Liz Howard

Beauty is my irreparable and today I became geometric. A faux linear figure that distills a skip trace of First principles. In a whiteout of Atlantic snow banging stars into the femoral vein of Euclid while rows of lavender circuits, all porous, surrounded me. I genuflected before the hospital parking of my father’s jaundice, for I am a good daughter of the colony. The colony which begot the immortal heart of the markets. Resource nursed all young bucks of the florets, a liquidity I should service or else receive a lesser dessert. With my smudge cleanse at the ready I find myself dispensing with the usual future haunt of stability; a survival signaling my relationship to time, or I’m out of it, entirely. Chanting hell as hair veils my face as if this is a Western. Come polygon and I circumvent the disaster,do not disturb my circles. Holy I went, holy all around my head, the holy I am went careening down the back stairs of this low-rise rental. Striated by the pinnacle light of this city that has my blood pooled purple at the center of its gravity. You can scan the ground from overhead for death pits. I read this on the internet when I was dehydrated, lonely, and afraid. Office plants all broad-leafed repositories for cognition’s patent heart. I’ve gone and been abominable. A column extended from the top of my head into heaven. At the edges of my system an Anishinabek or Indo-European projection of words my nerves could translate into the crawl space of animal magnetism. White pine verticals send us up as a stomach pumped by filial love. Oh, inconsequent curb of my street I refuse to kneel, this day like any other, a cousin charged with trafficking. Still waiting to be ordained, I make mask of our features that are retreating. Plush pockets of rust about another falsehood of water, a creek that pleats. I’ve gone and got a blister. That summer a black bear’s muzzle was coated in shellac from the aerosol can she bit through on my mother’s porch. A half-century after my grandmother’s mother said, don’t ever shoot a black bear, they are my people. So I continue to speak more than this mortuary sunrise where I am only just alive. Boozhoo, today is over.