for Lisa,
and for Lynn
I feel like making a fiction tonight, some electric charge in a still, black hollow, some thin spark of excitement. I imagine the curling sea sucking away at the ground I inhabit, my skirts spun and gritty around my thighs. The electricity is a shaft of light from the fat moon over me, a column of white intensity penetrating the open cavity of my mouth, a thick tongue dripping frenzy to coat the noises of my throat. The nails of my fingers are the colors of coral, sharp and dangerous to the fabric of air around me. Charged and immobile, I brace myself against the winds, where they are containing me, capturing the cool flesh of my shoulders, locking into the blown corruption of my hair, striking against me like shells against gun powder, threatening explosion and the sweet release of sudden invisibility. Fire! Ignite, explode, burst the protective colors of deception, crack the mortar, split the rock, set me free.
© 1980, 1996 by Canéla Analucinda Jaramillo.
This piece originally appeared in Somnambulist Volume 1.
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Original Graphics © 1996 by
Jim Davis-Rosenthal
and by Canéla Analucinda Jaramillo
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