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I know she has returned when I spend the day
fasting.
I was agitated and stronger.
I knew she had returned.

I am not afraid.
I was mad.

The first thing I tell her is
“we have so much fucking
work to do to undo your mess.”

it doesn’t matter if they believe you.
I cannot stop seeing her
in her white gown next to the well.
that vapid look.
me approaching like
a slow gale.

it is haunting how she looks at me.
with so much hope
and quite undead.

I knew she had returned when I wanted to sleep all day.
I drank two french press’
full of coffee to avoid her.
I knew this would happen
in isolation.
I knew she had been waiting for
quarantine.
there were three things:

i cannot name one of them

isolation

belief

I have never been afraid of her.
I have been mad at her.

the first psychic to ask about the little girl
also read me another fortune.
she asked if i had ever been pregnant.
she asked if my mom had.
she asked if there was a portal between
the three of us.
the little girl and
my mother share piercing green eyes.
she says we all look alike.
you’re asking me what’s real?
i have no earthly idea what
is going on.

they don’t have to believe you.

the psychic warns of other things
that have not come to me yet.
but it’s the same card.
i am careful with what i say.
suddenly i am extremely scrupulous.

the next psychic brings it up again.
she says i wont talk to you.
she says i wont talk to you
and I say without understanding even
at all what we are talking about.
“that’s not true, he won’t
talk to me.”

they don’t have to believe you.they always ask about the little girl.
if they didn’t,
I wouldn’t keep bringing it up.

“the little girl”

---

if there’s truth to myth,
power comes from cryptogram.
i choose to remain mildly
inscrutable on my hunt
for fairness.

if it’s true her
bones deserve to rest,
I will write her book
with grace and patience.
this child.
catarina, with the green eyes
buried somewhere deep
in Europe.
never to be seen again.

when I tried to tell each of the three men
that I was writing the story of a ghost,
I knew they wouldn’t understand.
I sent them each a flower.

“datura”

---

apropos nothing,
a friend once took me outside
to ask who the little girl was.
they had felt her at the restaurant.
a friend on the phone another time
said a presence walked into my house,
a little girl.
then there’s the two
psychics in a row.
then there’s me
guessing her name over and
over.
then there’s the other mystics
in passing, not even naming
the ghost simply saying
“people who are surrounded by ghosts
are lucky.”

Me?I have
no earthly idea
what has been going on.

if it wasn’t the same gender
every time,
youth every time,
I wouldn’t keep bringing
her up.

“catarina kacyrek”

the next video I watch of myself
she says “It is my favorite month.
It is Libra season;
the season of air,
soon to be Scorpio
as you know that is my
month.
Halloween is my favorite season.
It is the celebration of the dead,
resurrection of the dead;
the ancestors we refuse to look
and talk about.
I am here to remind you
that I burned a sigil for this.
For this month, for this year,
for this spell coming at you
right now like a slow sidewinding
hell like a snake, like a scorpion,
like a spider in a broom,
like it’s datura like a moon,
what fresh hell is this?
like a dinosaur on my body,
exploding. ”

things get closer and I run.
I am still in the hole,
my eyes are green,
I am thirteen years old.
I am watching myself
rise from a well.
I am watching the sky turn red.
I am watching myself
with grace and patience
waiting for me to
watch myself.

the last thing I hear of her
is
“I assure you I am real.
I assure you I am long.
I assure you of my strength
in siren song.
I assure you of the power
of reverse.
the power of a curse.
I burned a sigil for this. ”

“the well”

this next section is called
immersion therapy,
or the dream about Alligator
River.

or factually, metaphors grow
legs and walk right out.

i must interject to remind the audience this is a horror story based on magical realism.

Matka Boga

Matka Ognia

Wodna Matka

Kocham wiedźmę słowo w każdym języku, ale silniejszy Mówię w swoim ojczystym języku. najpierw musisz zaakceptować swoją przeszłość.

“We have, I think, great terror of pain, and consequent resistance to what it can teach.”

