Body as liminal space. My wet and squishy soul waiting in chambers of blood to ascend to permanence. I am waiting. I am Waiting with a capital W. My shell expands and my soul exhales, but still there is not enough room in here. Behind me always, a crimson demon hiding in my dust as I burst through emptiness.

I wedge sentences into paragraphs like door stops. What do I really want to say? I mean to say that frostbite is the only answer to a love that wanders far afield, and that terror is a terrific thing to keep in your backpocket. The cold settles onto the land like a squatter in a fever dream. Ghosts clamor at the edges, longing to steal the living for their games.

In the blue light of her motherly vision, I glow dim as an ember. And yet she blows her gentle breath on me until I spark. Suffering weighs a ton and smells of gangrene. From the innards of stars I come, foisted out onto a world prepared to devour me. Because of her my flame will grow whiter, hotter, and guide the contemporary pilgrims home.

Doubt has been my mortal enemy. Only one of us is actually mortal, and it isn’t me. In the pangs of horror or the sublime vestibule of bliss, there will be no room for doubt. My sister canoes up the Mississippi toward the cold, clean, clear. In the driver’s seat of my life, a three eyed monster with a palpable disdain for my happiness. I am certain tomorrow will rain diamonds, and Ambiguity will have his day in the lime light, finding his religion. Doubt trails me like Death, and even Death is annoyed with him and butts his head into walls like an unwanted kid brother. Death has no time for doubt.

In the gluttonous dark, stars carry on like they’re on a trashy talk show. Cool air painting everything black. I paint the world hot pink. Together, an erotic charge. Now he puts his hand, the paddle, his eternal boatness on my chest, and I restart like the old Windows 98 computer my parents owned before I knew deceit. I can’t yo-yo and philosophize at the same time. But I will tell you, as I Walk the Dog, that strange things prowl in the duplicitous dark. Desire, my fanged name, pain. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Glittery ghosts promenade in my hallways. One takes a lock of my hair “to remember your mortality by.” In the rage of my systematic ineptitude, a mountain range collapses from my heart into the greedy sea. My little box by the bay. My island of sugar miracles. I will love you always. My personal wolves hunt the horizon. They will bring the bones of twilight to me

My capacious curves captivate my hunter as he crests the dark, haunted with the howling of wolves. Somewhere a bad dream chases a man to the end of the Sidewalk. Another is caught in thorns and melancholy. But my man is here between my hips, marveling at the sweet, secret underside of my breasts and my generous thighs. He touches my fluffy core and a beam of blue light pierces my corneas, lighting the room like a computer lab. His body is rough, coarse, able and willing to do the math that frightens me. Eventually the sun will rise for the last time.