Libra
by Sophia Terazawa
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026
by Sophia Terazawa
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026
"Myriorama 341," Owen Brown. Acrylic, pen and colored prints on panel, 12 x 12 in., 2023
Libra
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As early as October, so too despair runs out. Mutual,
the blade of grass, the look that says: Between you and me, I’d rather burn up. What drone doesn’t stand behind any of this? Which trucks come and go? Volunteers outnumber the dead who measure and answer for stunned silence. Don’t declare allegiance, wartime’s vassal shield. Here runs our latest breeze, amaryllis, gone dormant, rope around the plain isolation of it. Seasons well up, crushed by a floe strait. So too freshwater dreams of landing home. |
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About the Author
Sophia Terazawa is the author of three poetry collections, Oracular Maladies (Noemi Press, 2026), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021). Tetra Nova (Deep Vellum, 2025) is her first novel. About the Work
"Libra" is in a constellation of horoscopes that I've been drafting over the year. Oneiromancy, or the interpretation of dreams, arrives with questions of mutual aid for an impossible future. Who determines the ethics of wartime help, when the wars inevitably come for all of us? There are no heroes. About the Process
In general, my poems drop in and out in one go. I write everything by hand. The moment something hits a screen, typed out, it dies. I let language die there, so now you have its form in clean lines. In a past life, I probably lived in a temple cave, tending to the oracle bones with my sisters. |
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About the Artist
Owen Brown was born in Chicago. He lived for many years in San Francisco, he now lives in Minneapolis. His works are in collections in this country and abroad. He has been the recipient of various awards and residencies; most recently he was a guest artist at the Spinnerei in Leipzig, Germany. "Myriorama is one of 451 identically sized abstracts which were hung to completely fill the walls of Veronique Wantz, but on velcro, so that visitors could rearrange their position and orientation, thus painting the walls." Brown writes, "Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking. The source of my practice is the world with all its beauty and confusion--nature, so alien and alluring, the social, equally baffling but no less wonderful, and the uncomfortable friction between that, and our internal interpretations. This world seems to carry on as if there aren’t a million reasons to be shocked–life eludes easy understanding or conclusion: what are we seeing when we really think about it and how did we miss it before?" |
