No context snippets rescued from abandoned stories and old poems or selected from current works in progress, like the little taste they give you one the back of a book. Updated from time to time.
She gave a laugh full of waterlogged lungs and silver bells, “Well, my Presumptuous Little Frame Narrative. Here we are.”
“There was a fable when I was little, The Time Witch and The Death Witch who live at the end of the world and eat lives like ripe fruit.”
The one with sickly grey skin, veins of electric purple cracking across her body like wicked lightning. A corpse creature animated by something ancient and strange. The other with ginger hair, peachy pale skin, soft edged and flush with life but with the manner of a statue about her. Should you look too long, or let her look too long, you may notice the calculated movements, the eye that doesn’t blink, the ticking of the heartbeat.
She would build her children clockwork lungs if that would save them from the sea.
Seated in faded old rocking chair is a veiled woman. The woman beckons her closer with a gloved finger, and the girl sits on a velvet couch the color of her hair.
Do you recall your name?,” The honey voiced woman asks.
“No.”
The woman didn’t answer the question, but she began to speak, and she could only listen.
Of course, I…I was drowning.
“But such a good story,” a honeyed voice said, sincere and kind.
The sky was all a lake full of fish and I jumped straight up into it. I mean it started with the rain...so much rain. Then I realized the rain was going up. It was coming up from the streams and lakes into the sky. And as I watched the birds in the sky become soaked, their feathers began to morph into scales, until every bird was a scaly golden fish. And It kept happening until all the water that had ever been in and on the Earth was in the sky. And it poured into the sky until the Earth I stood on was just a dry shriveled rock. And the sky was full of all the water and thousands of golden fish.
I used to watch the figure skaters in the Olympics when I was little and I thought they were just the most beautiful creatures on earth. Ballerinas who danced on knives.
Parents warn their children to stay away, that the tunnels are infested with rats and beetles, that they are dark and whispering and scary, that they are haunted by the ghost of a woman in a blood-stained evening gown. All of this is true, of course, though Gisselle’s ghost has no interest in harming trespassers, she just floats about them, hissing judgmental comments in French and bemoaning the fact that the dead cannot drink.
My mind can slip in and out of my brain like a quick fish.
Can yours do that?
Puppet soul slips off her strings to fly away.
Can’t take being contained anymore.
Where does my spirit live when my body isn’t mine?
Winter is not safe for the living
Sometimes
I talk to microphones
To remember the world
Sometimes
I hold up a seashell to my ear
To listen for memories
Most days
In stare into the mirror
To convince myself that I exist
In my dreams I think about my bones
I feel them, beneath my skin
They laugh, rattle, and scream
They want to claw their way to the surface
I made a deal
With a dollmaker
For a body
All my own
He gave hands and eyes and hair
Bones inside me and a beating, bleeding, heart
But my mind was too big for the doll body
So, it had to break
Just a little
To fit
And now
The pieces
Won’t fit
Back together
My eyes fill with oceans, pearls, and aquamarines.
Seaweed, seashells, salt, and sand. I am made of the waters of the sea.
“Dead stars are beautiful, I hope I’m beautiful when I die, I hope I end up as something lovely.”
The rain still falls in Florida
On humid breezy nights
The droplets still cloud my glasses
When I dare to step outside
We’re still alive
We’re still alive
We’re still alive
In here
Take the deadly creature in your hand
Show it that you see
The gentle parts of their soul
And they will be gentle
I’ve written
A spine
To rip out and throw to you
Bit
By
Bit
Fill the air with questions
Desperate
Why do we do it?
Why do we
Rip out each other’s bleeding hearts
For fun?
Eat them up and leave hollow lives.
Lead hollow lives.
Chase each other down with laughter and claws.
Why do we tear out our eyes and pour soft pretty things into empty sockets?
Glitter in my skull is a bright and plastic dream.
Something rips out my insides and feeds them to the sea. It salt cures my heart and lungs. It leaves me my bones, my eyes, my veins. The eyes are the windows to the sea. It fills me up new, cold heat and shocks and spirit. I am not anymore.
I sit under the evergreen writing about sensations
Rough bark on soft skin
And not so soft skin because I’m no princess and if I was I would be a sharp one
Skin dry and cracked, like rough bark
Branches fracture the moon, filter her beauty
The kiss of cool air is like Florida’s three days of winter
It will snow tomorrow, but for now I can sit beneath the evergreen
I trade my wet clothes for dry
Hair still with water
All is sunny
I taste the phantom flavor of lemon ice and watermelon
The feel of wet hair on the warm couch
I am transported