Blue Boned

TITLE: Blue Boned

AUTHOR: Arianna Kanji

ARTIST: Flavija P.

TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNINGS: MENTIONS OF DEATH AND METAPHORICAL GORE

If the glass is as thick as ice, why can I still see cracks shuddering through the snow topped ground like the calluses up my neck or the tremors on your lower backside? Something leaked from my left ear that lonely eve on the hills with the dogs and the salt-dusted earth, saliva caught in the dense pit just off the side of broken down, overgrown, never-hedge-trimmed teeth. Smooth peaks shining silver. Breaking silver, too. Catatonic, some might say. But it was always easier to freeze your worries in blue rose petals and processed meat.

Some time ago I melted down the sand and it became polished and within its crystal clear aura, I saw the image of a man being burned alive. If I were to break your confession between heavy handed fingers caked in frost and bite marks, it would rot away to dust and paint my lipstick black. I only whisper my words because the roar is oh so loud, the drumming of heartstrings like doe eyed guitars, picking away people from memories or blue bones from stretchy flesh. 

There was something vaguely pepper-like about the way he held his tongue, or the gaping dark hole near the bridge of his nose. You scraped my body down to its bare blue bones and then wondered why the weakest of winds makes me wilt like the flowers in the prairie or the girls in the second shed to the left. Where are the cracks in the glass? The splinters on sidewalks? The frost on distribution, reflection, straight-backed silver-mumbled every-second-paralyzing item on the counter? The spine squirms near your arm, shivering along with the trees and the earth and the salt-dusted pastries collecting whispers atop the hills. Spiderwebs cast shadows on porcelain and knives and hollowed out kitchen nooks where little hands lie and pieces of film pressed on stone like verglas and the glaze over skin when the body is shifted into wooden boxes, left for rotting or perhaps remembering in some strange and overwhelming ordinary way. Rime bites my tongue and it bleeds like it remembers better.