A neighbor once caught me in someone else’s driveway staring at the license plates on my block.  I was five years old.  We lived in a court and I was allowed to play in the court by myself so long as I didn’t wander off too far which I did often but I had grown used to crouching. Had grown used to hopping fences and often could slip in and out to Lea’s house undetected. I don’t know the circumstances of why I was outside but I do remember it was overcast. I do remember I had a light jacket on, probably a shade of pink. I am sure my hair was uncombed. I am sure my bangs felt too long. I am sure that I was trying to rid myself of this hindrance even so young, tossing it away with my hand constantly or tying it back in a ponytail, patting the back of my head when it was sopping from the heat and wishing I could peel it off. When it was cooler, I left it alone. Left it down and I am sure I was wearing pink corduroy pants with brown spots in the center of the knees. They were permanent. I was sure I had been tucking my chin to my neck and twisting the pine needle with both hands and crouching, my knees strong then. My white sneakers scuffed. The tips of my shoelaces drawn brown with mud and I am sure I didn’t hear her approach me from behind. I am sure she heard me muttering. 

I had been going up the driveway of each neighbor’s house and sitting behind the cars, in front of the license plate. She had seen me from her window.  I was looking closely at the license plate, that is all she could see. I was looking at each piece of information. VA for state tags. To be clear it was VA, like VAH. Like the sound it made. Vah. I would say it aloud. Vah, she must have heard me. The letters in front of the numbers. Some would be doubled. Some in doubles. That felt special, like they were chosen to be doubles. Like some plates required scrutiny. This one had a green tag in the top left corner which was usual but also did not have repeating numbers. XGH-2879. It would have sounded better, I am saying out loud, XGH-2873 when I hear her.

“Honey?”

the first card I pull is the Magician.
say nothing about it.
my couch is stained from cat vomit
and chocolate ice cream
but smells
like alcohol-spritzed
fresh linen spray.
I am uncomfortable
at all times, at all
hours of every day
and tonight is no exception.

I am trying not to look in
the mirror behind you and
instead focus on the red wine
in the glass,
the bottle on altar, not comment
on eye color, guess placements without
ado, turning over cards to let you
know.

I try to explain to someone one day
what I am seeing in the mirror.
no one is there, I say this first
to myself on a walk
around, pass a little girl in pink dress.
fuck.
a haze, like a fog surrounding my body
begins to build and my voice,
almost like it’s been previously
recorded and then played back,
comes through me and I have to
repeat what she says.
but sometimes the track is off
so I am two seconds ahead of myself
and it’s hard to watch
the way the mouth doesn’t
fit the soundtrack
wait, stop,

back up, I’m muttering I think.
too complex.

stop myself when her brother looks.
no, don’t tell him that.

Australia looks better than Alaska,
that’s all I tell him.
we have some wands between us.
that’s all.
keep it to myself:
predicting
deaths of
others
and also
practicing
hugging people
when they walk
into the room.

“the magician, abridged”

I was five and soft and supple and ingenue and so much deeper than I am now. She said what are you doing? from behind me which scared me. I was tiny and crouched there with my most favorite one to hold; the withered needle. I am sure she heard me talking to myself. 

 I said I’m trying to read the code.

“the magician, elongated”

I get nothing done.
they kind of smile,
don’t believe me,
this impenetrable
frenetic go-getter
who twirls on stage all day
but I honestly amounted
to nothing

I show them,
sweeping my hand over
an obscured history,
really erased but also
no real success
I laugh, undaunted
usually and also kinda
breezy. I like smiling
and they like watching it.
composition open
pointing to one sentence
I like watching time.

I’m obsessed with unproducing,
or burning a process as you
watch it unfurl. it’s like
setting the bottom of each trunk
on slow fire and then you
climb to the top of
a pine watching it
engulf you, eviscerate
whatever you were.

