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| cracks in the plaster don't solve themselves. |
Her glasses rest on a bed of burst veins. Her eyes, too, are framed by red wreaths. Her cheeks, ruddy as apples, porous as winter pears, fold into neatly sectioned curtains. They rest beneath a sheer veneer of powder. Her lucky nose is shaped like ancient currency, falsely indicative of prosperity. She looks upward, and I see cross-stitches of crimson. Still, she makes a smile for me.
Her sponsor says she'll burst, soon -- a wrathful grape grown heavy. The vessels in her brain will pop and seep; erasing attachments to us, self, God. Like her tormentor, she'll live on a mattress, unfruitful and irritable, trapped in a tiresome cycle, watching the toilet leak and irritate the paint downstairs. But she protests. She shouts back to her critic-confidant, then takes a pill, the same ones prescribed to her centanarian father.
It's the weight of fifteen years that rolls her shoulders forward, leaving a thick boulder where neck should be. Knobbed fingers reach for the crack in the paint. Back arches, boulder cracks. Then she hangs from to the deep indent of the life-line cut into her palms.
Rewind. She hangs onto the deep indent of the life-line cut into her palms.
The canister of diuretics flies into the waste-bin. She seeks a plumber for the leaky pipes in her body, nimble needles to knit them back together, a seamstress to smooth over crimson cross-stitches: he who knit her in her mother's womb.
Volatility dwindles so swiftly that she feels emboldened to approach him. She kneels by the mattress, brushes some hair out of way. A whisper, a nod. A vow to wake, after a moment's more rest. Now, she argues, and tears the crier from the crypt. The pair plunges once again into a sea of code and connections, special skills and speculation. While the grapes are young, they guard; at the peak of ripeness, they reap. The cycle reverses.
Her lips are limber and limpid; her glance glows white. Time tastefully fulfills her nose's prophecy, never granting excess, but heeding her need. There's a glow, matte and steady, that inflates the cheeks. Her eyes tuck away the yuletide laurels gules, and peer through patient lenses. Those eyes that watched the paint peel and broke free from trance.
Rewind. She hangs onto the deep indent of the life-line cut into her palms.
The canister of diuretics flies into the waste-bin. She seeks a plumber for the leaky pipes in her body, nimble needles to knit them back together, a seamstress to smooth over crimson cross-stitches: he who knit her in her mother's womb.
Volatility dwindles so swiftly that she feels emboldened to approach him. She kneels by the mattress, brushes some hair out of way. A whisper, a nod. A vow to wake, after a moment's more rest. Now, she argues, and tears the crier from the crypt. The pair plunges once again into a sea of code and connections, special skills and speculation. While the grapes are young, they guard; at the peak of ripeness, they reap. The cycle reverses.
Her lips are limber and limpid; her glance glows white. Time tastefully fulfills her nose's prophecy, never granting excess, but heeding her need. There's a glow, matte and steady, that inflates the cheeks. Her eyes tuck away the yuletide laurels gules, and peer through patient lenses. Those eyes that watched the paint peel and broke free from trance.
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