Little Ambient Heart

love, enormous

2011-07-21T12:02:00.001-07:00

I resent being called a "cradle-robber." My boyfriend is a year and a half younger than I. Gender reversed this would hardly be an exorbitant age difference.

Why isn't it people say what they mean "you are old, dried up soon unable to bear children and therefore worthless, he is too good for you, you are breaking the rules and we don't like it."

Honesty is simple and simplicity breaks the spell that cities and calculations and illness have over me. I am twenty two years old and when I am dead I want to be rolled beneath a tree and swallowed up by the earth while I am far away, laughing and dancing and being incredibly stupid in the place the Lord has saved for me.

the red herring

2011-07-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

Kahlen is fast.

That is to say, she is a runner. She french kisses tree branches low hanging in the sweet spring and pounds pavement all winter long. There is constant warmth in her shoulders. Anna has kissed those shoulders. Mark has pursed his lips between those shoulder blades. And Leanne, well, that was a mistake too great to talk about.

Kahlen's freckles expand in the summer and contract in the winter like concrete and her muscle grow and glow under sweaters and t-shirts and tank tops. She is an upstate summer winter spring fall straw blond and perfectly perched on the edge of a trembling cliff. Not quite perched actually but fixed. Everyone knows where forward goes but she's afraid of that. And behind is a frightened mystery like the portentous wind currents in trees in the blackest of night.

Running is a matter of life and death, not unlike the carrion, the dead deer glassy-eyed with tongue lolling maggots in the belly and the rabbit still going for the open field where a barn owl waits for the oily night. She flexes her palms open and closed like clams and the tendons beneath the arm move, so every part of her then moves.

Her skinny torso bare lays a cover of thin white skin over muscle and quivering ivory ribs. Maybe not Anna or Mark or Owen but Sierra with her heavy dark head of Russian descent that will read the patterns in that cool, tight waist and knotted back. Sierra's heavydark eyelashes touch Kahlen's collarbone with such surreptitious wanderings and she asks if maybe Kahlen will help her get in shape so the muscle above her pubic bone can mimic the firmness, the small sliding triangle over which she spreads her hands, looking out with enormous dark brown eyes.

Maybe not Sierra either, then. Kahlen will keep running faster down the road and cut off onto a dirt path through the pine trees, with bursts until her lungs hurt and the rumors and reports and the terrors spew into the air and dissipate behind. Maybe not Sierra Mark Anna Aron Owen Leanne but someone far out beyond the horizon, behind the moon still spinning and waiting to for God's final push.

So Kahlen is fast and when she runs the broad smile resulting hurts her very cheeks.

2010-12-12T15:21:00.000-08:00

Little ambient lonely. I want to fiercely disconnect. Savor the solitude. Get into my head more, get something done. Except the notknowing, it keeps me from experiencing, and I don't get the trajectory of lives right in my own head. Because of course I can't write about my own. Because of course the whole thing is stagnant.

I'm trying to figure out how important it is to work on Norah's story, because it relates a lot more I think to the timbre of where we are today, and it's more possibly important to what needs to be said, if someone like me could ever have the capacity to say what needs to be said.

And the nightmares of the windmills. Those violent fingers slicing torso in half, the black-eyed lidless children wailing for the unseen future. Is that really relevant? Am I fooling myself into thinking a selfish, spoiled brat like me can write anything except the stories of selfish, spoiled brats?

Either way, I need to finish "river island" and more on to the turbines. They're quite impressive to look at, those turbines.

Wicked Opiate and the True Femmes

2010-12-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

Being living is OKAY. Day-to-day breaths are measured in small towns, in big cities, in extraordinary deserts, in clusters of the near-dead and dying. So she (Natalia I think I mean) will go off, shoulders stooped, carrying on bag for the things she owns and one bag for the things she's bought, looking down the tunnel of the street, the buildings blending together and the snow in the roads, the thick ice in shattered pieces on the sidewalk.

Come on, Dear Lord, please help me get by. I can either chose to face the hate, and overcome it and gloriously victoriously come out much stronger or I can wipe my brain, and I can hold apathy like a bitter cyanide capsule under my tongue (harmless now though; bitter but harmless - for now - ) and be maybe a little okay. Being living little is all OKAY.

Like Mr. Sufjan Stevens, I'M NOT FUCKING AROUND. I really do want to be well.

