How To Kill A Crooked Ward

Oh, I feel warm. I feel warm like the sun even in the darkest of rooms. I am me again.

I want to know peace for while, if that’s alright. If the world can spare it for someone like me.

Living with my mother is like living in my office. She is my boss, my judge, my jury—my executioner. I hear her performance reviews of me in the living room, sat comfortably next to her easing into the armrests. I however can’t afford to be comfortable, I live on the clock and there is only a pinpoint for my big toe to precariously perch on as I teeter in and out of her good graces.

Smaller hearts beat faster, ever faster. Run rabbit run ever faster, ever faster. I’ll cut your finger cut your thumb, wear a plaster, wear a plaster. I’ll tell your secrets to the room, such disaster, such disaster.

Forgive me gentle heart, I didn’t mean to be a bastard.

In the blue hour, we find each other. Our voices are the only that exist.

Shadows cast under noses, in sullen cheeks and eye sockets galore.

Highlights on the rims of sharp roses, with thorns that grow ceiling to floor.

Nothing quite so soft and unforgiving, as the woman that waits at your door.

These javelins, these poles sharp at their tips that cascade through me as water, do they hold me up or affix me to the ground?

Would my body be strong enough to stand without them? Would I still know how? The stacking of the feet, the ankles, and the calves. The shuffling against dirt and grain to the steady rhythm of progress.

Fires burn in the shape of mountains, mere miles from my porch step.

The vegetation cries in red and grey.

My feet in my front yard grass ground themselves there, against the peeking patches of dirt hiding beneath the stiff yellowing blades, as if nature itself is afraid to look at its destruction. I cannot look away.

Our dry seasons get drier, rain will become myth, and water legend. I wonder when it will be my turn to record the destruction, to tell others of what happened to me, and not hear of what happened to others. I wonder if that day will be today.

The black beetle lies on its back, stomach burning by the tips of the sun’s low hanging fingers. I flip him over with my broom four times, and he can’t manage to stay upright. It could be the wind knocking him over, or the cracks in man made stone unfamiliar to his nature bound feelers. Or it could be that he just wants to die and I have to let him.

I watch the climate crisis march to my doorstep, and

invite itself into my living room.

The blaze is outrageous, but not nearly as much as his friend, the politician.

He insists the fire isn’t here, that my brown felt couches have always been black and crackling,

That the water from my kitchen faucet has always been boiling from its spout.

I watch my world turn to ashes, and the fire take its leave, and the politician smiles with heavy pockets.

Insisting he wasn’t paid to let him in in the first place.