the space above my ears.

Breath of God

Collapsed on a wheel, a girl erased from history awaits the dawn.

Blind, lead by a goat with malicious intent, her hero has long walked past in his journey to recover her.

He still walks, follows his goat, clinging to and trusting that frayed knot;

And the goat, knowing nothing but the cupcake he has been promised should he lead the hero to the end of the line, trudges west.

Blue aliens watch from above, sipping their drinks and shaking their heads.

The goat has led the hero into the garden of Eden where Gabriel waits, hands clasped behind his back.

The angel breathes, closes his eyes.

The hero vanishes in an explosion like a supernova.

One alien reluctantly hands the other a crumpled bill.

From the ashes, a tree sprouts, a willow.

The girl, forgotten, rots and becomes the Earth.

From her bones, a tree sprouts, a willow.

Years later in a cottage equidistant from the pair of trees, a family is saying grace.

There are two siblings, a brother and a sister, who both long for something bigger than crabapple trees and flour-coated roaches.

Praying silently for adventure, to go out and make love to this white-watered world.

Live in every crystalline village lining the stairway to the beyond.

The brother has an unshakeable feeling they are missing somebody every mealtime when they take their seats at the dining table, and it's this night that he realizes it's him who is missing.

The sister, who is only half prophet, is fighting with herself to stay quiet. 

The empty, sickly vacancy between the two lovers who know the story and the pair of children who think they want to know it is thick and gloomy.

It tightens their collars, causing them to tug at the necks of their shirts and shift uncomfortably until no one can take it anymore.

The mother and father retreat to their room, either side of the bed a completely different place than the other.

After dinner, the children creep out of their rooms into the garden.

Crouched behind the bushes among the premature green tomatoes, they ask each other the same obvious questions in unison;

"When is it our turn?

When will a tree call out to us, beckoning us to the angel's land?

Pink and alive and singing under the north star, innately good just because it was made by a thing whose reputation speaks for itself.

The token species is always to be trusted.

When will we be called somewhere else?"
Little does the daughter know, however, she is to replace the damsel who fertilizes the tree south of the sacred one, nourishing the gnarled branches reaching out, weak and angry.

She's all spaced-out expressions, cheap metaphors.

It's not about her, though, none of this is.

It's about the goat, incinerated and erased.

It's about the moon and her melancholy songs sung only on nights where the sky was black enough to see every star scattered like dust across that onyx scene.

It is about them and how they were stabbed in the sternum with the same knife, small and new, rubies encrusted in the silver handle,

And how they were, objectively, deemed guilty for the death of the hero.

How, without motive or means, they reduced a legend to nothing, a soul shackled to the bed like a feral animal,

Snarling, cursing, spitting, black-eyed.

Decaying quickly in the places where he once screamed with light, telling fables and prophecies of his own humble glory.

And having inherited all the blood bled out for him, he is bursting at the seams of his skin,

Suffering for all that carnage that he never returned to the soil of the Earth.

He cries that fortune taunts him as if he's even important enough to be bothered with at this point.

And when he watches from the window as the moon is executed, no one will hear him admitting her innocence in a cracked, defeated whisper behind those obsidian bars because he is simply much too late.

That, for him, will be the ultimate and very final state of dereliction.