Characters come and characters do not go so please live on, little phosphorescence; I need you very much.

live on, live on

2010-12-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

so in the worst of weather, do I dare to believe God steered me with great assurance to safety? Am I to believe that I've not died for a very particular reason? so what is folly, after all? I owe my Creator great thanks.

her story is finally coming along; struggling and screaming from the birth canal, swallowing air and bloating her stomach, turning blue, freezing softly, dead in the forest. there are worse fates: her's was an ugly one but there are always worse fates.

Now Things Will Start

2010-09-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

See: I am a little girl. They can look at me and guess maybe fourteen, fifteen. It is easy to be waited on. It is easy to be pampered and consoled and fawned over because of your youth delicate youth fragile intentions and innocent thoughts.

But for once for now I think I want my voice to be heard.

It will come in the slow cracked hum of an old woman whose bitterness became fury with age. A lacy white innocuous pathetic even (that's what they'd think of her, wouldn't they?) bubbling under the surface with frothy heat. Not a lonely cantankerous old woman but possessed with a sort of psychosis, a schizophrenic delusion of grandeur pulled from the shape of a Dostoyevsky novel and crudely shaped into her own vaguely clever but most blatantly third-rate creaking stooped form.

Pity The Poor Alcoholic

2010-08-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

she heard "I Like Your Peacock"
and she thought "Christ will come like that" (pregnant suns, how was that imagery even possible, could you imagine the sun mother bent over wearily, her back sore with light?)

the alcohol always catches her off guard. it's not that she does it every night it's that she does it at the most inopportune times like just before work or driving down the interstate. the exits are tight: construction is unpredictable. with ardor, shaky lean torso, it always catches her off guard because she's vomiting next thing she knows. under the low predictable light of the bathroom, the sound of other women's high heels clacking around her and their knowledgeable hush as the splash hits the water. always deep cherry red. it still smells like wine.

somebody stops her on the street and says, "I LIKE YOUR PEACOCK" and it takes her a second to realize that they mean the tattoo because she forgets that it's there. her head is too full all the time and she wants it dulled, dialed down, scrubbed away. the dead clean neatness of space. out there, she'll speak her thoughts aloud, because no one will be able to hear them.

comme ca, elle l'aime. it's this she loves: feeling infinitely sorry for herself.

death of a log cabin

2010-06-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

being that which was inherited ages ago by the mcNally's - they'd owned the property in the rural alcove of jungle-like trees of New York State. boards now rotten, gone sweet with decay and the delicate lacy maggots that squirmed among the wood. and it was quite beautifully shaded with bars of light from the listless northern sun. Some of the McNally's siblings traveled west - and where else? escaping the gloomy winters and the frail, miserable people. Several of them stayed, out of obligation or crippling low self-esteem: they sent their children to country school, and hid their cigarette habits in the strangest places (the creek, the old sandbox, the bottom drawer of a dresser nobody used).

The woods behind the McNally's house was a sort of Terebithia to their children - and grandchildren, in turn. In the creek the slippery rocks and the wide hills of the gully were foreboding, so deliciously. They hidden in the lob cabin for hours, counting childish aspirations and poking at small, helpless animals with sticks. Sarah, the recluse, she was the dreamer: winding herself joyfully through the spires of trees, extemporizing: the glory she sought in the most basic and immature of matters.

For her older brother Sean the cabin was an indolent place to smoke pot, hook up, lead young women astray. He felt their bra-straps so carefully, that look of empathy so well manufactured onto his vaguely handsome face. And of course the fucking and the pained expression of those girls' faces and the weak begging -

(Sean would go to jail, in seven years, charged with three accounts of first degree rape)

And poor Sarah, a rare beauty, came back to the property after her parents died. She and her partner (Alanya - mahogany haired, level headed woman) helped her get the house onto the market. And on a chilly damp day in spring they hiked back to the log cabin and solemnly, tremblingly set it on fire. The heat crackled in the impossible mist in the unseasonably cold air. Sarah lay her head on Alanya's shoulder. Really the fire was quite beautiful: all those yellows and blues and oranges: melting and competing with one another over the old lace-like maggots in the boards.

Angular

2010-04-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

Angie would have been an octopus. Many lengthy fingers to hold with: teacups and geraniums and spiced rum. To move fluidly under a great weight, to be not bound by the pressure of gravity below the firmament.

