‘Is there anybody out there?’
question asked by Ian Axel

a boy and a dog in a johnnypump
singing ah-ha-ha! to the summerscape

crawl back into sandcastles
and lay down to play-ground sleep

change the words to a song
and sing it again with a friend

watch the mulberry trunk
wrap around this house, and die

we date dinosaurs in flowers
yet dandelions don’t tell time

trees may fall to thunderstorm-winds

but binder-paper bark stretches across
six sprawling pages, to come alive

a ghostly wind blows stars back into the sky
oh, how beautiful to wish onto weeds

tomorrow, birds of whimsy-fancy
may flit across the sun.

About the author

Quinn Wang is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Their words can be found in places such as boxes in the garage and the underside of puddles. In their free time, they enjoy playing with their cat and running the literary magazine Eucalyptus Lit.

Photo by Adrian Pelletier on Unsplash.