How to Discern Red

Allen Hope

In the line of approaching boxcars, a cursive scrawl, handwriting done upright, like some pyromaniacal paint-can artist exploded in a rush of color. But this is not indiscriminate art. It suggests form, an appreciation for the outré, avant-garde motif in font 36.3272. No drip in this frame, just rust, and shopping-cart-pushing figures bending to retrieve Budweiser cans - their uncloaked faces a signature of ultra-violet contamination. Twilight sky autographs this graffiti in motion, this nebulae dream, this fleeting footnote in the capillary of our indifference.