It must have been criminal, but saying
that tells you nothing. There were candles,
there was the ruined house, which
like a house in a fairy tale gave the promise
of everything, the water-soaked plaster
the warped floors. Say he was thirty-nine and a
junkie. Say you were fifteen and
hated your body. A scenario ripe for the
tabloid culture in which there is
always the victim, moist-eyed, blurred
newsprint, so fleshy in her blacks and whites.
Leave out the shared hunger, the heat
in the bone that could flare so dangerous
and luminous. Something was created.
It was cut out neatly but at times it comes
with bloody hands. It breaks a window or
two. Announces itself. Lost seed.
In the forever place where I was yours.
Each month the egg forms like a pearl in
the dark. It rolls away unrooted.
The dreams of women are always of this:
Something is born: a doll with
plastic limbs. It will not live, but it might
have. The words: bone cup, empty spool,
cut thread, a bowl of hair, the heart of a
rabbit removed still beating. Terror and the
scent of grass.

Volume 1, Issue 1, 2006