The Mother of All Queens

This Luciferian tongue, this taste for salt and fire.

This home outside the cave.

So it's a story not a promise then?

Landslides ruining familiar passage, forcing us into scary detours.

While in another sense, my heart is an angel's heart, and my body a boy's just trying its wings on an empty beach. 

Snow blurs the only map left, mutes our voices as we hike deeper into the swamp where my father first threatened to leave me for dead.

Deeps we pretend are deeper than they are.

The Fluorescent Telepathic Octopus is the mother of all queens, including you.

Bluebirds in late November, a troubling loveliness notwithstanding the sentence prior to the sentence prior. 

That fucking basket floated in muddy reeds a long time before it became a manger then a hospital on fire in Burlington, Vermont.

At critical junctures he did not hold me, being deprived of a mother to teach him how, and so now my grandmother has to leave the company of the other shades to try and make clear to me that no matter how hard I try and demonstrate otherwise, I am loved. 

Chrisoula healing us both in and out of the pantry. 

Still Corners' The Trip.

Why do we insist that trauma is not the cause of suffering? And why do we need the one who suffers to be responsible for their suffering by failing to heal their suffering? 

Stop making us watch the water for signs of monsters coming up from the graves to which you consigned them - this is not our war.

We sleep on wasp eggs now. 

At night Chrisoula touches my cheek and murmurs, "ghosts are feelings you're still scared to feel." 

Ways in which there is only one kiss.

Something we are together, even though one of us doesn't know it yet.