I walk out to the white edge of the wedge of winter. Around me, silver glitter, and accusations from the cold. That in shutting my windows tight to him I let comfort grow in my soul like a tumor. The beasts of burden are now relaxing at whichever lake your family did or didn’t go to in the summers.  My soul sips lemonade at the table she has covered in dried baby’s breath. But I stand bereft at the edge of winter, calling his name beyond the white boundary into a summer I cannot see, but I can hear its electric hum.

I sold my lymph nodes to Age, who intends to smoke my immune system on the grill and give it a cajun rub. Disease is a dark room developer, and his images are always of Death pushing a lawn mower across the back plains of my iridescent mind. Age is an old friend (literally). He is not as wise as you would think. Folly has a shocking shelf life. But I smell my life float away on the Kansas wind, whistling as it does toward the hostile Rockies.

Fresh, minty ghosts curl around me block out the scent of singed sinners. In the diaphanous daylight, they are invisible like indifference. But in the cool colored twilight of my youth,
I see their visages, their eyes gaping holes and their mouths smiles taped on. I, too, am a scrapbooker in the government waiting rooms of life. Cut out of my purple womb, a poem so sublime my guardian angel won’t read it without his shades on.  I stick a ghost on my tongue. He sizzles and evaporates, leaving that wonderful cold scent of freshness. Behind me, the warm aroma of Regret baking my blue birthday cake.

Jealous molecules cling on to their exes. The amorphous film of water over my skin makes me shine. Fanged mermaids patrol the drooling shoreline. I, too, am dangerous, and I do not budge. Their eyes glow. My hair is autonomous, and flows toward one’s neck, strangling her. Men are a myth here. In my dreams last night I stood at the edge of a haunted wilderness I’ve only ever seen in my slumber. The abandoned house slick with demonic intent was across the marshy field. For the first time, I did not cross the field into the ramshackle shack. This place follows me. And when you feel the essence of evil breathing behind you, watching and enjoying your fear, you fear nothing after that. Pink and poisonous, I taunt the remaining mermaids into surrender.

I tattoo my man’s name on the stiff breeze, and let it tousle the chimes I call my hair. The radical politics of spanx. The gross speeches of spectacular leeches. My man once brought me chocolate along the sylph like river, and my eyes glowed like a cloudless blue sky when he fed them to me gently, enticing me to remove my shackles of shame. His name is on the wind and travels parallel to the sea, daring storms to look at me. Sapphire encrusted coasts look jealously at the warm lines of my publicized body.

Calamity rides a yellow bicycle down a facsimile of a country road. Along the dusty edges, market stands offering the juiciest news and freshest betrayals. My house is at the end of the road. The windows glow blue like dead computers, and inside my ghosts are serving me brunch in their red checkered aprons. I didn’t invite Calamity. Only the stupid do. But she will come anyways, flinging the carnations in her bicycle basket into my outstretched hands, demanding to know where the bathroom is.

Mem    ory has a whole hole in it, made as it is like fishnets from the corner store. My cornucopia of vanilla flavored dreams are cataloged by neurons who are all drinking Everclear on the job. My menstruation is meant as an affront to the cold. Memory is embroidering “welcome home” on doileys they pass out to the homeless on President’s Day. If my name doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because your inspiration is flowing backwards. Memory is flimsy and frail. I once swallowed scissors, and that was the end of my life’s record. Now, the dark halls of my brain are mostly silent, except for the wind whistling through my eyes.

Ambition disguised as snow coats the city suits in a light dusting. Christmas in the city…or the collection of bridges and turnpikes we call home with the vague flavor of discomfort in our mouths.  Christmas laced with martyrs’ tears, glowing as icicles outside shop windows.  The cold here wears a roledex and diamonds. As the time gently but surely crumbles away like Christmas cookies, I yearn to be even half as permanent as the flakes on my lover’s silver hair as he builds another world for me.