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.