By S. A. Arleyn
I am closing my eyes on the subway, and I can no longer detect if I am moving forward or backwards. The rushing blankness of a missing reality remade. An utterly uncertain world. How do you tell the child that still lives there — somewhere — that what they want most is worse for them than falling out of a tree? That bones regrow, and hearts heal, but the yearning for toxicity will never leave. Like living the rest of my life without a drop of alcohol. I want the hands of the dark man, the messed up girl, the quick rush downward. To live the rest of my nights with the horror-movie spine-chill as you wrap your delicate long hands around the base of me. And tear. That’s how art works, the rending spaces: it’s alway something new that holds out, that becomes the next wave. And I rode all of them, beautifully. I found them in the deep, and losing them became an addiction, a roaring, a splitting; a cacophony of words.