Cover image: Art work by Stefan Reiterer, featured in this issue of TDM, in the interviews and Reviews, Out of Bounds section.
Inside what’s called the cabin
where time has held its breath
so long it hardly knows
its own light headedness,
where place, slippery as quicksilver,
cannot be held, the air outside
too thin to contemplate…
Inside what’s called the cabin
we wait, like tiny scrolls
humming inside a sealed tube
kept aloft by the gasses
venting in a muffled shriek –
a wash of water vapor and oxides
etched on someone’s evening sky.
Our fight with gravity
invades the in-flight entertainment
where Batman and his girlfriend hang
from the cornice of a tower
far above a searchlight-haunted Gotham.
It makes you turn away
decide to raise the shade,
to look downward and see
the upthrust scrabble of rock
and ice along a mountain’s spine,
the light of morning sun
pooling orange on the shrinking glacier –
and you remember it now –
oh yes, the earth – that body
you thought you had escaped.
by Clark Bouwman
Copyright 2025
Clark Bouwman is an essayist and poet who lives in Richmond, California. His work has appeared previously in The Dreaming Machine, The Antonym, Gargoyle, Minimus, The Tacoma Voice, and in the collection Music Gigs Gone Wrong, Paycock Press (2022). He maintains a blog which includes many of his essays at https://from-where-i-stand.com/
