the blueshift journal

My mother’s grandfather was a ghost. After my heart was thrashed about like plum in a casket

my hair began to fall out by the fistful. I built a moat around my corpse box made of repurposed

wooden panels. I was like a paper doll, dressed and undressed, exposed and easy.  Naked.  Here I

am a purpling figure, fumbling flesh, skin skeins, Venus fly traps.  Here where thirst found river,

where hearts were extricated, sleep found its owner, where the owner stopped hanging flyers at

every street corner in a ten mile radius.  This is error, this is what slithers out of the cracks in my

walls at night, this is my destiny to ignore.  Little me, I wring darkness into my skin until it bleaches

me distinct, and I evaporate like tea steam into the evening air.  I am patterned and arranged.  I

become the overlapping blue knots of woven array, a manifestation only fashioned out of the old

fashioned.  I am a macramé owl.  I bind myself tighter than ever before.  I become fixed.  More

adaptable in some ways but fixed in the way duct tape is adaptable.  They will be forgiving for my

rigidity of spirit when in their menacing presence.  They will be forgiving when I long for an opaque

bottle excruciating enough to fit into and be crushed.