Fossilized
Fused with a flat mental sky she charred hours with used, dead matches. All timid squalor, fussy haggling between impulse and intrusive clarity, wine doused her back into slatted mumble of day that drained her down the sink of another benign sunrise. A splinter throbbed, stabbed her through movement and calendars. Actions petrified.
Catatonia
The railing, littered with gripped stench of frenzied maybes, the erratic pulse of discolored being. A space blanked in on itself said, ‘oust’ ‘dishevel the river’ ‘paralyzed by desire’ until Lorazapem; blue code of the pharmaceutical kind, turned sideways and upside down from a German documentary into a Disney cartoon.
Salvage
• Ramped down into a dumpster of the past. Take a hefty inhale. Smell the filth of fingered histories. How much childhood can be buried? See-saw stomping over wrath and decay, whole family portraits propped up in kitty litter, remnants of food in Styrofoam, clothes, toasters, printers, sad decorations, and brutalized dolls.
• The rancid plagues of family albums that reek out of tired closets and cupboards. There’s a beauty. A girl, maybe ten-years-old, slung as far away from Dad in the photo, as he presses his body against her, laughing at her airborne angst.
• Memorial of the burned body. So much easier to roll and cigarette.
Buried
Woods, woods, woods.
Parking garage?
Wood-burning stove.
Eyes yellow as a fulfilled liver.
Basemented terror reeks of a whole genre.
That’s when somebody else rocks in.
Otherwise, it’s a goddamn curve I can’t see ahead.
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.