{Excerpt}

I find pencils within the cracks of sidewalks…weeks of this, on a daily basis, no matter where I walk…shallow graves where the bodies wait, for my fingers, for the touch of thoughts smudged in graphite, leaving a passing word, in porous concrete…breathless leaves that flee in the breeze…from pain I write, it’s the only way I feel free, where my screams can bleed, beneath childhood chalk outlines, and delicate pink petals of life…the only place I can admit, I’m too much like you, too much for my own good, and fuck it all if I can’t age long enough for Death to ask me to cover a few of His shifts…I must break this cancerous curse…quicker of wit and the lengths I’ll go…

My preservation and your displacement…Why are you there?…in the stone of a chimney, book-ended by lilacs, and sheer curtains…phantoms haunting in silhouettes, ashes of winters, ashes of you, and my fugitive youth…I always feared the pitted earth, falling in on itself, a tomb behind the greenhouse, where I’d stand and stare, feeling the breath leave my body, too much absence in that land, soil of solemnity, and the voice of the swing, chain and seat, legs kicking and pumping at my back…I surrender to the haunted house, ghosts peering out from my eyes, unaware they ever died, aware they’ve secreted immortality…

He loved me incapable of words, grew resentful of my voice…he once told me…I’m unlike anything he’s ever known, unlike anything he ever knew could exist, it unnerved and disarmed him, holding me to his body, his strength a thing to behold, in the dark, asking me what colors I see, breathless and spent, I broke free…within an arms reach, and in the human space, within the vertices of cartilage and bone, maps of veins and unfathomed depths, I opened him to the ugliness, to the feral beast, and he called me incomprehensible and just shy of evil…he rested, easy and at peace, and with dawn he rejoined the chatter of the masses…but for me, a night’s long contemplation, I don’t live permission nor approval…I spent a morning of pen to paper, to dismantle, to resurrect, to be exactly what I was meant to be…

Some people find coins, messages from the other side, masquerading monetarily…some spy feathers and wings that whisper, greetings from the deceased…I find pencils, in cracks of sidewalks, and hope they’ve been able to say all that had needed to be said, even if their last words, take shape in the soles of feet, beneath constellations of stories that remain, a light years distance, in security, in the space of concrete seams…

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018