Psychotic Break: Impact Antebellum

Petite dragonfly with kaleidoscope wings,

would you squirm if I peeled your tail

from your abdomen to see if you could still fly?

Would you open your jowls and scream as I did

when I heard the voices but couldn’t see their faces?

We’re lonely 

I could braid ghosts into rope and wrap them

around my hips, pull their invisible bodies

behind me like chain link through the neighborhood

and wander through backyards in search of their faces.

I could project spirits and send shivers through live bodies,

while I held them from the inside and whispered, I love you,

whispered, watch me dance in the living room with mirrors

twirling my Black doll in my likeness as my conduit.

We’re lonely without our avid listener

I put my spirit into my doll with no face, and she

kept my secret powers hidden. She

squeezed her eyes and nose and mouth into blankness.

I saw in her myself preserved and soft and immune to passing pain.

I drained myself into her and returned to a homeostasis

unphased by the metaphysical gifts I’d inherited.

Yet still I wander to the doll weeks later and pick her up

to hold my existential crisis in my hands.

Today I dare her to move from atop the bookshelf corner.

She quivers and tells me that my time is up, she says:

The surly voices are begging for an ear.

I close my eyes and breathe deep.

We’re lonely without our avid listener, come here.

I listen for the rustle of her skirts as the vertigo hits

while the ceiling begins to lower, but I’m not claustrophobic.

Exhilaration is all you feel when the ethereal manifest.

They murmur about a man listening to my conversation next door.

Knock-knock on the wall to blur out his instruments!

Stomp-stomp on the floors to send shocks through his headphones!

Steady your breathing, because what a rush to be in control.

Hold the doll and sing as you drum the walls and rain dance the floors!

The familiar dissonance of sounds and voices,

layered in spider web strings, mangle now as I spin.

I see dew glisten on silk and my doll’s face reflected in droplets.

Pass through the wall, she says with her face without a mouth

(I backpedal twenty feet to get a running start…).

Rings like Saturn’s orbit my head

and I feel them hit one another and shift the

gravitational pull from left to right on impact.

Sensations in my spine reverberate into my skull —

the prick of fear and exhilaration of falling.