SHIFTING SHAPES1. Some Magicians Are Like Sculptors Pinwheel, you are a talisman guiding the light of astral bodies: save it up and blast the bad rays back to space. Backspace. Back up. You cultivate a telic chakra in your cyclone of bicycle spokes (that’s only when your momentum’s arrested, otherwise you move quick as culture and no one can see you). Stilled, one might mistake you for a gorgeous gorget (go-getter) circling the neck of a cloud, but in fact you are sharp, you cut low, low cut, your design a palindrome: read all the way round, you return to moraled pin. Your sound: mylar streamers in blossoming cherry with crop dusters drifting silently across bucolic palimpsests of field. Or no, it looks like someone’s left the sound off. If the game won’t start, you say, try blowing on the cartridge. 2. Some Clothes Are Like Magic You are a nautilus shell. Turned in on yourself (never navel-gazing), as you move, sliding footwise over slate, your palletted shell clicks, a walking mosaic, clattering, yet put together. You are palpable—all eyes upon you, a noise like the syncopated pop of an expandable straw escapes. Or maybe it’s the sound of a ream of scrap paper slipping, sheet by sheet, from a desk. No, a cascade of hot milk through a latte’s foam, you think and gasp, distracted by the compact skin of flags through which you semaphore your intent: to pack and unpack your suitcase to grand effect. Each fold invites its opposite in this slow performance of self fashioning. When you finally pull yourself apart, all that’s left is a voice on a radio tuned to static: over and out. 3. Some Shapes Are Like Not Being Worn You arrive pressed carefully in a sealed bag that opens with a sigh, labeled J. Crew. J/K, you hate preppy chic, but like shrink-wrapped catalogue-wear (it’s true) your creases will never come out. Your design bug is a feature: pentagram folds for keeps provide a restrained anarchy. Your bright song, a holiday tune: "Silver Belle." At the phraseRoll out! you transform from a Christmas star to an angel’s red carpet look (you’re still the tops), a pleated pouf that magnifies her mecha shape. Your sound is neon’s buzz, radiating a power pose, no one sees you close your five fabric fingers into a fist. Say it: easy mockery. No one messes with you, Missy, when you un-origami and pump up the volume on your shiny Michelin suit to step into the night.