Her sister, Leanne, believed in the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Jane: which was actually a new-new testament written by a radical feminist Christian organization. She held prayer circles in the lawn with daffodils, cranberry juice and swung loosely from side to side for the salvation of the sisters round the world, whose gifts were horribly repressed. They painted from pictures they pulled off news websites, and posted those pictures all around their house to humanize many squandered statistical resources. One was a wide-eyed little girl with such a tremor, with such a tremor as to be seen through the veneer of the magazine paper.

Guilty jaundice. Hydrogen peroxide poured (last of it) on the cut, the little foamy noises, a distant sort of wind from the turbine farm across the valley. Angie leaned over the sink and pretended to see the germs in colorful paramecium struggling on the slick white surface. She was almost seven months pregnant. The father vanished, sort of, in a flurry: she heard his black hole scream. No matter. Her sister enveloped her in soft white prayer, little strings of gossamer on her shoulders and sprigs of lavender to hide behind the ears. Baby to be named Aiden, which was mostly an androgynous name. Leanne's partner Rachel built a crib out of pine from her backyard.

In about two months Angie would give birth to an octopus. Then she'd put it in the water, and watch it fly.

the melted ear

2010-04-07T18:10:00.000-07:00

THE MELTED EAR

freckle, little on large yellow thigh
wonders?
very, indeed quite hungrily
beneath pants:
to see longingly questionable sun?
sun-tastes, to see browning disasterfeet
in long bare chortles
making dust happen,
then cotton-smothered hidden long
winterly long.

Devil Bird, Evil Still

2010-02-27T15:47:00.000-08:00

?

the lovely people and their kittens were tired and sad. we went to sleep under the maple trees; later I saw him coming up over the ridge like a lip (she was with him).

Jesus, our Lord, purify the hearts of the wicked and purge the thoughts of sin from the righteous. none of the righteous can live without sin lest they be mistaken for something more remote than human.

there were two very large maple leaves laying triangular across Julie's chest. she had come with Mark, who always walked three feet forward; very aggressive and insecure he was. Mark had short, stiff blond hair and a small firm mouth. he had small eyes set back in his head and he coughed into the back of his hand hackingly and incessantly.

if God almighty chose to make the skies very blue and the dirt exceedingly brown, still, what is that to the rest of us? if He was omnipotent enough to infer the proper length of grass against our heels, then what?

Julie has blue eyes. i am afraid of her teeth, which are too sharp. she is my older sister's girlfriend but she is a liar and a cheat. i didn't trust her then - and i do not trust her now.

Let Live, Little Woman

2010-02-14T17:30:00.000-08:00

She cannot get you pregnant - so she must change you, in some other way.

Understand the way the wind changes when it comes from the mountains, through the trees, then onto the plains where it has a great rushing sound like child holding its breath to stop hiccups -

Evangline called herself "Ev," shortly touched her mouth with her index finger before she spoke. Huge heavy dreads rolled down her back and shook with the weight of her: she was not a thin girl, so you loved her for it. All the girls in your dorm had exorbitant waists and beady, blackly line eyes. They looked furious and mistrusting. Ev had freckles and her eyes were always crinkled with happiness.

You were eighteen and you hated men. You had not yet learned to love and let live the way crocodiles open their mouths to let in tiny birds [finches are they?] who clean the speckles from even the most vicious of fangs.

If you could be tiny, extraordinary, like a filament, like a flash of white, then.
So tiny as to fit in her belly like a fetus with lily-white feet, unawares of the outsides' noise and booming, war furious and sticky raging across the ocean, the many oceans of change. You threw up because standing made you dizzy. Then your period stopped and you wondered where had it gone. You thrust two fingers inside you to fish out the blood ( Ou est ca, la sang?) So you grappled and dry heaved and then sobbed.

"Aidez-moi, s'il vous plait," mais comment?

Ev, Evangeline and her massive eyes quivering as with breaths her cheeks sucked in and the freckles round her nose, the freckles in a portentous garden round her nose.

"Everyday," she said, and looked over her large shoulder, the bone-looking earrings in spirals beneath small clumps of hair, "women are raped and molested and abused. You think you have it bad? You think you know what anything means?"

- they took you to the hospital.
you were on a saline drip and they took great pleasure in thrusting a long catheter down the length of your nostril, your throat, your collapsed little stomach.

