017, White Knuckle Press published
her prose poem e-chapbook, Qualia, and Ornithopter Press published her fifth
collection of short poetry, for Want. She is also the author of two award-winning
haiku collections: apology moon (Red Moon Press, 2013) and The Horse
with One Blue Eye (Snapshot Press, 2006). Several of her haiku are anthologized in
Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).
