ISSUE: Spring 2018
At the spot where the girl lay, I see the refineries. Their stencils are blurred on the horizon, making their machinery less intricate, & therefore, holy. Her screams like steady streams of dark smoke. Simile fails at this. Her voice, like rubber, stretched only so far. I ask, what is fractionation? The whole is greater than, the field says. I ask, what is a cradle? Even the darkness has arms, the field replies. We are all filled with leaving, it continues. I cannot give them back because they were never mine. But whose were they, I want to know. We knew her by the dress, the field says, smelled sweet like almonds. We knew her by her overbite. Did she eat darkness, I ask. It crumbled between her molars like gravity. The field is gracious with its anonymity, stuck in the marsh with no way out but no way out. She dreamed that way too, I say, in infinity’s lemniscate. She had it on her wrist & ankle, two unfortunate anchors. There’s no delicacy in faith, the field says, just in the way the scavengers rearrange the bones.