When you screamed, they gave in, pulled you in white (like a wedding gown) and rolled you into the psych ward. There the nurses had mouths fluffed with flour and cheeks impaled deeply with time and other nuisances.
"I'm well," you pleaded earnestly. Evangeline showed up to visit you, Ev, her hands behind her large back. She seemed to take up so much space in that small hospital room. Her large eyes, blue eyes were narrowed.

"I could not get you pregnant," she said defensively. "I had to change you somehow, didn't I?"

They had your heart on a monitor; its speech read in little beeps. Barely thirty per minute. Who am I? Who are you? When the male nurse touched your rib to adjust the sticky plunger of an instrument you sneered and nearly bit his hand off.

Little woman, there are people here so much more ill than you are. I hear the little ones screaming down the hall; I can hear the sobs of the parents whose only children will not see twelve. Little woman, let live, your childish nonsense put to bed beneath those soft blue sheets, under which you perspire, under which you were absconded by the deep shroud of sleep.

She couldn't possibly have made you pregnant. She had to exact that change upon you, somehow.

but in my best behavior...

2009-12-18T21:56:00.000-08:00

Natalia went into the store, and they looked at her. She bought a pack of Marb lights and they stared at her and her wide blue eyes and the curve of her mouth. And people stared because they wondered -

the sky yes, the sky curving in infinite black swoops, she saw, the massive blackness of the clouds and the paralysis of her limbs - the utter exhaustion. like the dream - Christ was a small man, and not arrogant, dark like unground coffee beans, cradling her head in his lap - "don't cry, you know it? there's no use. the point of fear - what is it?"

quoting Paul's letter to the Corinthians - "now we shall see things, as in a mirror dimly; until we meet - face to face - "

the hail was coming down. it was knives, it was sharp and cold and miserable. she could see the brick buildings from the corner of her eye. and where was Christina? the atheistic, persistently morose, pessimistic and miserable - afraid and of course not admitting to the fear. and Christina - was she already gone?

Natalia could see the hugeness of the sky, the black hole that ripped in ragged edges, and nothing behind it but a void.

She slid her ID across the counter and fished a ten from her pocket, ragged and soft. the woman behind the counter was heavily pregnant. She looked miserable; defeated. The pockets below her eyes were sagging and Natalia wanted to say "I'm sorry - "

cigarettes in pocket she slipped the lighter with the edge of her thumb until it was sore. She imagined Christina slowly in the the bathroom, towling her long hair dry, the soft rolling cello arc of her porcelain collarbone. Little tiny pear like beads of water on her neck. She got in the car and switched the ignition. It was snowing in soft heaps. The was a balloon of swelling panic in the back of her throat. She put the cigarette in her mouth and lit it and breathed. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. The sky was ambient and white.

vast water

2009-12-16T11:58:00.000-08:00

there was red nail polish smeared on the vodka bottle. and it was empty, tipped over and sad in the dirt. the label was crumbling softly away from several nights spent out in the rain. the moss curling up in steaming pale green tendrils; that moss taking the vodka bottle away.

out in the distance it was miserable and blue. a dark cold violet where the mountains stretched, pale and white coming down, touching the stream, recoiling. the stream rolling. through rocks, touching them with its unsteady tongue, breaking clear in some places then going on brassy green dark forest gray with the movement of sediment.
noises of screaming (from the mouth of) the sky

that brilliant white sky so thick with fog,
colder than the water or the mountains or the earth colder than -

energy slowed to sludge matter, slowed enough to collapse the horizon.

the pressure was coming, and why? the mountains still strained furious and purple against the sky. the water crashed faster and faster outrunning yet never advancing, the same three waves breaking over the same boulder over and over again. the pressure should have cracked the trees. still? they stood tall as steel blades and unwavering stared disdainfully apathetic; not screaming.

the vodka bottle splintered to pieces beneath the pressure
and some little red flakes remained beside it.
there was possibly a woman's t shirt and pair of blue lace panties
near a little clearing in the grass where it happened.

but found never neither blood nor bone and investigations all proved inconclusive.

i was much too far out all my life, and not waving but drowning

2009-12-14T06:27:00.001-08:00

Ms. Smith huddled beside me at night;
huddled beneath a mauvely soft afghan and
stroked my cheek with her thumb; my
very soft cheek the hair downy pale the hair:

baby soft the touches, she leaned beside me
she was moaning and (all the way out)
moaning softly hands drawn palms down,
over both my eyes the pressure sweet.
the pressure made a warm red glow streaked with violet
across my vision.