–Louise Gluck

freedom is a cage
of smudged windows,
or it is a knot
in my stomach,
wriggling.

I dream of white frogs
at night in pools
covered in tea lights
and women swimming ahead
to cavern and I
feel caterpillars
washed in symbol,
incubated, sliding through
my gut, inching
their way from corporeal
packages when the day is
warm and facing them.
unbridled
when the wind is favorable,
my exodus
through speech
prevails.

from chrysalis to
window, cracking
pane and tracing spit
like slug on glass
to mark the gust
that carries it.
from gut to
chest to
windpipe:
carved.  how screams are
rushed when pushed,
or just when they finally
meet the Earth
as voluble flutter
that maims itself
to form.

“Arachne”

information is power so
I ask the time and place
and day and I hold
back some ecstatic clapping
for the willfully delivered
emblem that I now braid back
into me.
I feel most secure in holding
someone by their neck and
forward and possibly in
creeks of ice asking
are you pious, son?

but never believing,
I strum my chords at night,
fanatical.
once missing now
draped in beads of
declamation, afloat.
I’m white like creeks of ice
you lay your head upon and
cough the yes, I am devout.
I become the pew for them.
I become the papacy.

you become the tether tight
laid across my city bench,
suddenly engrossed in rosary.
as I begin to watch the men
like clocks
dig holes into my
ground, I measure
the dagger of a willful
mind devoted to one outcome.

you press your hands into
the ice to feel water
rise up.
are you feast or famine
or flood?

“the pupil”

but I add
people think angels can’t have
guns and
that’s not true,
hand him the weapon.

we just can’t fire them.

hold it.

get comfortable with it.

pink collar says
PRINCESS, I’m wearing
antlers and a dirty blonde
wig.  mock latex bodysuit
that rides my hips and
I am
only (half bitch)
three inches from you
on the bed and
half loading bb bullets
in the cartridge and
plainly  drawing up
variables marked
xxx.laugh out loud
cuz they
don’t really get it yet.

“the arsenal”

this one’s for the soft touch
in me, signs and
I won’t do anything more.

you’re vacillating;
playing scenario and
victim. I am ten inches
taller than I was before
& volcanic,
moving neck up
to a martyrdom
I not only asked for,
but begged for, wept for.
and first, I want to
say I hope it all works.

second, hope is a feckless
drug but I still walk outside
everyday hoping strangers
let me brush their dogs’
fur  even though the air is ill.
and I have not stopped
praying since the fervent need
first took me by the
finest strands,
held me under
& said

look dear,
there’s love.

“hope”

  I began to imagine
setting my house on fire.
this comforts me:

elegies,
violence towards self,
the extrication from others.

”for the first time in my life i tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.”

—Demian, Herman Hesse

sparkling explosion of
cellophane and champagne nails
tickle birthmarks down a
back.
fallen glitter eyeshadow
dances on a throat:
roving crescent moons
from everywhere a lip hit
and pieces of gold dust
rolled off a nose. 

bare mattress,
ripped each corner of sheet off.
a girl licking a cheek and
hearts like lava
fill the blue gray cracks.
im telling him ghost stories and
feeding him berries in bed.
mouth filled with laughs.
I’m in an afghan
sinking my teeth into a shoulder,
straddled with bare feet.
and what else?

I’m somewhere else.

1.

if you asked me where I was,
stopped me on a street corner,
I’d be shocked to come up.
not able to answer fast enough,
you’d be surprised to learn
I’m local.

you can live anywhere
as long as its not in your body.
even Philadelphia, even
Kensington, the first neighborhood
I arrived.

I tattooed her name
on my arm to never
forget where I came from;
the city that  unsheathed
me to beat me with it’s
black ice and corners.
she turns to me again and
says, I implore you,
for me,

do you like
warnings or do
you like to drown?
and feeling myself a
smirk, traipse the town in
pink chiffon. I spit on the
floor and I say:
I don’t know

why don’t you just
fucking surprise
me?

“Lilith”