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lost bird Lucid
mauve tears captured a sunset on her mother's cheek and twilight rose anyway. The
moon sang in every drop gliding down her mother's face. The vibration of the high-pitched note
sent tidal waves across the streak of tears; they rippled like shudders up her
spine and sent earthquakes through her shoulders. A
few days before, in the midst of a sick green and surgical white circus, she
gasped in a spasm, a final claim to the life line that was dropped into a steel
pan. She watched it get carried
away through the spaces between her fingers, wide like the constellations, wide
like the spaces between clock ticks of a numb eternity and half a day later,
wide like the spaces between the creaks of her rocking chair against a
brown-shag carpeted floor. Each
salty lament watered the ache of a muted sleep, while a light breeze scattered
the exploded pearls of dandelion dust into the fuzzy legs of silver moths. The small ova landed on the saline
shores of two decades of detachment.
Soft waves broke against the shore soothing the small pearl to sleep a
while longer. It
began like the nonchalant flits of dragonflies across the humid evening
air. Crickets droned away the
expected machinery of the hot summer night. Gathering love like nectar from white jasmine kisses was
simple when she was young. An
arm of moonlight found the egg in the sand and dazzled the shell to wake in
giggles, the smells of barbeques and all of the colors of a thousand photo
albums. The colors of the shell in moonlight
took even the moths' breaths away. But,
they forgot quickly, when she popped out a pitiful, mucous-covered, dirty-kneed
grub; cracking her shell like the broken home they imagined she came from. She emerged a muddy-faced yardstick,
half-sized with non-existent expectations. As
a tenuously amorphous larva, they despised her into a calculated mold. Growth slid behind the slippery
memories of snails and the diet of wood-rotting fungi and splintered, decaying
undersides of bark made each masticated swallow tear long, crimson scratches in
her stomach lining like catalystic fractures. The diet of rage and dead pulp emptied her out from the
inside while meek protests were met with derisive desperation. To
their mirror of chagrin, the moths eyed her incremental growth spurts with
concentrated suspicion; her dull color was gaining a chromatic threat. Iridescent honor roll reflections of an
indigo sky, combined with the sparkling trophies for surpassing dysfunctional
time limits constructed like hopscotch squares that only disappear from the tar
when the rains come: when the wet asphalt shimmers like prayers of mourning
relatives that carried love as old as the land itself. Wooden
spoons and belt across the backs of thighs knee-jerked from the moths to seize
those colors of mockery. Acrid
words were high strung under a floor of eggshells to trigger upon a step
outside her confinement. A bloody
nose accessorized the opalescent cyan creeping beneath the pupa's epidermis
worn with sweaters of blame. The
hemorrhages in her stomach carved
out rivulets of fury followed by torrents of tears that eroded away the marrow
of her bones‹leaving canyons that roared with hollow wind. She lost track of time at the bottom
of a beer bottle and a bowl that kept getting passed to her for years. Her extremities succumbed to the frigid
gales whipping over the surface of the canyon; they bit her numbing ears,
stiffened her hands and cooled her skin.
She ran and skipped over the crevices to keep warm; until, insobriety
misplaced a pebble she tripped over and tumbled down the edge of a canyon. Her responsibility had fallen behind
in her race to stay warm, but finally found her stuck on a shelf some ways
below the lip of the cliff. Hidden by the new moon, the chasm
sang to her toes in A Minor. Her
curiosity crawled down the walls in search of a shelter out of the wind. On her way down, she traced her
fingernails along the wrinkles left in the canyon walls. She studied patterns as fluid as the
rain that differed in horizons as she descended until her feet hit the sandy
bottom. She put her hands in each jueco,
fascinated by the perfection of their curves. When she ran out of juecos, she moved on to find lightning
patterns in fissures. She even
hummed in them to differentiate them by the individual echoes they made. Once, while she was humming for
echoes, it bounced up and her eye followed it up to the precipice of the
gorge's crest. That was when she
noticed that the tone of the sky had changed slightly. The clouds were no longer silver from
moonlight but were darker against a weighted cobalt. The fragment of light that caught the echo was golden. She started to scramble up the walls to
get a better look. She made it back up to the surface
again and her eyes were flooded with a flaring copper dawn. Transfixed morning seeped under her
skin and triggered a photosynthesis of heat and voluptuous textures boiled over
into the canyon's hollow spaces, sprouting itches under the skin of her back. Coconut fibers like down lulled a
warmth as the edges grew full with gelatinous capsules of liquefied
laughter. A sun kiss touched her
forehead as she was tucked under the comforter of her metamorphic bed. She closed her eyes, and with a smile
on her face, she began to dream in spectrums and of places the wind wanted to
bring her.
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