A young crow builds its tender voice, a playful architecture formed in layers around borrowed stones. On the other end of the phone is a crow who never learned to caw. She emits a human beacon bereft of dream.

The morning prescribes a tangerine, its return a sure sign in the mouth of a stranger. Above floats a network of albedo and I offer it my word, as if a name could hold the sky still.

Your voice, stretched toward new syllables, hyperextends the moment of experience. An orchid wearies and together we search its curled tongue for the word it can’t exhale.

It survives unsounded, let loose in the slip-signal of your song, and the pith of the sky dissolves.