I lay in bed with her throat against my neck and:
she button clinking mumbled
'don't let them leave you so far out;
don't let the water the icepricking cold the ice
the water - '

2009-12-03T16:27:00.000-08:00

UN JOUR JE MOURRAI, ET TOUT CA NE SERA RIEN IMPORTANTE.

in the bellies of tiny animals, i will live joyously. i will - to not be. gender is subjective, subjunctive, is subterranean and hidden in alcoves of human sickness, raving privately the hunger for conditionless love. and love is the deep cider smell of autumn, heavy in splintered wooden barrels. imperfectly grammar weaves little threads onto spools, burgundy threads running out between teeth, cotton churning over a loom where a woman bends a birdlike neck in the dusty heat, the speckled air in the shine from the windowlight.

back then woman was woman and man was man. breasts perfectly perched hips rolling and rising with the tide, arms legs thighs plump dress swinging down to the ankles, eyelet and serene. men in tall tall black tophats.

[kyle was an anomaly]. anomie, strain theory. he didn't have to bind his chest because what little breasts nature had given were so easily hidden. compressed beneath the generous mouth of an ace bandage. not eating was an easy option because he smoked somany cigarettes and lived with exorbitantly skinny roommates in a dingy apartment. the wretched, gin soaked, riveted, wretched. his immediate roommate played bass. his name was arthur, old fashioned, big shouldered.

fags & dyyyyykes, faggots faggots faggots. someone snorted coke in the living room everything green, the walls sheathed with that mucus colored licked over animalistic childish light from naked bulbs, promiscuous bulbs flashing the scene over the glass coffee table. Kyle would take nothing harder than ecstasy. he needed to know that his heart would continue beating. his hipbones jutted and knees became knobbled, wrists furious, ankles bleeding from the constant strain of his shoes.

beneath black boxers a pussy. how horrid. weaker sex. barefoot && pregnant. gitback in the ketchen. cast iron skillets flying the stove ablaze. bitches and hoooooos. kyle bit the inside of his wrists and bit and bit until a coworker asked what the fuck was wrong. he worked for a living - someone had to. pay the rent, the hot water, the electric bill. they ate vegan and took acid and stared at the yellowed old walls. the chips in the paint opened up and tv pundits howled, screamed, mumbled in tongues.

and then someday he'd find this and that and be happy with himself. hormone therapy. Leah, Adrianna, home and hope and the heat of minivans and 2 1/2 children white picketed suburban, the huge sun bawling, the endless pavement. life is endless. one day death with will be whole and his thighs will be perfect. and this - and this - and I I I I

happy parisians

2009-11-22T20:43:00.000-08:00

parishioners in tweed

soft jacket leathers, head bowed, happening
to be a happy well-dressed wealthy bunch,
driving secure cars secretly, bending the lines
the wires the rules, careless thrown glances
carelessly dispensed kisses and quarters in bills,
leaving the scent of goldmoney elsewhere.

happily paris swelled under their feet:
the cathedrals; the river.
young lovers both gay and otherwise rolled
the cobblestones, rolled "mais je l'aime"
about their mouths and danced happy beats long streaming
hair made to drink, to be drunk, to own
their pale faces and sweat-soaked t-shirts
was all they could own and as content as two people
would ever know to be.

made of prayer and false confidence,
feigned humility. humble sweet lips and
ivory teeth, fragile monsters behind the shower curtain,
again picking crackers and wine for dinner
remembering mom's
word mom's warning from behind coral lipstick,
her head tilted hair falling
cigarette fingers moaning: "hate him until he loves
you back enough,
loves you to pay the gas bill."

you looked at your girl and laughed. the eiffel tower loomed
cold and unflinching behind you.

erratic symptoms

2009-11-12T21:05:00.000-08:00

word cluster:

[mucus, coalesce, felt-tip, grainy, desperate, lethargic, violent, violet, ambivalent]

if loving cannot be helped? subconsciously she had an affinity for men whose names began with J - especially Jared, Jason, Jacob, James. they would of course have to have hazel eyes; they would of course have to have hairlines perfectly intact.