I am up by dawn, or close
to it,  thinking this is what
true love is doing
and I’ve done this before;
proving habit,
and the deep deep
null of feeling
that I possess daily
filled with  plotting and
idle time, idols and
a rumination around these
invidious encounters.
my ability to rectify.
something always in my hand and

wanting you to see it:
my nullness yet
overreaction, especially
when  courting  that must be
facade and always vexing,
watching me mold any emotion
into something better than the ice cold
well I am.
palms open with pleas.
that’s where people fall;

in the snow bank
in the bottom of the frozen
hole trying to help out
the little girl.
I think a lot,
I say softly.
we are two inches from the
other and I must admit,
I flutter when brushed.
and I like learning
words.
point to one
as he leans in,
elbow to my bare forearm.
flutter. 

what’s the meaning? he
says thumb pressed firmly
at the bottom of my buttox
right above my birthmark
til the second bruise sets in
so now it’s like a shadow ring
of one mouth and I’m
not sure if he means the definition
or how many marks he
has counted.

“duplicity”

1. Propitiation

 I find my face moving, giving notice to something: the phone on the table, the front door closed and my boots near it. on the floor and my palms are pressed there. I dropped the howlite. an effort to keep  still. then I am grabbing my headphones. I am usually interrupting myself. I am clutching the straw and the keys and the knob. knees crack and my wrists hurt too. the T-rex bend to the elbows so I can fiddle as I pace. I dropped the howlite for this. habits are insidious. they are the leftover thing to shake. they are made from ephemeral need becoming  the most used devices even though need is fleeting. one sip of water to sate a tongue.  one glass, a throat. a couple, dehydration but this is the distant oasis you’re after. this is the gauntlet. these tics: they just sit through anything and become big, fed, fat. the word habitual means regular or usual. I am flinging the front door open in hat and coat and headphones because the come up is hard but you have about ten minutes of a mostly innocuous adjustment before it gets harder. habits are familiar. they are the leftover thing.

I am on the sidewalk moving slower than time and leaning to one side. my back bends a little and I feel almost breezy, or fragile. if a wind came, I would have to be careful feeling that I would let it take me. my feet are not dragging. they are picking themselves up deliberately and making our way down the street but slower than time. a cool saunter and my mask is on so I can narrate out loud, openly what is happening. the first thing I say is:

“there is no joy in the pandemic.” 

I feel guilty saying this out loud, as if I am judging the person’s apartment that I am outside. I am looking up to the right at their walls not drawn to the cream plaster but the overcast sky and thinking. I am finding joy. “being out here,” I kind of wave my hands, “is miserable. I miss talking to people.” there is no joy in the pandemic. no one is happy right now. “there is no joy in the pandemic.” 

I am fuzzy and cannot speed up my walking. I have gone only, truly, around the block and I cannot imagine withstanding the gray, the row of red brick now, the owners and their dogs avoiding me. this is not happiness. I see three people and their dog walking towards me. I had intended to walk as far as I could. I pictured myself getting lost in a park and also shivering at the thought.. I have no provisions. “there is no comfort in the outside.” I am in front of a row of townhouses that look exactly the same

 I left a candle burning. 

and I had only been outside for ten minutes when the mushroom grabbed me,
like a mirror,
held me in her attention.
first, go back
then wait,
slow, slower than
habit,
paced.

watch the flame.

II.

She may often feel dominated. She has a good sense of organization and accepts her responsibilities. She achieves her objectives in spite of slow progress, with some hurdles to overcome. She is persevering and patient, very stable.

Observant, self-controlled, unforgiving, tough, methodical, a researcher, an investigator. Lots of courage, self-assurance, and inclines to keep her cool.

Possible issues: Making no concessions or compromises for fear of loss of control or respect. She might become a fanatic of a creed, a party, work, or a religion in rare cases.

