To Walk to the Edge

In the surround sound cult of Tuesday, be a heretic. The jellyfish judge me, their electric colors reproachfully pulsing, dreaming in a sea that offers to claim me when I can no longer haul my own blood back from the shore to the home that drinks it. Cover me in stamps. Discover me under black light grinding against amoebas. You aren’t sending me anywhere. Currents take me. Currents spell my name in blue.

Pain

Time acquired dilapidated properties at the edge of my publicized lake in the inner folds of my mind. This life is a performance for the entertainment of angels who do not laugh. Their weeping kisses the lilypads with dew. Frogs sing and philosophize. Time vacations here to taunt my memories and fragile wishes. Life must be grasped by the sharp end and plunged into matter like glass shards to harvest a wine so bittersweet with lilac pain that I can’t bear the rustic smell of music.

Beaming into The Future

I am a white daisy beaming into the future. Roses gather at the hem of my life, baby’s breath at the cross stitched hymns. God, please pick me among the petunias in their pageantry best. My visions have tea together. My secrets tell me nothing. But somewhere on the edges of my  name, a scythe scratches the notes to a new psalm in petaled flesh.

Despair

I wander into night like a stain into a wedding dress, not seeing the disaster I am for the black velvet around me. Hairy voices of monsters dissecting my name echo against the fur lined dark. Escapism is a red and blue striped slide from the playground of my private wallowing well down to the depths of whatever a red light district calls despair. I walk the greedy streets in stilettos, my footsteps Morse code for sadness along the listless lane.

Micro Fiction – My Grandma’s Trailer

I walk down the rickety lane to Grandma’s trailer, the Taj Mahal as we called it, and knocked on the peeling yellow door. It was a single wide, and the siding was coming off from a recent hurricane. The North Carolina humidity shimmered, speckled with mosquitoes. Then grandma opened, her expansive voice welcoming me into the marble foyer. As she closed the door behind me, I greeted the koi in her fountain.

“What brings you over, Cupcake?” she asked.

“I need to borrow a little TNT for my mom.”

“Ok honey. It seems like every day it’s something, which would be fine but she never returns anything. She still has my cyanide shaker and my mentrual map.”

Grandma takes off, surprisingly spry for a hip recipient, down the corridor on the left. She whisks past the library and the music room, the terrarium room and the aquarium room. She comes back with a carefully wrapped parcel and hands it to me gingerly.

“Be careful. Remind your mother Sunday night is dinner with Father Rohrer and the Zeitgeist of the 80s.”

 

Stars Like Tattoos

Your parsimonious attitude neglects the vitality of the sunset sky bleeding all over us, the petrichor scented rainbow above leaking down on us, an infectious fluid of madness. The flag of the granite country that bore me waves in the breeze as it unfurls, rubbing stars like tattoos on the blueing sky.

Cheese, Salt, Audacity

The ghosts of sunset are tubular and fantastical. The last lingering color on the backporch of my vaporized brain is defrauded pink. Teal waves of entropy ride over me like the 4 horsemen of a very soothing apocalypse. In my letter to you, I described my life as “cheese, well grated.” I described my personality as “salted.” And you wrote back laughter and guesstimates on the waiting time in God’s pharmacy. Harvest hums, gaining ground on us. The sickle is at my back, my mind far away salting fields of lavender. Cut me low. Cut me clean. I can not bear the aggravating taste of my own audacity anymore.

Lost

Churlish water churns in my private ocean of antipathy. Sunlight maneuvers on the surface of the slate sea, polishing it. From here will come my death, small and terrifying. Somewhere on memory lane, I am riding my unicorn bike with the pink glittery seat. Somewhere, I am eating lemon clover. Somewhere, I am drunk in a dorm room writing poetry my future self will lose, like I’ve lost my name.



My Seafaring Love

Elizabethan frost coats my cold coated dreams. My husband’s name means rocky place, but it also means steadfast. He’s steadfast in rocky places like the craggy shores of my thalassophobic mind. Mosasaurs prowl the coast of my psyche, hunting stray thoughts as they sail desperately to the blue safety of open synaptic water. My husband is a man of the sea, the tentacles of his love entering my royal chambers like an octopus. He enchants me with his intelligence, his ability to open jars. The sea breeze he carries with him that tousles his hair when we sit in the doldrums of life, currents snubbing us as we drink ink on the beach.

Prayer of a Sinner

My celestial heritage makes my poor connection with my fellow man somewhat more palatable. Lord, save me from my private sins. The ones only You know about. In an alluvial dream of glittering scales and madness, my backstroke will not be enough to get to the haughty shore. My circumstances are humble, my virtues stoned on my mother’s lawn and unsure how to shame themselves next. Please throw me your love soaked lifeline of blood and grace, pull me to a tranquil rest I have not earned. In Jesus’ Name I pray, Amen.