I See Her Far From Me. My Mother Is Cool And White And Floats Like A Sun In My Mind. But She Is A Dying

Time keeps passing, I fight hard for change. It does not yield to me, wind against a mountain. I carry on, I carry on, still. There is nothing left for me to do but die.

Let her die softly, let the seabed take her as if in a dream.

“You’re gentler than they said you would be,” the girl remarked.

The siren smiled graciously in return, and took another chunk out of her calf and thrust it down her throat without reprieve. The girl didn’t feel a thing, her saliva numbing her skin the moment it touched it.

“We’re only hungry beasts girl, not cruel. We leave that to the men,” she said frankly and wiped her mouth of blood the way a child would of jam.

It hurts me, the rust. The moving water is both a curse and a blessing, I know it rusts my chainmail further but my skin is dying for the tips of its rushing fingers. My leg has been shattered beneath this fountain statue for nearly seven days. I cannot stand, I cannot move but inches left and right in its basin. How horrible a way to die in war, by a stone man, in an iron casket. Though if a living man had struck me down, I’d say the very same.

—a solider named Feo

Hope lives in the eyes of children. I can see that now that it has left mine.

I wished every day was summer when I was a little girl. No school time, just bikes on the pavement. Sun chasing our shadows, never quite able to keep up. Sweat collected on my forehead like a tribe of parents watching me worried as I popped wheelies with no helmet on. The wind brushed my hair wild. I wished every day was summer when I was a little girl. But I’m a woman now, and the sun has caught up to me in the shape of fluorescent bulbs. It has taken my shadow. I swivel in my office chair and lean back to feel childhood’s wind-

I feel nothing.

That was when I met him. My undoing. He was like a father to me, but I was not like a daughter to him. He knew this. He knew what I saw when I looked into his eyes, and he did not look into mine, drawn into the gaps between my blouse’s buttons like black holes for morality. I was always to blame for his touches. I had always thought of myself as a girl, as a person, but really, I was a place. A place for innocence to die.

If you want to know what someone wants, watch what they give away. Love, time, compliments. People think others yearn the same way they do, and they reveal themselves in these little interactions; the way daylight escapes blinds midday.

Though yellow grass grows

She wanders barefooted, on dry and cutting blades

Something has died here, in the glades of her old memories

Its terrain water-hungry, fertile with long-lost mistakes

Sweet aroma of morning dew has forsaken this place.

But she returns, like sunken ship to lighthouse unmanned,

though only yellow grass grows in her past.

If nothing else, I will always have my misery. Like a child that does not grow old but cries and cries in her cradle, only silencing in my arms. She is mine, and I am hers.