debuted in pieces, in between handwritten curses
and crimes: chasing heuristic whiffs
of informal linguistic forms
Made to make
empty pages from used paper, from
overcrowded printspace on unpaid bills
Writing over crowded post-it notes;
like white creases etched
on bare skin going draught-dry.
She pronounced compressions and palm-lines
A rugged work of contemplation;
Beneath the sides and under the curves
She preached from the tips of my left-hand:
sacred taper icicles carved from cold flesh.
She, blurred the names from this personal essay,
But spat out lives since past
Posting inverted internal verities
They were just states of rampage,
of anticipatory apprehension,
behind a smile; Of natural anaesthesia
from winter-weather, Of heatstroke
from winter-weathering
Felt like a live-wire
pouring from my hands onto paper;
The will, the testaments
of a woman unkept by self-conflict.
Before I could stop her
She was December, awaiting arrival
of an undoing, a final wreckage;
the ghost of a past hugging back
She was no man’s land.
Now, imprinted on my palmscape
pressing away on paper, spitting
reflections of my own mettle,
a palimpsestuousity refined
Stirring once, the imagination of a forgotten scholar;
As I felt the creases clock and swivel
through a morning news papercut.
Was a palmspring bleeding red
on cheap newspaper
Crimsoned NEWSFLASH! on the front page
It was a missing person’s case,
A manifesto to catch the public enemy,
An arrest warrant, unwarranted by crime;
It was a public outrage outage
Fallacy conducting itself inside us:
Must be the truth if they said it was
It was a community search party of dogs and hounds
for a woman who drank the sea empty
Because they thought how dare she?
So what if she cried in secret for 24 years,
Stake in hand, hand at heart;
So what if she evaporated
in a feud-fire outside her bedchamber
consumed herself away
So what if she was tired
of being prisoner to shame in her mind
So what if she used to be the girl I once was, before
the woman who drank the sea was a fugitive
They don’t tell you this in ugly print:
that she lunged face-first and drank the sea in mercy
The act itself was a speculative withdrawal
from social expectation, from the sea that was
a repository of monster blood.
It reeked of good intensions gone foul;
The sea that was made
from a once utilitarian urgency
Its empty floorbed now boasts an ocean
of salt dunes and deserted bone-shards
Morbid chandeliers planted upside down
It’s a graveyard of people
who died trying to drink the sea before me;
my ancestors by cause and action
featherstitched on my gravestone