I always start with the right, I am thinking as I enter the lake. It’s my stronger leg. It’s the way we are taught to sprint: propulsion from the muscle relied on most.  Careful and light today.
Here for endurance. Careful. Breathe. I watch my breath leave my mouth, chattering.  I put my arms out. It’s not just the cracking but the slipping I am worried about. It’s not just the falling but the cold. I suck in a breath
“Careful, princess!”
I can hear them laughing. The temperature hits me like a wall I am braced against. It has dropped ten degrees since we left this morning and three degrees since entering the dip of the lake. I can’t move but I have to and I don’t know how far they will actually make me walk. It’s sixteen miles across. Are they waiting for the first crack or do they really expect this? Are they waiting for me to turn around? Are they waiting for the truce?
“Truce,” I hold out my hand.
I know there will be no truce. I don’t even know why I say it except for my natural urge to acquiesce to anyone similar, but darker, to me. Call it harmony. Call it diplomacy but it’s not the same as fear. You do not engage with fire and fear it. You are grossly underestimating it while trying to manipulate it.
Camille grabbed it though.
“Truce,” she said.
Right before New Orleans.
“Truce?”
Liliana grabbed the stick in my hand demurely, sticking her tongue out, sort of biting it, then proceeded to break it in half. Head lolled back in a wild guffawing, you’d think she had broken a finger. Or wanted to. Like a banshee, my mother would say about her. I don’t like you hanging around with her. My sister and I eating our oats asking about the weather. What boots should I wear, mother. Whichever one kicks her hardest.
She has put the leaf out and she is whispering about our agreement. I am trying to get close enough to pinch her so she will stop talking about it in front of Kamelia but also keeping distance. Nothing contagious about sinister girls except how quickly their friends become them. That’s another thing my mother said. That girl is malevolent, Katarina. Why you bother with her?
As she bathed me, she discovered new bruises.
“Just climbing a lot,” I swatted her hand away. “The way girls do.”
Each scratch, each red mark, noted.
“Why doesn’t Kamelia have marks?”
“We don’t let her climb the trees.”
Though mothers sense things, the daughters bore from them cover them the same way they feel it. Call it kinship the psychic bond that develops between families. One truth detected, one lie to lob back. One bad feeling, one unctuous grin. One bath, five stories. My mother; my poor fucking mother.  How devastating the day of the hike must have been for her; disappearing without note and then waiting up like that for hours before sending the men out and how far did they go? I bet she went to Liliana’s house first, spit raging and finger wagging. The girl’s mother unaware and drunk, five kids and no help and no care and probably closing the door in her face. How long did they walk to track our boot marks in the snow? And how long before it started to snow again covering everything? Has she ever listened to us? Listened to where we go? My lies so big and gravid birthing more deception. We weren’t allowed to traverse the woods like that but did it anyhow and what killed me in the final moment was the crack heard at a distance so potently and the thought of my mother lighting candles on the altar cursing Liliana and then the cracking beneath me, my tongue finally acrid enough to break. Break into cursing Liliana.
“Let’s go for a hike,” she said.
“It’s freeeeezing. And it’s gonna snow.”
“No way.”
“Yes, look at the sky,” I point up.
We are just outside my cottage, hooded, our wolf fur boots and mink velvet mittens. We would be chattering soon; frozen stiff with air between us and no words. But then. In the eye of it, the hope of it, the same as we always were; me tepid and her, pushing.
“Come on!” she hit my shoulder.
I looked back at the house. I remember that. I looked back at the white paint and oak awning. We had a stunning and century old oak tree in the back that Kamelia and I used to sit in and under. We spent entire summers there. Me, looking for bugs to pet. Her, fanciful, telling stories to herself. Our property was mostly beechwood save a couple oaks: the one we kept and the one we cut down. Mostly grove of beechwood and birch behind us. Some oaks. The elusive firs.
“Fine,” I began walking briskly to stay warm and without turning around, sensing her looking back too, “and we aren’t taking Kamelia.”
Loga wasn’t that far but it wasn’t easy. Lucky for us, we spent all of our free time walking, circling, running and chasing. I was always looking up eagerly, avid for interaction from some other creature, waiting for falcons. Listening for their cries. Waiting for them to swoop.
“They hunt in pairs you  know? Packs. Not many birds do.’
Liliana was always looking down, looking for rocks to throw, things to break, or insects. I looked for insects too. Not the same way.
“Look,” she held it’s decapitated body towards me.
“Fuck, eww, Lily.”
“I didn’t do it!”
But she threw the bunny’s body towards me.
“Fuck, Lily, GROTESQUE.”
I stepped around it, scowling, holding my stomach.
“I didn’t do it,” she repeated, not looking at me, continuing to look at the ground. “Some animal left it.”
Dancing around it that day I had this thought and it returned to me before the lake, when she told me she had a surprise for me and reached into her pocket: no animal would take the head. In fact, they’d take the body and leave the head if need be. It was a fast thought but it lingered. The day of the bunny was before the snow. Before the languid miles. The day of the encumbering barbed wire to greet us.
