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?”

Bright with bumblebees, the meadow frolicks in the sentimental sun. A child with a magnifying glass haunts the ants and butterflies. When I see a giant Monarch come up behind him with a giant one, I don’t tell the kid until he’s starting to singe a little. I side with the hexagonal bees in all things, from dancing to dissing. If the bees don’t like you, neither do I. I was born a poppy in a field of pastel dreams. 

Slatternly clouds disrobe the blue sky, peeling away for storms in another dimension of cool correlations. My causation is staring at me, unblinking. The sky is exactly what I mean when I say I was blue, flying my kite down Main Street and making promises to tree tops. I hear a wind summoning me to the brink of winter, the culmination of the cold leaking in the edges of unsealed autumn.

Sour glowing integers run away from me like sunlight. Sophisticated testimony of a holographic truth echoes through the passages of Culture, who is wearing cheap leggings and an oversized sweatshirt. The math here is simple. Take a woman and divide her by herself and watch angst spill out as the remainder.

Crisp bubbles crinkle as they pop open on my sharp personality. I have a sticker collection bigger than you. The rowboat that seemed so superfluous is becoming essential as the river rises from my eyes. I need to row to a land of roses and pinwheels, where the refining fire of delirious faith is as sweet as honey from charitable bees. The fine print in life’s lease is that you are responsible for maintenance of the machine.

Unrelenting, unrepenting dismay trickles through culture like tree sugar through a fungal network. My ego glows in the dark. Under the blacklight, sin splattered everywhere. I used to dance when I had feet. Now I float with the other ghosts of dances past, my spirit sagging whenever the music stops. In the trees, revolution. From the women’s arms tangling children like branches, the infestation of revolutionary thought. The dayglo atrocities of banal government are a sign pointing to the cemetery. Here, the piñatas are people. Bust open a politician and watch the graft pour out, sugary and deadly. Democracy tends her Fire by the river and knows her true daughters by name.