Cara Writes

This pigment creeps; It turns my pallid skin into shades of smudged charcoal, Breathing Black. Ink. I'm sinking in this puddle, my body a dying star collapsing in on itself only to expand again and diffuse into the universe I wonder if you notice the ampersand of my mouth every breath giving birth to letters and numbers forming mushroom clouds beneath the ceiling-- Each breath is potential every gaze a new word melded somewhere between this life and the unrealized Cool finger tips caress along my meridian lines tracing out the next stanza of a broken hearted widow or a school girl named Jaimie. I writhe with(in) this ink like a carbon copy pressed to metal, the pressure subsides and all that is left are faded imprints of the original There's a question mark on my forehead, it refuses to break loose.

I don't know enough about the world to write poetry. I don't know about foreign lands and broken bridges and the pages of history I never turned in high school- Maybe I should have turned them. I don't know all the animals that have sex for fun, or the ones that don't have sex at all, all I know is that both of those have described me. I don't know how to write fiction; I think fiction, I am fiction-- its potential string of words grabbing me into a black widow's web, tantalizing that soon I shall die, or it shall die Or at least suffer from the slow sting and poison. I don't know about anaphoras and hyperboles and all the words we assign to movement trying to explain the inexplicable quickening heartbeat and waves of hot blood flooding into our veins as if we suddenly feel ourselves alive and this is the first time we noticed all day. It's lucky if we notice at all.