{Excerpt}

The sun…a blindfold of white light that slips about my eyes, mesmerizing my deficient skin with a heat that tingles and pricks my body alive with chills…my sight flashes a loss, staring upwards to the singular frosted glass pane, eliciting a burning haze that vaporizes the chicken wire threading, until the only barrier between my hunger and satiation are my fingers, splayed and shielding of their own accord, an arachnid transfiguration of shadow play and rearranging joints, slow and methodic, my fingers creep the expanse of light, severing the contact in a slight shade, leaving pits of endless depth in my vision, overflowing their essence into dilating pupils, bleeding their emergence into one, pitch blind eye…the prison should bar the likes of me from its wisdom, and yet, here I sit, in a cell of chipped paint, a white sullied by decades of cigarettes, humidity, and the sweat of ghosts that walk through walls…with no exit, save for the portal above, I visit with ideas of flee and notions of rot… …tobacco shreds from hand-rolled means to an end, vibrate into existence tiny red ants, thousands materialize from concrete pores, circling my tri-legged seat of unstable tilt, unwelcome at my toes where some burrow and bed beneath the nails, the remainder trail my legs in henna hued lines of determination, designing a survival plan that imparts question upon and behind my skin, traveling to my torso, encircling me, cinching me with fear, what of me would they covet and feed? Take back to their queen in honor? decomposing nourishment through winter…from the sunlight a rook’s talons can be heard, catching hold of a metal frame in a startling din, its tongue clicking shamefully at my submission, a crackling purr that unsettles the balance, I keep on the seat, I open my mouth to speak, its low slung caw coaxing forth my tongue, extracting the essence of disquietude, and then a scream from its throat that robs me of internal and external sound, deranging my equilibrium, imploding the skylight in a downpour of geometric shards, one severing my tongue, as the ants pick up their pace and infest the vacant tomb of catalogued words, cultivating their nature between my teeth, setting me into a phase of unease, the blood rushing forth is a river of disbelief… …the sun saturates my face, calling me back to my hands in a sight-saving attempt, the draw of the sun’s excruciating power, sets the chair upon which I sit in a slow diabolical spin, a prism of intention held by one strand of translucent filament, my flesh filleting at the intensity of laser precision rays, voices escaping every cauterized laceration, each recognizably mine…the freedom in my multitudes, in my voice of body and limbs, in their purposes… …I am emerging…existing beyond my flesh and mouth… …

E.A. O'Connell. August 2019