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Cardan’s fingers dig into my back. He’s trembling, and whether it is from
ebbing magic or horror, I am not sure. But he holds me as though I am the
only solid thing in the world.
Tristan, 8 years old.
The horror he saw in her eyes killed something inside him. His jaw trembled as he stepped towards her, wanting to rush into her arms and have her tell him everything would be okay.
She jerked back from him, her mouth agape in terror. "Get away from me."
I’m not Brandon King. I’m not the broken entity who sees black ink instead of his reflection in the mirror. Not the weak man who’s more often than not swallowed by disgusting nausea and the terrifying notion of nothingness.
I’m just me.
His lotus flower. His Prince Charming. His baby.
Sayfa 231Kitabı okudu
“Because the butterfly’s yellow wing flickering in black mud was a word stranded by its language. Because no one else was coming—& I ran out of reasons.
So I gathered fistfuls of ash, dark as ink, hammered them into marrow, into a skull thick enough to keep the gentle curse of dreams. Yes, I aimed for mercy— but came only close as building a cage around the heart. Shutters over the eyes. Yes, I gave it hands despite knowing that to stretch that clay slab into five blades of light, I would go too far. Because I, too, needed a place to hold me. So I dipped my fingers back into the fire, pried open the lower face until the wound widened into a throat,
until every leaf shook silver with that god -awful scream & I was done.
& it was human.”
Sayfa 85Kitabı okudu
“That mercy is small but the earth is smaller. / Because I stopped apologizing into visibility. Because this body is my last address. Because right now, just before morning, when it’s blood-blue & the terror incumbent. Because the sound of bike spokes heading home at dawn was unbearable. Because the hills keep burning in California. Through red smoke, singing. Through the singing, a way out.
Because only music rhymes with music. / The train whistle heard through an opened window after a nightmare.
My mother, standing at the mirror, putting on blush before heading to chemo.
Sleeping in the back seat, leaving the town that broke me, whole. Early snow falling from a clear, blushed sky.
As if called.”
Sayfa 82Kitabı okudu
No, let us rather choose
Armed with hell flames and fury all at once
O’er heaven’s high towers to force resistless way,
Turning our tortures into horrid arms
Against the torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his almighty engine he shall hear
Infernal thunder, and for lightning see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his angels; and his throne itself
Mixed with Tartarean sulphur, and strange fire,
His own invented torments. But perhaps
The way seems difficult and steep to scale
With upright wing against a higher foe.
Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful lake benumb not still,
That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat: descent and fall
To us is adverse.
Sayfa 47Kitabı okudu
Will I ever wake up and look in the mirror and feel good about the person staring back at me?
The Death of a Roach
…when the last fig falls and we are pruned from light,
our golden ladies gleaned of love—
infest us with the mercy
of stone.
calisthenic tempest, kingly pain
the flowers held kisses and blossoms
crackling with lightning power against our
pinioned brain; I watch the roach
as prophets of exile
That first time they made love, that first touch after years of separation, felt like a curtain of fog lifting to reveal the naked longing beneath. Finally the mind, with its endless fears, and the regrets and sorrows, quitened to whisper. And it was their bodies remembered what they had long forgotten.  pulsing with a force, they had thought could belong only to youth, their youth. The flesh had a power of record of its own memory, that tattooed on skin, layer upon layer. It is a map, the body of an ex-lover , pulling you into its depths and bringing you back to a part of yourself that you thought had been left behind sometimes, somewhere. It is a mirror too, though chipped and cracked, showing all the ways you have changed; and , like every mirror it dreams of becoming whole again.
Sayfa 254
By ten in the morning half a dozen native women and their children were sitting under the trees. If she disliked native men, she loathed the women. She hated the exposed fleshiness of them, their soft brown bodies and soft bashful faces that were also insolent and inquisitive, and their chattering voices that held a brazen fleshy undertone. She could not bear to see them sitting there on the grass, their legs tucked under them in that traditional timeless pose, as peaceful and uncaring as if it did not matter whether the store was opened, or whether it remained shut all day and they would have to return tomorrow. Above all, she hated the way they suckled their babies, with their breasts
hanging down for everyone to see; there was something in their calm
satisfied maternity that made her blood boil. ‘Their babies hanging on to
them like leeches,’ she said to herself shuddering, for she thought with
horror of suckling a child. The idea of a child’s lips on her breasts made
her feel quite sick; at the thought of it she would involuntarily clasp her
hands over her breasts, as if protecting them from a violation. And since
so many white women act like her, turning with relief to the bottle, she was in good company, and did not think of herself, but rather of these black women, as strange; they were alien and primitive creatures with ugly desires she could not bear to think about
Sayfa 90Kitabı okuyacak
He believes himself to be all messed up, but he's the only one who's managed to keep me rooted in the present, the one who manages to stop my thoughts from racing in different directions with unnatural patterns.
As long as he comes back, I'll murder his demons one by one until he's ready to look in the mirror again.
Until he forgives himself for something that was not his fault.
I’m not Brandon King. I’m not the broken entity who sees black ink instead of his reflection in the mirror. Not the weak man who’s more often than not swallowed by disgusting nausea and the terrifying notion of nothingness.
I’m just me.
His lotus flower. His Prince Charming. His baby.
Sympathetic Horror
From that sky, bizarre and livid,
Distorted as your destiny,
What thoughts into your empty soul
Descend? Answer me, libertine.
— Insatiably avid
For the dark and the uncertain,
I shall not whimper like Ovid
Chased from his Latin paradise.
Skies torn like the shores of the sea,
You are the mirror of my pride;
Your vast clouds in mourning
Are the black hearses of my dreams,
And your gleams are the reflection
Of the Hell which delights my heart.
