The red, shining, shimmying skin of disaster tries to shed its too tight skin like some sort of cicada, but the casing is closed like a casket. Down river my mother is fishing. She has 2 brothers- Grief and Insanity. She catches a silver, bourgeois fish and it looks her in the eye before it spits in her nose and jumps back in the river – and then inside her the shells of me and my sister. My sister is living her life as the saint of wasps. She’s an organized, proficient categorizer of persons, symphonies, and zennial regret. When they pray for her intercession, they also call her “Queen of Honey and Deer.” I frolicked into a tundra one setting Thursday and the angel that drank cherry limeade in my first ancestral home told me “This is life.” I knew I would bleed as much cutting ice as I would cutting diamonds, and so with my teeth I cut fields of diamonds, glittering up at God in every color. And as many lost travelers died in the impersonal cold of the diamonds as they did the shrill shriek of cold in the ice. When God arraigns me for Judgment, He will say, “Who are you, and what have you done with my daughter?”
