I work to put away these daggernails of mine and carve off each stain of the hurt, each line of the black love that turned my burnished skin to furs to sweat in, to wear as uniform’d curse— I won’t lie, I wake up snarling. I want to rend what turned me so, I want […]
Someday, you will learn that life is mapped by misadventures and heartbreak, unruly as the sea, arranged and rearranged in waves, until everything is salt and sand. Someday, someone you marked as safe will call the witch out of your bones, and leave you full of burning, your mouth tasting like ash, the blessing of […]
I am angry with myself for wanting for needing for being a heliotrope who turns to the sun, believing it to be weakness, an admission of failure, as if the blood that the light creates does not thrum through my veins. I am angry with myself for being the vine, the ivy, the leaf— why […]
Each night, her mother speaks to her out of the fire: come to me, my daughter. Come into the flames. And the Cinder Girl, the one they call Dirty Ella, even the housekeeper, even the kitchen maid, steps into the fireplace. She burns brightly, hair flaring upward, skin as white as the heart of the […]
Not easy, spending my life in this one house, my nights at this window. Not easy, those first ten years saying no, turning down dances, husbands, till eventually I said yes to avoid the innuendos, and take up what might be termed my life. It’s not Peter I pine for, though he’s why I wait, […]
I hope I haven’t ruined this city for you, As if you could, As if you were bigger than these tenements, balconied and blessed with history, and you had walls dressed to the nines to fives with graffiti, and sidewalks hallowed, haunted by a few sad stories, a few fierce glories, As if you could […]
I never liked the trick with the girl and the swords. The magician would lead her to the box; she’d peek inside, as if expecting it to lead somewhere unusual, a book-filled desert or an ice cream shop only serving root beer floats, right before entering. The door would shut and I’d always think she […]
tahoooooooooo a lonely wolf call in desiccated rivulets, the call penetrating past sinuous rilles as winding as the curves of marian rivera trails off in the cold, thin air a lone bot treks crushing martian rubble under eight symmetric wheels it grinds red stone to dust on its rickety shoulders on its way to the […]
I was five years old when I began to awaken before dawn to watch the first beam of sunlight coax the green wallpaper awake the paisley pattern writhing the way a cat quivers in a leonine stretch within mere minutes the wallpaper would still again and remain so for the next 24 hours during that […]