From 'I am writing you from afar'

Some time ago, I must have died. Now I am simply on their spindle.

Or nature gnashes its teeth, chews me, wishes to crack my husk. Of course.

Tenderness is outlawed.

____

They stole the girls to prevent them from reading. From writing. They stole them away from words,
to make them into bodies. Of virgins they could enter like gods. But the girls refused their
annunciations.

To grow up is to become mute.

The girls wipe them off of their mouths.

Do not cut off my hands, my tongue.

Henrí, can’t we rewrite that fairy tale?

____

They make loud noises to smash the thoughts in your head, because they are suffering in their big flesh, buried alive in it, and they see how you are made purely of strings, therefore musical. How the wind and air pass through you. This they cannot bear. So they drown out your reveries with their aggressive noises, which they claim are beautiful and edifying. In fact, these noises are rocks with which they bang on your skull — but from the inside, where it is even more of a violation.

They have taken up residence inside you, and they will not leave until you slay them. You aren’t
violent, but you might have to become violent. Dismemberment flowers into imagination.

This is the Fall.

I miss my garden, my mama, my books, my swing, my copse.

But it’s said that to sustain memories here is what is most dangerous.

____

Having been transformed into a fist, my only hope is to unclench.

That, before anything else.

____

They cannot tell you the answer because they lack electricity. The electricity that erratically anoints you.

Author note: Portions of this text have previously been published in pallaksch. pallaksch. no. 3 (2017).