Harpies
I want to write of girls free and vicious like lions, tearing at branches and beating silver backed chests. I want to talk of little girls of fire and spit! After weighted walking, they’re running through the streets. War calling. Jumping into space.

Something’s in my skin and I can’t get it out. I wriggles and writhes like an insidious worm through the pockets of my bone. It fastens my muscle to my flesh. No matter how much I stretch I can’t flex it out.

Toe flexing sinews.



Something in my mother died last month. Today I looked up, and the weight of sorrow and fatigue in her eyes was enough to discern even through her glasses. This is not a poetic line. This is not a description quoting the typical tale of distraught women surviving. This is my own mother, and her eyes are heavy, and I didn’t even notice, and it pains me. When exactly did this occur? It could’ve been years ago! This ghost, hanging in a droop, in the groove of her wrinkles. It’s sick. I missed it. To realize that you haven’t been awake, you haven’t been watching, you haven’t checked, haven’t turned around to check what is now or what is home. Yesterdays left and today I found my mother wrenching, quietly, as she watched over me, like she always has, and now I’m pained. From the pits of my being something rang so horribly hollow. A wind blew inside me, all throughout. That is what it is to be sick. Hollowness of being. An emptying.





Dream Slip.
Somewhere near the beginning of time, we lived in agricultural peace amongst warriors akin to Gods. These demi-Gods watched over our villages, and were a source of beauty, grace, and pride. They served as representatives for our lands, and utilized their talents in service and aid. They were celebrated as swans amongst birds. There was no jealousy.
This peace however was new, and proceeded a time of great violence and bloodshed. A time where brute strength and malicious wit was valued over honor and understanding. A time when breaking another man paid off more than showing him kindness.
In these dark times, the demi-Gods were employed by their city-states in the sole interest of slaughter. In an unending struggle for power, their superior skill, agility, mental, and athletic prowess was prized above everything because it gave them the ability to black out life. Their divine gift gave fat senators a right to rule, their divine gift beat upon the heads of those who cannot stand against the wind. People were ripped from the plots of their life.
Powerful yet malleable these warriors were weak, as most creatures are, against the ever tireless and agile hands of human manipulation. So we shaped them to resemble hell’s fury, we shaped them to bore out holes reflecting our emptiness. We let them loose. We said kill. They killed.
But these brutal times grew tired, worn, and eventually ceased. Governments failed as they always do. Man returned to the earth to taste the salt on his lips and feel the sweat on his brow. He returned to the sensations born under the sun that unfailing nourishes everyone. Steady hands and quiet labor. He forgot his dreams of dominance, traded black for blue sky, and violence rippled further and further away until it was only a shiver in our memories, only when the wind whispered.

To be continued…