An Alchemy of Words

Galleon

"Galleon"

There are crosses embedded in these walls

beneath the crumbling flesh

of plaster.

There are bones, pounded in

like nails or twisted

like the helix of a screw.

When I am alone here,

I am an angel in a centrifuge,

wings batting like a futile moth,

abdomen caked in paint.

I am a child on a carnival ride,

raped by fear,

burnt in offering.

I pick up the phone, pretend to talk,

the dial tone reminiscent of an old friend,

a comforting voice I remember lost.

Naked in bed with socks,

alone, entangled in my sheets,

sweating in the winter's glistening heat,

hunched over as if grotesque,

I dream that I am the creaking beams

of a Spanish galleon,

1534,

hold empty, mast shattered to a stump,

sails in ashen tatters salty wet, now,

on my skin.

˗ˏˋ・。☆.・゜✭・.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
✫・゜・。.・。. ✭

I studied 16th Century History in university, with a focus on contact-era Latin America and the rise of radical Anabaptism in Europe. The two topics are largely unrelated except in the often dark and deeply disturbing nature of the subject matter. It was a time of disruptive change to European (and Central American) understandings of both heaven and earth, a cognitive dissonance that led, time and again, to wholesale descents into depravity.

I fell sick with the fever one winter, my bones twisted in pain, my flesh drowned in tangles of sweaty sheets, my dreams filled by crosses in the architecture, Renaissance carnivals, and a tempestuous voyage across the sea. When the fever finally broke, I was indelibly marked by the shadows of a poem.