prose poetry and fiction
“some gray little heart you have”, said the lord of chaos, grinning red.
and it all furls like the bugs, and all the flowers are burning in death.
you say “i have seen your heart too, and i have seen who pays the price.”
and it all furls like the bugs, and all the flowers are burnt to death.
the last of them died about a month ago while you puffed your chest for gentler men / / you let out a little gasp into your hand haloing your body frozen in time you break open the chest holding the momento under your tongue and you see what it has ravaged you gaze upon the moon and, god forbid, she looks right back at you devouring everything with that crescent-shaped smile mother warned you about
i’m sorry i can’t tell you about the chamomile fields. it hurts so much, talking about imaginary places like that. i’m keen to avoid it. coming back, that is. looking back, twisting my poor neck, desperately hungry for an eidolon, slowlyslowlyslowly. i’m really trying to be a better kid now, so i burned them. burned and salted the entire land, with all the kindness i could muster.
pain was something of a sophisticated trompe l'oeil.
spirals of smoke came from a hole in his chest. a loosely structured entity, clustered weird thing made of memories and matter, had been summoned to collect his fading, tired soul. he got stricken by the eyes before everything else vanished: several pairs of almond eyeballs leaking sulfuric fluid. rosin and light slowly mingling in one tight space. (certain eyes burned on their own, due to the excess of lamplights and fireworks and luminescent things that glow in the dark…)
any idea of how’d you got in here? yes. he doesn’t want to talk about it, though. as soon everything he kept inside tried to burst free, the glass cracked in horrific sounds and found a new twisted rhythm cradled onto silence. you are being seen. you are also weakest when you hide the knives and file the teeth. you have been hiding because you like the smell of dust. he sees the smoke and thinks of sunset. he watches the fire and longs for oranges. death is now the color of the wilderness. but how did it feel? how did it feel to taste the oranges?
a chorus of satyrs, ouzo-soaked gowns and hairy masks of animal skin, sings for the reminiscent audience: “he was made for being lost and always, always blessed! maybe that day could be today, unless solitude made him a fucking saint, huh?”
a girl sees this painting framed to a wall, gasps in amazement: a god having his holy dejejum, absent of taste, knees bleeding in self prayer, his throne behind him sheathed in doomsday aura— yellow eyes claiming the moths, mouth wide open like a pulsating crater, he chewed one leg then the other, fangs digging hard into raw flesh, a slow-moving mass passing through his translucent esophagus— this silly, crimson gale of one last meal. for the gods are all dying now. they eat what they can eat.
the pacific roars not a single star to witness—
darker than the bottom, cold as a stingray's skin, his body swims among polluted waves shattering the air in a prismatic gathering of light and aquamarine and gold and green fishbones and salt salt salt salt
he guesses time is linear again, thank god
and, oh, it’s july. one last month left to mourn the past and get rid of its iridescent scales, one more month of blue, moody singsongs. trinta dias submersos.
(please do not leave your lungs to drown with one last memory of me, Ocean)
in the space between splinter and fingernail, she heard all the voices thickening in raw sap hard, chaffed, stuffed into monochroma linens, running down her sore throat, two stations later, carefully wrapped in [reverse] static
she thought about the dried flowers caressing her insides, venomous, black winged anomalies all set in invisible frontiers of nitrogen oxides and cheap lavender seeds (not dangerous enough, ma’am, it's still growing) the last branches in her mind unstable and opaque as ravenous sights through a glossy window
she cried when it exploded all over her small parts and secret parts her divine portrait carved in a rite among the bones of enemies slain in battle
her cleaner skin, hair braided, chopped lips as burned mahogany, one swollen eye, one golden tooth
and all of the voices (one, three, five, twelve) wringing her in one place, one sacred place made out of rapid tongues, chanting priests dressed in robes of flowing reds leading a choir of spoken gore: “night will never come home, my darling, never again”
it felt wrong to know of this, father— all the buoyant violences behind close encounters, they would never touch her like they used to, at least not enough to make you forget the stench of burning corpses (purple skin, bluish bruises, dark meat, chop, chop, chop)
how lovely! to turn grass and mud in a handful of dried tears