Palm Latitudes, novel by Kate Braverman

“My life was an arc between darkness and irradiated clarity, an unpredictable and brutal journey. I felt as if I were a stranger to this earth. No, not merely this collection of angles, streets and alleys named Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles. I was estranged not from a particular season or region, a climate or a barrio, but from the planet itself. I stood motionless on my front lawn, humbled by sun, wind or fog, a passing sparrow. I heard the sighs of trees in their inviolate dominion where the sky is pearl, glazed, a mesa of puffy clouds tracked by wild gulls that could if they chose, shriek your name and the hour and latitude of your birth. I thought all women lived like this, in a torment of concurrencies.”

KATE BRAVERMAN, Palm Latitudes

Painting: ”En Vakker Dag” (“A Beautiful Day”) by Isblahblah, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Palm Latitudes by Kate Braverman

“My life was an arc between darkness and irradiated clarity, an unpredictable and brutal journey. I felt as if I were a stranger to this earth. No, not merely this collection of angles, streets and alleys named Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles. I was estranged not from a particular season or region, a climate or a barrio, but from the planet itself. I stood motionless on my front lawn, humbled by sun, wind or fog, a passing sparrow. I heard the sighs of trees in their inviolate dominion where the sky is pearl, glazed, a mesa of puffy clouds tracked by wild gulls that could if they chose, shriek your name and the hour and latitude of your birth. I thought all women lived like this, in a torment of concurrencies.” KATE BRAVERMAN, Palm Latitudes

Painting: “En Vakker Dag” (“A Beautiful Day”) by Isblahblah, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Palm Latitudes by Kate Braverman

It is late afternoon. Soon the city will wear its night face, erased of myth and purpose. Night will strip it as if by scalpel. The central city will stand without pretense, deserted as if by a collective perception of contagion. Citadels will be revealed as they truly are, brick, dirt and mud dug from the earth and returned to rot under stars and banks of gray tin-scented clouds. In the cold dusk, the air will rattle with wind in branches and fronds, a form of music, subtle, vaguely metallic, like the sound of syncopated amulets. Dog will run in packs again. And night will fall with the weight and power to dull a world.

From Palm Latitudes by KATE BRAVERMAN