“The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.”
Once they are buried under dirt, people become place. Flesh becomes earth, geography. They become enmapped, acquire fixed coordinates. That afternoon, she would be going to see her father, that patch of soil to the left of the cemetery entrance, third row. A momentary spasm took hold of her left eye. She slapped it shut.
There’s a place
In the woods
Where the dead come alive
And the living melt into the foliage.
How can a word simultaneously hold within it innumerable worlds and something as intimate as a single touch, many years ago? A sense of self and calm, several waking nightmares ago.
Anna’s toes dug into the earth of the dead zone, her ankles trespassing into the no man’s land snaking across the island from east to west. Her breasts, that lay safely within government-controlled territory, were cushioned by the gentle slopes of dry weeds collapsing onto the torrid landscape.
As the world closed in, the sunflowers bloomed.
The thing about the body is that it is an archive
and the thing about trauma is that it drills
an active volcano into the chest.
This place of pure pain. This place of pure contradiction. This place of pure fiction. This place where nothing is pure.
in the grass that cracks open concrete
and in the seeds that never found soil
but found sea
imperishable testaments to
perishable promises
The mother dies. Or maybe she kills herself. Or maybe she is killed. The father locks the two-year-old child in a room. Covers up the windows. The father believes that the child, deprived of language, will begin to speak the language of God.
This unreal country 