“It’s a hard armor we wear waiting for trains and saviors to happen.”–Lorri Jackson
Let this rummage of uterine captivity undress itself until years of a life unchord my spine, rot the teeth, and styrofoam the skin. Alcohol recognizes me. Drugs are just closer cousins. Basement vantage breaks open gray through the bruised pane in a neighborhood in a city. Blurred tattoos, hairspray, and leakage of brute rage blister some kind of forward movement. Anyone watch the act of change scare itself? I’m fluent in gaping cracks poling me with swelling innards and transient bleeds.
No, I did recognize time grit my tailspin in a sick embrace. It sustains me. The dead flower collection is a preamble to beauty’s naked leer of misery. Doesn’t everyone simmer daylight until it evaporates, wait for the burner of yellow sky to swelter the inner thighs? Sticky and half-baked hope of what becomes just another pock-marked skeleton drunk on its own marrow.
Meg Tuite is author of a novel-in-stories, Domestic Apparition, a short story collection, Bound By Blue, and won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, as well as five chapbooks of short fiction, flash, and poetic prose. She teaches at Santa Fe Community College, is a senior editor at Connotation Press, an associate editor at Narrative Magazine, fiction editor here at Bending Genres Journal, and editor of eight anthologies. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines, over fifteen anthologies, nominated nine times for the Pushcart Prize, five-time Glimmer Train finalist, placed 3rd in Bristol Prize, and Gertrude Stein award finalist. Her blog: http://megtuite.com.