{Excerpt}

…treading the dark of ocean, horizon line a rough handed cadaver seam, panic surges in the realization that shoreline sanctuaries are a lifeline not extended to my peripheral view, the viable world has been substituted for a dilated pupil…lips brined and muscles in scream, I hear the siren call to shipwreck, wrapping my limbs in a tidal pull, subduing my fight with the rationale of pity for bipedals, a movement in synchronicity with a zipper interlocking predicts my capsizing…a violent tug, stealing my final exhale with a waterlogged gasp, and silence is pressurized, blood loss is ambitious, and I’m not fit for survival…a solo mission—my death—this feeding of my flesh, exposing hollows where vitals should be, I should be frantic in a last ditch effort, but I let the beast take hold and turn my skin inside out, the deep’s bioluminescence exposing the glyphs that write of me as a civilization…a deathknell of sacrilege, and my mind flashes with vice, my frayed body caught and released on repeat in a scissor grip of eyelashes, a baritone voice sounds from my oxygen rich hollows, and I know it’s time to commune with my next death… …a suffocation—cord about my neck —feet numbing in the vain thrashing, hair bending with the steel of January twilit atmosphere, where pines whisper gossip to the wind, their boughs creaking with the weight of retribution, my arms bound at my back, hands a pinned bouquet of ineffectiveness, fingers freeing airborne sigils in hex, the executioners cloak tailored from my mourning dress…I am an extension of the hangman’s noose, I don’t seek to escape this death, I intend to take a life with it…the bruising about my body, paints me in the light of an unforgiving God, and in the final throes of adrenaline, my legs clasp about his throat, constricting my victim within my thigh grip, his irises diminishing to the expanse of his pupils, and a portal—with which to meet my consecutive death—opens, my hollows raise a rattle, and with that summons, my toes tunnel into the depths of his skull…dense soil cakes beneath my nails, shale slicing at my soles, my progression jamming my knuckles, as I morph in form, shedding my mammalian hide, and exhuming myself from the grave… …

E.A. O'Connell. January 2019