Tiny Bubbles

Kathryn Jones

October 22, 2020

0 Tiny bubbles float on paper,

0 color the ovals black,

0 fill in their emptiness, 

0 give them purpose, 

0 bind them to the page, 

0 translate thought into action, 

0 find a voice, point the way, 

0 transfer power with the tip of a pen. 

0 Tiny bubbles float in a machine,

0 gobble, digest them, spit them out,

0 transform them into numbers,

0 convert them to symbols, plus and minus, 

0 count the rows, set the dials, 

0 turn up the volume, 

0 turn down the noise, 

0 change the course with a calculation. 

0 Tiny bubbles float in the air, 

0 release them with the balloons,

0 will them to wander, 

0 cast them into the jet stream, 

0 drift into the collective dream, 

0 intercept the energy, 

0 ride the wave, let the foam blow, 

0 seize the moment, 

0 declare victory with a single vote.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.