eight crossed i's

Mammal

Raised by a witch and her twelve familiars, in a drafty cabin, in a cursed crab orchard, above the blue-black mud of Tricky’s Cove. A swamp witch with twelve cats and a Mexican mutt named Chico, taught me the symbols of sacred texts and children’s books, where the icy air around my ankles, and the red orange blast of the cooking furnace, and the library of spines, and the dust bunnies silent, lurked under bed.

Suckled on her deceptive teats, smooth QQ’s. Until the milk-swole spell wore off. Nightmares, moo-cows with snail shell eyes spiraling into soft pineal sponge, spoke in mesmeric M’s. In came teeth, to feast on bits of flesh, congealed, slippery gelatin horse’s hooves. Cats grew wary from cruel experiments, savage spell craft propelled them faster forward, thrown down the stairs in a cardboard box or caught in the fan blades of a stubborn engine starting.

Frozen dirt driveway, orange extension cord cut a hot line in snow, while hands of the clock stayed stuck, the shape of an el for seven years. A twitching lonely tail fell out of the engine cavity.

Black mold skulls, visions, suspicions made us bitter, like cats trapped in a drowning bag. A river of end of broadcast day flags whipped silent on blue-light poles to deafened stars spangled through which we slept and dreamed of bombs going off somewhere beyond town, a stitched line of t’s trampling bodies in Vis-queen.

Time fractured like the sun sent through a broken green bottle, full of maggots, into a meadow of asterisk daisies, white-out Queen Anne’s Lace and hyper-active Goldenrod, where tiger striped, yellow and black field-spiders swell over summer, swallowing flies until they are the size of half-dollars. Pjercing black mandibles, such plunder their bodies buoyed on silk guy lines, resonating in a wake of crystal dew. Their fat body’s arsenal, venom; cultured is the milk in the breast of a witch, abdomen full of wriggling ova tickling her eight crossed i’s.