the space above my ears.

She, The Grass

Seven other worlds I have come and gone for.

Fourteen velvet tongues.

Thirty-eight minutes left of light.

Filling in and filling up, accumulating over a lack of time, things are aching more slowly every performance.

The miners' wrists are tired and they come to me with bruised hands asking for a cure to humanity.

I'm the wizard, of course, but I can only conjure up the things they never ask for.

"Hello sir, how can I ease your suffering?

Would you like a hat? A sword? A yellow bird?

A bus ticket to get back to the gas pump where you might have dropped one very vital bit of somebody you love?"

They tell me stop, stop it.

I apologize because I am obligated.

"I'm sorry it's so out of control, I'm sorry this place is glitching endlessly like Mars in a nightmare.

Rain falls upwards there, splattering across the black skies like paint.

Every resident must kiss the street every time they leave their home, then climb the rungs of that ladder that lead sideways toward the basement.

Worst of all, everything is hidden under a cabana where some false, empty land is pictured and our kind assumes there is nothing more to the story."

"I see you are feigning shock," I say bitterly, "but try and feel it.

Feel that otherworldly presence, that deterioration, each passing moment as you drift apart, flaking off and away into oblivion."

He will die, eventually, probably around the time when only my feet are left and I will take his place like I was always meant to.

No one will know it, though, and there will be no deeper meaning.

No skeleton under the skin, only sand, only heaviness.

No bones in the fingers, spindly and winding and thin, dancing like gazelles on the moon.

Curved nails, long and with miles of grooves,

Shining with far too much sweat for someone so young.

Cold, insincere, and made by an artisan not native to heaven.

The raw, skinless parts are concealed, but the finish suffocates all those scars.

Still, they think I want this.
These days, anyone could be caught, and exceptions belonging only to those without the capacity to see past what is immediately before them.

Free of whatever symptoms this premeditated cure will bring.

Those who faithfully manufacture and distribute a vaccination to a disease that still has yet to lay its lips upon the first martyr.

Those who have never had more than one needle in their back at a time.

Those who are privileged in the sense that they are unprivileged,

All because of how intelligence is being quantified this week, or who we choose to worship today, or who defines shame tomorrow.

We just take refuge upon these blistering mountain top, close enough to that chariot to burst into flames at any moment.

Crooked houses in wayward neighborhoods leaning against one another like a group of sad, tired soldiers.

The kitchen inside one house in particular where I have come home and am participating in a screaming match with a very lovely looking boy who's storybook features are twisted and gnarled with unrestrained rage.

Hair pasted to my forehead and neck with moisture, water falling in small rivers from my head to my knees, I am trying to tell him how the bathtub sprouted arms and dragged me underneath the water until I saw stars.

He does not listen, just shouts to something behind me that it is my fault this house has gone mad.

As he shatters dishes and hurls burning candles at the wall, a horrifically animalistic expression plaguing his face, I have the unexplainable urge to slit his throat and crawl inside.

I don't do that, though, I banish the ghosts from my mind just long enough to strike him over the head with a boot and drag him out front into the cool and sobering frosty yard.

I sit by him, shivering in a towel until he comes to, and when he does, opening up those crystalline blues eyes that have only recently become strangers to me, he has nothing to say.

He doesn't need to, I can taste the coppery guilt pouring off of him like an avalanche.

Silently, we vow never to enter the house again.

He kisses my knuckles and we exchange forgiveness.

We leave without saying goodbye.

On our hike through the prairie south of the house, tall grass shields our tired eyes from the sun.

We are content as we roam through this maze we believe to be nothing more than an overgrown backyard.

The towering blades are a blessing to us at first, and we thank Her for sheltering us from Helios, who has decidedly become our enemy.

Something about our expression of gratefulness offends her, for I blink just once and my young, beautiful Grimm Brother has disappeared.

I hear him call for me, but every phoneme he utters echoes from a different direction.

I call for him, but it feels like every time his name leaves my lips, he becomes one step further away.

Calling becomes screaming again, only this time it is a suffocating desperation for each other.

I jump, hurling myself upward toward the sky in the hopes I might catch just a glimpse of him, praying he is still searching for me, needing him like I've never needed something before.

She keeps us here, toys with us for months until we both surrender, at least half-dead in spirit.

Only then does She set us free.

We meet again in Her center and the reunion feels nauseatingly familiar.

He looks a little older, a few more rings around his eyes, angrier at fate.

He looks worn, maybe a little harder, but I have never seen someone smile so beautifully before.

We know we will never get out of here, and we are happy with this, so we draw blueprints in the dirt of the palace we will build here.

It's tall and stone to hold us up high enough to see over Her, encode Her vastness.

We live in something only slightly short of paradise, limbs tangled in the tower's highest room.

With cartoons on in the kitchen, we imagine the rose petals on our lips, static on our tongues, lungs filled with fictional water.

We roll our lips first between our own teeth, and then each other's.

I watch him lick that skin-soft rose petal, wetting the edge just enough to seal the leaves inside.

He kisses it once and suddenly we are dancing, suddenly we are melting into one another, absorbing the surrealism of it all, the excess beauty lingering on each other's bodies.

I tell him how I used to worry that love in my family skips every fourth generation, just because it seems like one of those things set out exclusively for me to be cursed by.

He murmurs against my neck that it is not love, this thing She has taught us, but something that has been so far undefined.

"We are rooted to the Earth, and therefore, rooted in each other," he says. "We are rooted to and by Her."

"Yes," I whisper, and at this moment, we sink to the core together, further away from Mars than anyone I ever knew.