When Symphonies Empty it's father's rocks at the hornet nest again and a piñata of furies spilling into an increasingly absent air the way they hurl themselves at the wooden roof and hold their sting like medicine, the drone building to a coda that exhausts rather than ends it's all such a flurry of rage consuming nothing and a death away from understanding that we can stare through the rain streaks of the dirty dormer windows and still be close enough to feel that nothing breaks without a wake of victims in a few days, father will hose out the core and leave the shell dripping sweet like a candy skull suspended from a vendor's cart the day after el Dia de los Muertos then dry, a child's papier-mâché creation, symbol of a loss not yet experienced but already named workers swell with wood and plant fiber, the queen guides the fat and the nest reforms deep and high in a maple tree, nature always absorbing man's leaks it's the action of living, a blaze wilting the marigolds and through it we forget, forget to scratch at the grave mound, free the passage of new air to the past and dead and allow for the skeletal teachings that burst mute from our future
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Thomas C. Dunn is a Los Angeles based writer. His screenwriting work has received worldwide film distribution and festival inclusion (Sitges, Austin, Cairo, Brussels, etc.) As a playwright, he is the winner of Samuel French’s prestigious Short Play Festival, and his work has been published in Samuel French’s OOB Festival Plays, Exceptional Monologues 2, and Collective: 10 Play Anthologyamong others. His plays have been presented in over thirty theaters nationally and internationally and have been featured in numerous festivals.
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