fiction – Page 26

this is fresh.

like when my cat’s claw gets stuck
in my fingertip or when I
bump my elbow on the armoire.
things only last for seconds unless
they are eternal like
God’s choir,
mass extinction,
our howls like bells
like doom
like fate.

I try to tell too many
that this has happened before but
never with the same
patterning; the cavern
patience that’s filled with
liminality me in the
tub and dreaming.
I have no fear of the color
hazel or unmade beds
or the way you let your fingertip
trace my thigh’s Baphomet
as you turn to me
and say
this will never end.

I bet you never say a word.
I’ll grow to equatorial proportions
and bellow.
I have no fear of
mirrors, men,
mirages or monsters.
I have no fear of depth.
I have no fear of flight
or landing, heat
or frozen streams.
those talons.
those waves.
those headlights.
I have no fear of death.

you? you will know me
by my sudden rage.

“the red book (revisited)”

July 21, 2019 0

they are not shocked that I have
tattooed every lover’s glyph
along the stitching of my skin
but that I repeat the same story:
I have never, ever loved.

“yet such grand displays for men
that have touched you!”

I glare.
in general, I glare.
you can fuck three thousand men
and fall into each one’s abyss and
never touch a feeling but
no one believes me when I say
I have never, ever loved.

“yet you repeat their name with
such fever I think you may be
sick.”

I cough just to get attention.
if we are in a room full of people
and no one has looked my way
for seconds, I clear my throat.
no one believes me when I say
I am a pacified nihilist.

“yet you lend your hand to
every thing and the way you wear
your man’s cologne makes me
think you want so deeply.”

I want to sit still.
I walk the streets wrapped in
beats, a phrase tattooed on my
tongue. a glyph for everyone
I sung to.
(toss five dollars in his cup)
I have never, ever loved.

“the seraphim”

July 21, 2019 0

we both saw the lighting storm
and we both held metal rods
under a tree
like we deserved it or
like we just wanted the tingle back,
confusing amends with self slaughter.
we could just enlist–
bring kerosene to the housewarming and
tell your friend,
pour this here
gesture to our clothes
and necks.
hold hands.

watch us try to put

the other out first

so you believe you can

long without conditions.

consider love and

freedom exist at the

same time.

here is what I demand:

eye contact.

a witness.

an extinguisher.
your fit in vocabulary,
whether fresh or stored
or researched but

directed right at me

so I can hear the way your irritation wrestles,
the way you covet remorse and old marks
and I have a new cane to brand you;
mahogany wood hand carved,
if you ever just laid down to take it,
my sting.
let your silence make way for screams
and welts, not fair?
well. that’s what I deserve.

but you don’t believe in any of it
or that you are growing a handlebar
mustache and I’m squirming, in bondage,
under a metal rod under a tree,
amorphous so I can slip free
and the sky is finally black enough.
the antonym of black is everything
at once.
consider love and self-sacrifice

exist at the same time.
consider my ethics and organic
expression.
consider I’d be real dumb
about it.
consider my skin would melt like
altar prayers, wax and I’d be
wasted sending rain, a lake,
a splash your way.
me, avoiding water.
me, melting.
me, disintegrating just to rise in
white like an osprey or
an egret,
perched and
habitual,
seasonal.
graceful, large, eyes on
the prey.

consider love and altitude
exist at the same time.

“the long flight”

July 21, 2019 0

carried with her
a weapon: her keys in hand,
a disarming speech pattern
and no reason to suspect
her about anything.

I never tell a lie,
she said
leading me to
someone else’s house.

(how do you get away with that?)

I just never finish the story,
she said and I
hung there like a
Christmas ornament
glistening in her iris.

“How guys save me in their phone #12”

July 18, 2019 1

nice figure and

sharp glances.
obsessed with her wrinkles when
passing window.
thirty three years old and can’t seem to
thwart her own self persecution.
but an alpha.

told me to sit down on the bed.
told me to lay face down on the bed.
told me to consent.
said she liked ass play

and pegging and

doing things in pieces.

“how guys save me in their phone #10”

July 18, 2019 1

mood swings,
kind of mired in
a circular prophecy
that she keeps repeating.
silent in spurts,
frozen when alarmed but
then bursts in and says to
me: “are you fucking
watching me?”
like we’ve been talking
all this time.

“how guys save me in their phone #9”

July 18, 2019 0

made me walk to her house
and collect stones along the way.
said she was building something.
my pockets and fingers were dirty
and when I arrived,
she was sitting, arms crossed
and

“throw that conch shell away.”

when I asked about the stones,
she looked perplexed.
said to throw those away too.

“sisyphus” or “how guys save me in their phone #8”

July 18, 2019 0

if you shrunk her to the
size of a pine needle
and hid her in the bunk of
a barn underneath the bales,
she would shine like a comet,
possibly set the house on fire,
so you would find her.

“how guys save me in their phone”

July 14, 2019 0

you become loosely creased
looseleaf reduced to a crumple
floating to the floor
without altar,
a harmonic little
m o r e
in my palm
on your way
to the tile
where I gently lay
you leave you
altered without prayers
once more.

leave you twisted
in want
like me and
deformed.

“warning forms”

July 13, 2019 0

the first thing I showed him was the callous
here look
and he licked it with his tongue
without questioning my need to
grip things so tightly
I’ve succumb to carpal tunnel,
arthritis, delusions of
grandeur and infancy.

“has anyone ever talked to you about splitting?”
is what the doctor said to me once
after observing me mumbling to myself
in my room.

sometimes i like to shoplift.

“Who is Catarina?”

sometimes I like to fuck the men with wives.

“Catarina is the girl who does bad things. I am Sarah. I am the good girl who does good things.”

sometimes I like to hunt.

“splitting is a phenomenon in which you sort of leave your body to allow another persona to take over.”

sometimes I like to punish bad boys.

“like possession?”

sometimes I like to peek at Christmas presents.

“no, more like split personality.”

sometimes I watch the mirror dance in candlelight
and wait for her to come
I break men
like the swell that rises over bridges
engulfing islands with her mouth,
I break men with turns of
tides.

“the journal”

July 12, 2019 0