I live in an old film. My sight tears and glitches sometimes, the curves of my form wound in a vhs tape. If you play me back in a time machine, you’ll see rain flying up from the ground – sapphires taking petrichor and tiny fossils of light with them. The producer of this film is smoking by the turnpike. The director melts water and keeps an old ledger book lined with my hair of every time I don’t show up to live.
Tag: writer
Glittering Desert of Diamonds Ruled By The Worst of Us
Seas of silty green glitter carry life like a gloat to the unexamined shores of the Present – a glittering desert of diamonds ruled by the worst of us wearing designer bags. The new life will sprout transparent like ghosts, but immovable like a disapproving father. It will reflect life, envy, wealth, inexperience. New money aesthetic laid like a costume over a third world spiritual plane of poverty. We can all dance the Charleston and drink our grandmother’s wine, but our prayers bounce among our children like deflated balloons and the rent has come due on our bodies and we have nothing but glitter and smoke.
Semi Precious Revolvers
The rainbow of my shape shifts between sunshines and valleys in this cosmic horror of suburbia. Turquoise and emerald chains tether me to reality. I am a landscape of soft legacy, of marble layered in fleece layered in velvet layered in silk. Leaves fall all autumn and the royal blue of my cold nails. Music here tilts radically left and downward at 30 degrees. Least believable turtles I’d ever seen, I answered when the radicals asked for my vote with their shining semi precious revolvers. Sound initiated me into the rolling sea of the dead crashing on the mauve shores of regret.
Pureed Future Tense
Ceramic cerulean blood scrapes through the veins of the aging skin of my face. My expression could strip the veneer off the 21st century. My breath is vaporized blood glistening like rubies. The violins playing in the cemetery smell like rotten verbs and pureed future tense. I pretend I am not a tangerine. No one believes me. In the violet, violent hallways of death, my silhouette bearing another like a casket.
Ekphrastik Poem – Identity’s 1st Painting
Sooty clouds leak a fine dust that turns into sliding beds of black silt along the murmuring rivers of my mind. Rowing in one river is my husband, setting sail along the shores of my body, stopping in the inlets and the dive bars that are my eyes. In the next river, a poem sunbathes with a rubber ducky, drinking cough syrup. I always have loved the flavor of cough syrup and the slick scent of dry erase markers. On another riverbank, little Lisa penning novels in gingham dresses. The novels are in gingham. Lisa is in a shroud of loss. My memories ride rough shod over the rough volcanic landscape of my consciousness, periodically plummeting to their deaths in unseen lava tubes.
Sewing Buttons on Sunshine
I’ve got to sew buttons onto the sunshine. It’s a lot like trying to define myself in the language of flowers. The roses are red from pilfering the blood from my veins. A red umbrella taps into my wrist and the rain is as rubies glittering in the uncooperative sunlight. Feel the burn. Not communism. Asphalt. All of my childhood days not running barefoot have caught up to me, and I must pay for this particular batch of sin all at once. Lay off the iron. Bring on the buttons.
Clear Concealer
I wear an identity of glass like it was some sort of designer bag. All my ideas splatter like paint balls against the fluorescent spaces of my spiced up brain. The light lingers lovingly over my porcelain, ghostly skin. I match whatever environment I need to camouflage in by being transparent and thereby concealing the truest, bluest parts of me. In truth I hate it, but everyone tells me glass will be rare and valuable soon, so I better keep the cracking coat of clear concealer.
Short Horror – Mandy
Meghan drags her worn body down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom again. Another night of no sleep and post partum psychosis has led to her being able to see and hear the demons that lived in the walls. The new baby remained back in the nursery, somehow sleeping through his sister’s screaming. Her husband was sleeping through it all, as usual. Still, he had to get up early for work, so he needed the sleep, and she tried not to be angry. But night after night of her daughter’s meltdowns had her on a knife’s edge.
“
Mandy! It’s time to sleep! Please baby, I just need one night of sleep.”
Mandy continued screaming. Meghan wondered if it was another nightmare.
“Eeeeeeeeeee” her daughter screamed louder.
