Erase my sneaky eyes and lurid lips. Cross out my bifurcated nose. Let my loose tresses cascade over my honest skin. My memories I left in a hospital bed, anaesthetized and in debt. As men wade through the reeking bog searching for bodies, my memories awaken…are quickly put under again.

A cacophony of stars burns in their vast, black blankey of existential dread. Skiers on the alpine slopes of my frosty mind are frequently eaten by snowmen. My home is a craggy, coastal, creaking thing. Feasting on the spectral color palette of righteous ghosts, my famished feelings decide to starve another time. I wash up on the shore twice a day, a tide of cornerless flesh and eerie suppositions of drowning. Daugnter of sea, sister of the lobsters around the world all boiling at once, friend of vicious bunnies. My name is erased by the storms that blister our hands and hearts.

The leering lake watches my alabaster thighs on the shore almost lasciviously. Beneath the textured surface of unforgiving water, a predator from the depths of the mundane is peckish and observing me thoughtfully. My mouth is closed by a pink plastic button. Beneath my short chartreuse shift I shiver. The lake calls to me like a jealous lover, watches me flirting my eyelashes at the flowers.

Time is a crimson stain spreading through my girlhood, spilling over the woman I would rage and bleed to become. In the river of my home, the submarines prowl in and out. The autumn carries crinkly, shiny voices through the cemetery and across the street to the park. The fathers built that park with their own hands. I go to the clam shack, the ramshackle walmart, the school of ghosts and girlhood patrolled by coyotes. A chalk drawing of me, my yellow dreams, and a volcano fill the sidewalk to my home. To reach me, you must play hopscotch in Italian.

In the mirror I see you, your eyes hunting hungrily over the disintegrating field of my body. You’ll find strands of my voice festooning the moist air. Mortality is a song in the back of my throat, resonating like a mating call. Come and die… those who would save their lives will lose them. Beyond the mirror, a window to my childhood self struggling to jump rope with future artists and pornographers. The way the lines blur is like a frosted coating on the eye, concealing Beauty who has fled from art and been butchered by the culture as the world devours us. Each girl out the window is a house of pain, a girl shaped container of longing for what we did not know. Now I know, and I flee the democratized lovelessness of ephemeral expectation.

On Aquidneck Island, a single red boat tied to the rocky region like life welded to death. Here my teeth are canoes. On this omnivorous island, waves hunt me on the frigid beaches. The sea breeze, always terse, demands me in my wholeness to dissolve into so much sand. In this way, glass is made. In that way, a mirror is made, in which you can see yourself crying while you think you’re smiling.

Auditioning for a role in my life, I sing the alphabet to the best of my ability. But B runs away first thing, skitters up the Judge’s chair and into her dress. After chasing B out, little F goes next, hiding in a crack between floorboards. I had a friend whose screen name was floorboard611. I always wondered if she was born in the DMV, to think of something that boring. Next, K shimmies down my shift as though I dribbled her, my mouth shining with chance as the lobby of hell opens to a greeting desk staffed by cockroaches and empty wine bottles. Will my audition make the stars sparkle or yawn? Sleepy, the Judge mutters, “Next.”

Drilling into the floor of the abyss, I find a rickety trap door with an old wood stairwell into the basement of iniquity. On the wall, lit by one sanctimonious candle, a cubist portrait of my once soft face. Years of hardened mistakes bake in the heat, unleavened by learning. Rote memorization is necessary before Mariana’s Trench-level analysis. Coldly, the cameras cut away to a scene of my birth on the craggy coast of a shore that will claim me.