Ginna Luck

I am sick again, blotted out between the bed sheets, smoothed over and floral printed. A never laundered towel hangs on the post at my feet. It is a normal Monday. The throb of street lights kick in my ears, and rain drips from the gutters. I cannot walk my kids the one hundred yards to the bus stop anymore, and I do not know how to tolerate the end the things. I crack my window. Cold air touches the dip between my collarbone and neck where the skin is the thinnest, where it seems like death is very possible. So much has slipped out and into silt murk. I see myself the end of September rain after a summer has gone so heartlessly, snuffed out, dark again. The bare trees click; the bark, slick and dark. The hours of the day flash open like a small fist trying to grab hold of a sun warmed landscape. I wonder if anyone’s image of themselves is ever so clear it comes off into their eyes.

I arrive in the middle of a desert made entirely of my skin blown through the high, cold atmosphere and thrown down as dirt and dust and wind blown sand. Thick clouds of heat move like hollow bodies opening and re-opening to the light of a thunderstorm burned into red mountainous rocks. The landscape is an open casket breaking into pieces. It honors how one single sound can be so brittle, like how it feels to stand and struggle forward despite the trauma of mountains. Sometimes I hear my voice saying silently to whomever:  slowly, slowly.  I strike a match and set fire to a tree. The branches curl up and explode in the air like a live star; the flames thick and too hot snap light against the sky and create ten thousand sunsets. Yes, there is all this absurd beauty. From out of my arms ash and smoke blow freely; curl up into a hand, a limb or a wrist that waves and then breaks across a desert of my skin and into some naked and howling future. I’ve never really seen anyone die.

A sound is made when everything inside / grows lighter and lighter / when in the world and then / into more a stranger in a world / I failed to imagine without you / your silence is a sound / off the back of your head / my hands are there to unhurt it / as not to leave it to sorrow / there is enough sorrow in leaving / there is enough sorrow in a sunset / a light that marks the world for departure / it is far too easy to come apart / to fall beneath the things / we are meant to climb over / we are more sky than we are bone / we are affected by the moon / I can’t blame you for the brevity of things / while we are young and still without rain / the loss of life / is flickering under our feet / you bend down and kiss the sand / if you could love me more easily / you would love me more easily.