I just got back from two weeks in Mexico for my 33rd birthday — sun, ruins, rain. The belly button of the world, the center everything folds toward.
There’s a cleansing before everything, a tooth snagging the inside of the mouth, a thin line splitting the dark. The air stiffens. The words pile in the corner and wait for the signal.
Heat climbs the walls, presses the breath flat. The season sits on the chest. This place is held together by choke and callus, sleepwalker spittle leaking through the seams in my teeth.
Hecate rejects the predator. Don’t speak of my dogs, beast.
The voice comes from the deep, the kind without mercy, without name. Rock grinds rock. Anger hums, low and steady. Wake up, Henry. Karen’s pussy pistol incarnate. Small and sudden and precise.
I want the rough wood, not their statues. The thing that stares back. I want to walk in barefaced, let the scrape do its work.
The ache waits beneath the work. It doesn’t rise. Teeth sharpen in the dank, split open the bone.
The ground takes its bite.
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