This strange incantation reads only loosely as narrative, but in that we get the sense of this woman’s life lived and now, in her afterlife, she drifts, imagining her past in a body from her past, though she remembers that body’s future. Let that sink in for a minute. Ben Spivey always coming through with the weird.
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I’d seen no natural light for however much time. The televisions of the sea stayed on top of the waves like buoys.
I touched myself throughly. My chest felt different. My face, my arms and my legs felt different. The skin was changed, smooth and younger. I was changed. My breasts were smaller and there again. My legs were stubby with hair that felt pubescent. I was younger than I was supposed to be. Feeling my face slowly—each finger sending information—I pieced together that I was a fourteen-years-old version of myself. In my mind I was a thousand miles away and closer to the thirties I’d been for so long.
I looked up for my mother.
My sex was what I was born with, I touched it. Flat there.
Betrayal the color of blood cells.
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With my husband under our blue sheets: early morning and making love until he spoke in tongues—God’s gift of orgasm, used his pinky.
I’d feed the cats thereafter for their meows kept with time so perfect.
And the sun rose so perfect.
And the moon’s glow so perfect.
Our living-room mantle, the resting place for an imitation of the Ark.
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Smelt my hands. The smell of salt and rot (wet, moldy skin.)
Taste of salt from anywhere, rolling down my body. Slithering into my mouth. Into my eyes. The lullaby of the waves sometimes spilling into the boat. The auditory reassurance like a metronome—deceptive familiarity.
I rested like a newborn left in a baptismal basin—close to God but abandoned. Sleeping and waking. Instinctively aware of necessary nourishment but not knowing the care of a human—crowned through, cut and left for baptism, turning the water red.
Often with uncontrollable heaviness, urged toward death.
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So many problems with teeth, tongue and oral hygiene—the distortion of the mouth. The origin of childhood fear association with pain. The correction of teeth, plaque, discoloration. The anticipation for a tooth to fall from the gum. The fear. In retrospect the amount of blood was greater.
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Remember the first moments of true hunger. Remember hearing the flapping of wings and knowing there would be something to eat. Or something to be eaten. Knees collapsed in the newly turned dirt.
Opened mouth waiting for it.
Rations stamped with the eye.
[A stone added.] The foundation was circular.
[Another stone.]
Reassurance of the hopelessness given.
Notation of the system by nihilists.
“Those children.”
Remember the absence of hunger—peeling the golden crust from slabs of meat.
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The omitted stars afforded no location. (Omitted for a God had surely waved its hand absentmindedly.)
There was no describable coordinate for where I was except: abyss.
Where I was—
[The pay-phone hung, sway.]
Doom the reverencer!
here was the center of the ocean. How this boat (this funeral casket) was mine only to explore.
I knew each splinter as I knew my body pre and post conversion.
TELEVISION
Black static like confetti.
“Time and place are not consistent with one another except in their similitude to change.
That is why”—static,
“Our prices are lower then ever! Be one of the first to blow down our doors! Join us for the apocalypse sale. Everything must go—
Half off hatchets and chainsaws.
With the wolves roaming…fear your neighbor.”
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There had yet to be a morning.
There in that boat—crossed arms like Stoker’s vampire—I wondered what I looked like. Was I myself at fourteen? Or had I another body entirely?
The night—what I assumed was night—continued on.
At an unknown hour I fell asleep. The great eye greeted me in my dreams. It took me into its mouth as I took my husband as he would take me. I woke. Put my fingers into my mouth, removed a substance from my tongue.
There had yet to be a morning.
Hunger was immediate.
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(An echo of the Television’s voice.)
“”
Everything must go.
Everything must go.
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