the blueshift journal

01.

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no streetlights. country black as rotting teeth, where they defined poverty by its proximity to

excess. hunchbacked men knelt atop the bursting crates and crowned themselves kings of

dogshit, as if the dust could absolve them of their need, and before them i knotted my

fingers in exaltation of the lord of sweat and spit, and wore the red clay as a brand, and was

afraid.

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02.

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sun hot like a steeped wound, where milk curdled sweetly on the banks of our yearning. life was

not a creation myth, but it read like one. great-aunt Tilda tethered her soul to the wooden hospital

bed with needle and gray thread, prodding the milky cotton until it cursed us, mouth a silvering

hoop: “O City, you think you have known waste!” i counted my blessings that i didn’t know a

thing.

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03.

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The funeral: me, and my mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother all in a sweet row

crowing the ghost away. our wet earth bore eight white bulldogs in her place to lap up the blood.

in the cloud of my memories, her witchcraft and my god wear the same sliding face: twins

conjoined, whose glutted stomachs i sundered to stop the screaming. peeled back to find only

gnats.