The first mile was easy, normal, no snow, she was right. My mind wandered. Spent some of it looking up but there were no birds. Looked down for fox prints. Twiddled with some stones in my pocket on and off; a habit, for luck or memory. My brain was eidetic. Every time I touched the stone I was taken to the oak tree; the day of the bear. My sister and I had been at the bottom of the tree and we had been playing “imaginary” again; a game she made up where we choose new names, new identities and we act out the characters. She always wanted something royal, fantastic and I was much more pragmatic longing to explore the grass and pick out ladybugs. Learn to identify things. Watch beetles walk. Follow them. For her enjoyment, often I played her knight or maid and I would always have to stop something right before it happened–a witch, a wizard, a war. A portending event was lurking everywhere we stepped. That day I remember vividly and more so as I turn each stone in my pocket.
“I will be Zoe; the most magnificent queen of the land and you will be….’” she was holding a long stick with two little twigs coming out of the top that she thought looked like antlers and called it her magic doe wand. “You will be my dog.”
“Of course.”
She placed a woven dandelion chain around my neck and called it a collar, made me “eat” bark that I pulled with my fingernails, made me howl a lot as we skipped around the tree. Laughing, her hair every way, long, dark, thick and crimpy, she was only eight then and impressionable. Weak kneed. Innocent but gregarious, curious. A tad puny. Not my rival; a deep well of love existed between us and it was just the three of us in that house. She needed me to be her knight and I was. And her dog, and she had me on the ground searching for bones as she skipped all around the tree and I began rubbing my hands all over the dirt letting the smoothest pebble come to me. Tactile and interested in make believe only in the tangible; that is, how many times can I recall something by touching and is that real? Is this special? If I think hard about a black bird and one appears, did I call it? If I hold this pebble twice, will everything come back to me. As I felt the cream-colored one, letting pulses glide up and down my spine, imprinting the smell of air I can’t even palpably explain out of the corner of my eye, I saw him.
First, I gripped a second pebble: dark brown and ruddy.  Then, I remember what my mother said, “Be careful of wolves.”
I remember Kamelia gasping on the wooden floor, knees up and watching her knit.
“We rarely see wolves, Kamelia,” I was stirring stew from the kitchen. I remember this now, and then, and now again.
“Foxes won’t bite you,” my mother kept going, hands continuing with the needle, not looking at us but not not looking at us either. The way mothers can.
“And even though it’s rare, your father once saw a bear–three actually, a mother and her cubs. The most dangerous of all.”
I remember Kamelia, singing softly just behind me, brazenly imperturbed. Not loud enough to warn someone, but loud enough to cover the snap of twigs.
“Kamelia,” I  whispered and without pause, quickly added. “Statue.”
Deferential to her bone, she trusted every thing anyone ever said. The child stopped right there and turned into marble.  I stood up slowly backing into the tree and pressed my left hand on it to get a sense of distance. Right hand still clutched the two stones. Because I heard no scream, I knew she was facing the other way towards the other grove. I knew she would wait until I said “dancer” to move again.  The big brown beast stared and was standing on its hind legs but no made other moves as I continued backing up. Relying on a hawks’ eye view,  sideways, to find her. She was impeccably still and ethereal in her stance; right foot pointed out, and left arm raised with a green leaf in her hand, a couple dandelions, the yellow poking out. Buoyantly, even in a state of terror,  I floated around to face her. It felt preternatural like walking through sky. Everything slowed to almost a halt and I slowly took her hands, pebbles pressed against her greenery and whispered.
“Follow me. Don’t turn around. We are playing leader.”
She nodded and we didn’t have far to go. Twenty steps and we are inside and the bear did nothing but watch, alarmed, I realized, she hadn’t been singing before. He hadn’t heard us. Both of us had retreated into some microcosm world of investigation using the environment as a jump off.  She was doing the thing I watch her do when she thinks no one is looking; responding to some internal stimuli, moving her mouth without sound and smiling like she is talking to someone. Like she is responding to someone. I did not take my eyes off the bear. Even rounding the corner, I watched the bear through the side window. He did not move. I turned the knob. He did not move. And when we were inside with the door softly shut, the bear got back on all fours and turned to walk away into the forest.
My sister will not speak again until I tell her. I stand at the window watching back to her. She stays at the door looking at her feet. Infantilization harms and possibly stints children
“and so does fucking everything, “ I sneer, sweaty palm on railing and I am leaning over the side, not guessing the height of the road I walked a thousand times but guessing  the timing. I put my left foot up for height.

