when you push me very far off, to the periphery of my sanity and the cords in my lungs have to pluck themselves to sleep, i hope you realize what i’m becoming. i can’t define it yet, but a boy in morocco once called me withering and i don’t even think he knew what that means. maybe it’s not as wilted of a word as i thought, for it also means devastating, demolishing. they also referred to me as the willowy one. i’m not so concerned with their perceptions though, mostly yours, but your mind seems to have sanded over, barren in your disconcerted way. never have i felt so neglected, so small. you’ve put so much distance between us i couldn’t find you if you let me.
if i close my eyes it can be right there, asphyxiation and honeysuckle, that deep southern honeysuckle that swarms and swaths, dabs at your ribs and slathers your eyelids, that sweet sticky swarming honeysuckle. she was not a southern gil though, she was not even eastern, she had rivers flowing through her veins. still she was a shapeshifter; she could mold. and the heat was very swollen, her brain expanded miles across that southern land. the whole time breathing the air and knowing it wasn’t hers to take, it belonged to gophers and boys made of straw. she felt from her toes up. static fibers in the tall grasses, a sense of falling rattling her empty stomach. sounds took on a metallic quality, everything like it was covered with a tin can. she needed more stairs, golden light making things distant. her brain kept reeling the same track, the film catching on fire and looping back trailing charcoal and ash. she saw him as a shell around her. and all the time suckling that honey.
Bones poking out of these spindle limbs I am writing in the dark, insides falling out of me. Nearly anything could topple me over right now. I’m an alien being blinking at a world I’ll never understand.
there is a rawness that only reveals itself with a certain slanting of light or dissonance of the heart when a sound pierces through sleep so softly it tears at the dream’s seam, little silver fish deftly darting and swooshing into chasms without names, holes that narrow if not fed and diffuse with a maddening red that swells and beats to awaken the hold that slumbers beneath, crooning its echoes between the ears and slashing stars across the brain’s velvet it whispers to absorb the bloom like oil in a wound, the sweltering heat at the depths of the sea.
[the siren's story]
By Barbara Jane Reyes
she wasn’t born in this city. she found its basalt greenstone chunks, seafloor forced skyward. it found her hands through mist and odors whirring pigeons’ clubfeet fluttering, toothless men’s paper sacks spilling elixirs, roots, shark fin tonics. heat swelling sewer steam rising, side street chess match maneuvers mystifying. it sought her whirlwind hair, grown seavine thick. songbird, adrift, nestling neon, she crafted snares for moths, butterflies, treasure hunting children tracing ideographs: sky, sun. patina spires, smirking dragon boys humming silk lanterns, flight of phoenixes through fish vendors’ stalls, corrugated plastic blackbird perches, jade-ringed gardens, needle-tipped shanties. it bulleted trees, lighting hash pipes; herbalists’ storefront canopies concealing leathered men, versed in languages of whiskered ghosts. it invented her dialect carving tongue: salt fables, yellow caution tape palaces. she lost herself in this city. it lured her, drank her air; honey voice’s precision, hybrid beyond memory. songbird, adrift, this city’s misplaced siren. migration patterns subterranean streams swallowed whole.
