Eris Reads The Star

When I go crazy, I go in all directions. I lick glitter slick as glass, let lights tremble over the sacrificed stage. Smog unhooks every star, silver egg still intact. Smoldering violet is what I claim, a war of almosts and underneaths, of darkness and neon rain, of sugar-spiked liquor and bars exhuming the rimfire sweat of tight-rope nymphettes. I rise like flames of well-licked kerosene, trains derailing into orbit. Girls like me melt into alumina, girls like me learn to lie with powder silk and push-up bras. Girls like me stop at nothing. The bullet shrieks-- Hysssssteria! We fly like corks freed! from blonde champagne and paper money out the window. We are the snakes that writhe, that coil around grenadine-soaked tongues and, in confession, are more likely to ask where when why then to laugh in the face of smooth-shaven re-demp-tion. Cadillacs promise us to crash in brilliance and bone. Our pale savior plays our song backward but the static fuzz of blackbox television is knee-weak under our teeth, begging for filth. We are beautiful and corrupt, cathedrals painted black. Melodies of shpwrecks & sunken diamond carousels, a language of disorder, of dance, of chandeliers that ache to pivot as pendulums do, as wandering crystals flow in darkness flirting until the light & I dance dance dance in our own kind of swing, in our own kind of sweat, in our own kind of blues, in the myths of what excesses we are known to crave, sugar blood and fire, inside, not out. A waxing-manic dollhouse painted red, red, red through millions of pebbled beads, thick as the plush guts of a pomegranate and the myths with our names. Girls like me belong to no one, deserts have been born from our throats. I am the pearl Swathed in spit, too tart for the oyster- restless-I am not fit. Forum Magazine, 2012