Something snapped. It completely broke. Not a toy or the lego Meghan was stepping on. Meghan’s sanity. She grabbed her daughter by the shoulders and shook her vehemently.
“Stop screaming!” she begged, screaming herself.
And she did. Mandy stopped screaming. Her head lolled sideways and she fell silent. Instantly, Meghan came to and realized what she’d done. She held her daughter to her chest, willing her to wake up. But she didn’t. Meghan remembered her old lifeguard training and checked her daughter’s pulse. It was ebbing.
“Baby, please, come back,” she sobbed. And with one last breath her daughter was gone. Meghan collapsed into a puddle. She killed her daughter. Her little girl was gone, and she did it. Gently she laid her daughter down on the bed. She ran for her husband and her phone. They needed to call emergency services. She needed help. She’d go to prison and never see her husband or either child again. She thought of the gun in her husband’s desk. She would use it on herself before the cops arrived.
Sobbing incoherently, she dragged her half asleep husband down the hall, bleary eyed and trying to figure out what was wrong.
“Hi Mommy!” They entered their daughter’s bedroom, and she was playing with dolls in her bed. Meghan froze, shocked, overwhelmed, grateful. But Mandy’s heart had stopped!
“Baby you’re ok!” Meghan ran to her little girl’s side.
“Yes Mama!”
“What’s going on Meghan? Why are you crying? And why did you wake me up? You know I have to get up at 4.” Her husband, tripping over his tiredness, asked and kissed his wife’s forehead. “I’m going back to bed. Mandy, it’s time to sleep. Listen to your mother.”
He stumbled down the hall and the master bedroom door closed. Meghan turned once more to her daughter.
Her breath caught. Her daughter’s eyes were slits, like a snake’s, and the normally blue eyes looked somehow green.
“Mandy?”
“I’m not Mandy,” she chirped, chipper. “You killed her. I’m your new daughter. And I don’t need to tell anyone what you did. If you don’t tell anyone I’m not her.” The eyes glowed, then the slits widened and the color went back to blue. Meghan fell backward. Her diaphragm froze.
“I’ll be the best daughter you ever had. I won’t cry or have nightmares or talk back. You just have to give me what I want.”
“Who are you? What do you want?” Meghan sobbed. Her daughter, her precious girl…gone..and this thing had her body.
“I think you know who, or at least what, I am. As for what I want, a body and a background. That’s all I need. A vessel to act in the world.”
“And if I go get my husband right now and tell him you aren’t Mandy?”
“Well, either he’ll think you’re crazy and have you locked up, or he’ll believe it and I’ll leave and you’ll be left with a dead daughter and some splaining to do.”
Meghan crab walked backward away from the bed and struggled to her feet.
“What will it be?” her daughter’s sweet voice asked. The crushing, agonizing weight of what she’d done split her open and she wept bitterly.
Her daughter, the husk of her, came over and hugged her waist.
“There there Mommy. You better stop crying and go back to bed. You can’t have anyone thinking you’re mourning or something. Neither of us want people asking questions. Sweet dreams Mommy.”
Meghan stepped backward from the shell of her former child and crept back to her bed, weeping silently.
Liquid Rainbows
Patron saint of leprosy and lepidoptera, please pray for me. Your prayers are perfumed prettiness in the heavenly atelier of our most brilliant Lord and Savor. Who made the colors that coat our lives? Who inscribed code into our flesh and blood? None but Him, His hands soaked in liquid rainbows. My skin is getting old. My face is going viral. My face is a virus, a label I wear to hide my soul shivering in her thin blue shift, nipples cutting against the cold like diamonds. Faces are a contoured means to a flattened end in the catalog of human memory.
Woolen Fortress of January
In the woolen fortress of January, gunmetal skies and home chilled on the rocks, bathed by the sea. I was born to granite and snow. The birch trees lining the lanes of my memories have a thousand eyes peering out of them. All of them look into me, red eyed windows to the abyss staring at my soul and counting the wrinkles. January is an old, brittle friend whose joints croak in chorus with mine along the craggy coast. Though January leaves me every year, I can never seem to disentangle myself from his cold, lingering fingers.
Miniature Moon 