It's Still Life

The Garden of Ordinary Apocalypses (A Six Sentence Story)

The Old Woman with No Cat Finds The Aleph

The old woman with no cat
haunts the edge of myth
with a crow
that’s black
as an obsidian
psalm.

“Look closer,” rasps the crow,
“your spade’s a universe,
a cellar of light—
your spade
is
axis mundi.”

She digs, and a worm curls—
not a squirm,
but cuneiform;
even her breath,
sour with yesterday’s onions,
contains the wind
that toppled Babylon.

“The Infinite?”
the crow chaffs.
“Child, it’s in the way you wipe dirt
on your apron—
each smear maps
every city you’ll never see.”

Her hands
(she looks at them: dry
and knuckled with time)
are Library—
all things are words,
all love is overdue,
and the old woman with no cat
counts sentences
the way a gardener
counts seeds.

And she smears dirt
on her apron,
its pockets full
of orphaned psalms
and one egg
shaped by absence.

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This series is in the style of The Dead Man poems by Marvin Bell and The Aleph (Spanish: El Aleph 1945), a short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges.

Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “haunt”.  Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.