The Year in Review Through Prose Poetry

Popcorn Fireworks (Gears of War 3)

His glory days were on the gridiron, ground packed down, a mess of the small incisions cleats make when they impact with soft soil. The roar of the crowd: as thunderous and as loud as the earthquakes on Emergence day. Remember the stadium on that day, when the earth opened up and the underground things spewed forth, hate in their reptilian eyes, when the cheers and chants of the fans blended with the chaos outside of the arena?

It was only after the crowd died down and the deafening silence filled the space like an invisible gas, when the distant crack of tectonic plates clued them into the fact that, despite the performance of Cole Train on the field or the home team winning, something was wrong with the world of Sera. If terror can be inscribed in an image, if the hollowness of that feeling can find a place on the visual spectrum, it is found in the voiceless picture of a Thrashball stadium, the frozen fear on the sea of faces, the simultaneous dropping of beer cups and popcorn, the sudden flash of a thousand momentary golden fountains of beer splashing and the crackle of fireworks in the form of bursting white kernels.