Me, Undone

  today my grand mother  asked for my burial plot   next to   her daughter   my mo ther and i obliged having lived in her womb once in my mother’s tiny ovaries   like wooden Russian dolls   we are finding our way back home

I saw the devil last night She fucked me in cobalt blue  Dragged my body across the marble floor Pressed her thumbs into the tiny bird bones of my chest  and opened me. "Balance," she said.  Remember the dance of the light and the dark.  Stray too far from me, and I will break you. 

“Where does it hurt?” Luz asked.   “Here,” Chisa reached down and touched the bed next to her. “And where else?”   “Over here,”   she walked over and stroked the handle on the wooden dresser drawer   “And…”   Chisa unclipped the barrette from her cotton brown hair and fingered its bow.   Luz stood silently bouncing her eyes between the three places Chisa touched-had she asked the question incorrectly   or was it Chisa who failed to understand?   and then she realized suddenly that trauma   outsmarts its victim   lodged everywhere and nowhere at all.  

He revisits dislocated memory. Disjointed and fractured - seething and ready to be reconstructed again. In any way. It doesn’t care. It stumbles and gathers to its feet.   Now fully dislodged - it tells the story again. Not for truth. But for pleasure. It is dark. He tilts his head as they arrive untangled and bustling in the frame of the door. They slither over and pull up a chair next to him. And they begin their play.   Pulling and tugging - twisting and turning. Slow smile and glance over at their new feed. He darts his eyes across the room -  f ractions of seconds looped and blown open.   He clinches his fists tight -   digs his fingernails into his palms - his feet jerking violently off the floor. Teeth chattering like fractured bones. They are exacting. Each one taking what the last one left behind.   When they are done, his chair falls to the ground. Next to him, a puddle of coagulated blood. The taste of brine and metal in his...