Emmaline made tiny gashes in the leg with the side of a pushpin out of desperate boredom. halfway down the shin, directly into the ankle, in the mockery of a shell's curve. each a contrived, jagged reminder of the smell of winter wind coming east to a lonely person. winters under the trees neatly glazed with ice, the cheery blinding sun peeking up over the library. the heady crunch of salt under thick boot heels.

she was ill in December: she spat mucus into the porcelain bowl of the sink for seven days. lethargic and bleary, she went around wiping her nose on her sleeve, curling into deep library cushions to read endless tragic love narratives.

In January, just after the holiday, she met Jacob. He had a very solemn peach colored mouth and a stern way of holding his back straight. he wrote her a note on a yellow slip of legal paper with a blue, felt-tip pen. she watched him write it - his remarkably defined wrist, hairless and tanned. of course his hazel eyes. he appeared grainy though the snow like a poorly developed photograph, moving slowly, and from so far away.

(loving of course being not so easily helped). he bought her a bunch of violets. she sneered, he became petulant - then violent. smashing a vase against his own kitchen sink. she tried to feign a mask of neutrality but her eyes sparked, ribs tensed, ambivalence curled inside her.

in March, the snow began melting, and Emmaline was happy, looking at the hazy rise of the sun over the library at dawn. Jacob called her, kissed her back, touched the tender spot on her shin where she'd bruised from so many cuts with the clear tiny pushpin. somewhere on a path in the woods, they touched elbows, and coalesced.

subconsciously and loving, Emmaline helped herself. she leant back into his arms and started into the blank, misty sky. behind her his chest was breathing: moving: in and out and in

akathisia

2009-11-08T11:07:00.000-08:00

the enamel of her teeth ache in the far corners of the universe. she has been trying to explain the dream for exactly seventeen minutes (watching the clock).

Christina says, "you're being a little childish right now," and turns on the ball of her foot, shifting her back away from the light. Natalia is on the couch, tapping her closed lips. the pain is radiant. little beams of it mutter and crack and shiver beneath her tongue.

"I think maybe it's time you went to see a doctor."

Natalia looks up and Christina is standing by the window again, her arms folded across her chest. her eyes are dark and narrow. she has a neat flooding of freckles on either side of her nose, below her eyes. it is difficult for Natalia to move the muscles of her throat, to unclench, to allow any sort of noise. any explanation would be better than this.

"I feel cold," Natalia tells her, but it is more than that. there is a rumble behind her sternum which sends periodic tremors out to her fingers and toes. she is the static in the air before a storm. her pulse is the kinetic rolling of an earthquake. last night, Christina spread her hand over Natalia's pelvis, above the pubic bone, and put an ear to her chest. "your heart is pounding," she mumbled. "your heart is going to explode."

they have been sitting in the living room for twenty three minutes. the nightmares started six days ago, two days after she stopped taking the medication. selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (synonym for headfog, lethargy, emotional dead space). when she told her mother on the phone, she cried. her mother cried back and screamed and hung up without saying "i love you."

Christina said "I love you" when they first moved in together, but she does not say it much any more. She was used to Natalia the clumsy artist, the mediocre oil painter, the defiant Christian, emotionally turbulent. who, then, was this numbfingered cheery-eyed high-laughing woman? her lit up eyes, the way she organized the coffee and tea on the counter by the gradations of the color of their packaging? who was this woman who shook hands with everyone, shrugged her shoulders when she saw anti-gay protests on the television, who smiled uncomfortably through rape jokes, because it was the polite things to do?

Natalia grinds her teeth together and winces. there is movement, like a feather on the wall, and Christina is sitting next to her, pulling Natalia's head into her lap. her and me and her and him himher - Natalia confuses pronouns in her head.

"why don't you tell me about the dream?" Christina asks.

when Natalia says, "I can't," she means 'I won't.'

she means, 'your arm was lying three feet away from your body on the pavement. there was no blood and the sky was exorbitantly dark. the whole sky was shaking. it started to hail and I was crying and my four year old cousin was picking weeds from the ditch in her yellow dress, and her skin was tearing off. you were already dead and I realized I couldn't love you because you were already dead.

and Christ came to me and whispered "it's time to go now" but I couldn't because I knew I would have to leave without you.'

Christina kisses her temple. Natalia pinches the skin of her wrist and breathes.