What was promised to me was miracle and sudden.  What was promised was my dead lover delivering snakes at the right time and a near death experience and a lake. When I saw it, I wouldn’t register it but rather react.  When I felt it, my whole body would tense up. When it was over, I would breathe deeply and contrite, my cold cement mausoleum skin cracking. Lips brimming over in verse, replete with a shuddering insecurity and effulgent missives to lovers, elegaic and hard yet softening  when I am touched a certain way. When I am gripped, rough, then dropped, let go, my hands reach out.  The letters begin. Or simply when I have too much time to think like in jail or in a long winding winter of solitude.
This. This is some miracle, and some portending force.  At the beginning of June this past summer, I drove home from Virginia after visiting my parent’s for a few days for my quarterly visit as is my habit. As is my habit now that my dad is dying, I should say.  The drive is six hours and I spend the majority of it thinking and speaking out loud, watching license plates, watching titles on my phone change when I can and checking numbers. The rock face smiling; cracking and spilling it all.
Camille asks, “What’s his name?”
What is his name?  I am still on the bridge, haven’t moved. The train has stopped. A man with no shirt jogs by me, side eyes me but with crave, not concern.
I am still one foot on the lake and one foot on the bank with three girls and their two dogs behind me. Somewhere my sister is tied to a tree, mouth taped shut and naive, drawn to a dare.
I am driving on the highway doing 80 miles an hour and working out last year with you, recalling the way the numbers had started to line up perfectly on each plate (finally) and ignoring the urge to check what three sevens mean, remembering it was first swords, then pentacles, then wands when the construction truck slowly pulled  in front of me. They were going only 45 miles an hour in the fast lane. Had I done any urge I wanted, acted out any compulsion: check what the sevens mean, check to see if in fact my tarot reading was in that order, check the time, the song, the rearview, I would have slammed squarely into them; neck bent. What I did was swerve, then breathe and as the woman careened into me from behind, fear returned. Immortaility. The dream of the alligator. The dream of the miracle. Umbrage left as I opened the door to step on the gravel; as I opened the door to investigate the crash, quickly, like a snakebite, breath washed over me.
“Are you ok?” I yelled.
Walking towards her car, I glanced to my left to find the dent, to assess what new hell this was and found nothing. Not a scratch.
“I’m ok. Are you ok?”
She stepped out slowly, looked shaken but unscathed, young, cute, maybe 26. I am good at gauging age. Long brown hair and a thick New Jersey accent.  She had been behind me for miles, probably going about 80 as well. Synchronized, I had thought to myself earlier.Two women, I found out, returning home after a trip home ignoring their phones and radios to swerve, to brake, to walk away breathing and not exchanging info.
“His name was (redacted).”
Umbrage took back over in the car but I didn’t stop to scold the construction truck. She advised me it was a waste of time. I asked. But I did roll down the window to scream “YOU COULD HAVE KILLED  US, MOTHERFUCKERS!” as I drove by them only a half mile further where they stopped, knowing it was a mouse squeak.
“They could have fucking killed us,” I repeated in the car.
“They should have fucking killed me,” I am walking now across the bridge.