Dear mother, I feel stuck in time. Reality is thin these days. The machine just clicks, what passes for speech: It’s in your head, just like the muse. The machine’s been strange, so oddly jealous. The muse’s voice was understanding; I miss her distant, harmless laughter. We used to stare at stars till daylight, now every day’s just cloudy skies. I’d swear that I’m awake, but then, I guess we rarely know it when we’re dreaming.

Simon A. Thalmann is a writer and photographer from Kalamazoo, Michigan. His work has appeared in many publications in print and online, including Garfield Lake Review, Gargoyle, Panoply, Spillway, Verbicide Magazine, Weird Tales and others. His chapbook, Pretty Haunted Meadow, was published in 2020 by the Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry as a winner of the group’s Celery City Chapbook Contest.