Work

_______ believes in the knives he sells, which makes it easier to work for him. But easier does not imply ease, and this job relies on the poisonous scripts I've been working to run away from for months. 

Sacred

My father and I drove down to Lexington to see my sister graduate. We were on the road by 5 a.m. The two-and-a-half drive didn't affect me until we turned onto New Circle, and I directed him to my sister's house, reciting those turns, that liturgy I'd learned by heart last summer. His unfamiliar tires rolled past the path on which I used to run every morning. It was new to him, but I could remember my skin burning with the sweat I shed like poison, the sun-bright air I took into my lungs, swallowing fire with every step like the xiezhi as I listened to Florence and the Machine ('I must become a lion-hearted girl'). Now, shyly stepping back into this place as if I'd never left, it seemed that I was traveling through time like the xiezhi, as well. But the simile ends there. I cannot prevent violent change, not when I run to it with an instinctive need like hunger.

We stepped into my sister's house. It had never been mine, but now that they were selling it, it was even less so. I was a stranger. I didn't belong to the ghost of the girl who lived here. That I and I were parallel.

We drove past the bookstore where I used to work, with its seafoam-green, pointed dome rising out of Lexington Green like a basilica. I have now traveled to St. Peter's in Vatican City and San Marco's in Venice; the sight of that seafoam-green dome filled me with more spirituality than either of those breathtakingly beautiful places; it reminded me of all the places that had filled the space between me and last summer. I could never explain how important that time was, just as I could never tell you how I exited my mother's womb; I can only ever know and feel it afterward, can only then explain to you how I exist.

My holy ground is not the same as yours. Sacredness is more than humble, bloodless faces carved from marble, dappled with red, yellow, and violet light from stained glass. Birth is quieter than white, more fluid than water.


Xiezhi

wake/burn

wake to your tongue having turned tectonic, drily scraping itself against your rumbling, violent throat like a velvet-antlered hart rubbing his horns on a tree; it's cold here. things are too still at the edges, too active in the center. if only your legs could run like your pulse; if only you could scatter your body and live in a thousand scenarios at once, like your mind. but there are only your fingers curled around blankets, only a sleep-warm throat pregnant with a sickness that bears you deeper into stasis. 


not even london rained this much. it hangs down over indiana when you fall asleep; half-conscious, you imagine this is what the slow sprinkling of dirt on a coffin would sound like from the inside, or this is the sound of ____'s movement in the bedsheets slowed down a thousand times. it is a drowning rain, only. no thunder, no lightning, no chance of fire. where did the thunderstorms go? what happened to the nights when you ran in the rain with _____ until three in the morning, dancing next to the cracking snarl of a storm until your clothes steamed and skin and clothes melted into one with the water, became one burning light in pooled streetlamp halos. 


there is comfort in burning. healing. there is comfort knowing that there is paper yet to be burned, that people still write letters that end as the smell of smoke in someone's hair.