A haunting, diluted blue glass case.
Imprisoned, with a butterfly painted face.
The little girl with trembling fingers reached up,
fraying dress surpassing bent knees,
red shoes balancing a trapeze on the tiny step
leading up to her distant grave.
A sheet of crystal hair draped across the wooden box
as the girl slanted askew to catch a glimpse.
Fingers straining outwards , feet stretching upwards,
the taut string of balance was broken in an adjacent slip.
Grabbing the wooden box with slender fingers,
the girl fell back to the marble earth.
A shatter of light fell across the broken scene;
the box was cracked along the seam,
the tiny girl on the expanding floor.
Lifetimes ticked away, the light across her face darkened.
A thousand years ago...
A snap in porcelain and paint.
A fragment from past catacombs and once life.
A flutter like blinking from the wooden box.
And life too suddenly sprung - a paroxysm cutting through the leftover shards.

A spindle staircase, wire ribcage
Hues darker, darker
Find forcible sunlight
Twisted behind the glass
And I'll remember your eyes
Lost between wantings
Fingers tracing edges of maps
Unseen in shattered light
Strewn across the memory
Of your lovely bride

Behind the blue gate you stand wanting

Fateful, darling
You stand wanting
While I, with outstretching fingertips,
Enclose my heart around your bones
And squeeze the love from your veins.

I felt like I was enclosed in the ribcage of a giant beast. Fearful, I watched as snow hungrily devoured the air, swirling in buckets and swooping gracefully to imprint itself on an eyelash or stop sign. Coordinated and lustful, the snowfall almost seemed inviting and I pondered how awful it really was being where I was, considering how the late afternoon was offering me hot chocolate and snowball fights with each fistful of fluff it threw down to the ground. I didn’t realize how slowly the world was spinning me until a moment later when the driver of the bus turned around.

I had to turn down my music to hear what he was saying and caught, “…the 41 or 36 will take a detour.” The motion shifted and I followed the eager crowd out the doors of the stopped bus.

I wasn’t expecting this. We were stopped at the C-train tracks. The bus was probably the third or fourth in line, waiting for the C-train to continue on its busy way. Stepping out of my isolated chamber into the gusts of snow, I wondered cautiously why the C-train had stopped and when I could find another way home.

I wonder if the sound a piano makes when it falls from the thirteenth floor of an apartment and crashes against the pavement would echo my sentiment when I learned what had happened.

There was a screeching sound of ambulance and police sirens. Closer, closer. I knew even then what my mind wouldn’t comprehend. I climbed the stairs of the c-train building, my feet not quite connected with the ground as if it were quicksand. Keep moving, keep moving. The cluttered groups of people, the hushed tones, the windows. The windows. It had just happened. I made my way to a window, unsure even of breath.

I had to go back a couple of times, unsure what I could see, what I wanted to see. The stretchers, the frantic movements, the heavy pressure of a train, squeezing, gnawing. With the entanglement only humans can feel in morbid strains of curiousity, I kept my eyes trained for that spot.

An outstretched hand. Dead, I thought I knew. Images flooded my brain. I can’t stay here, I can’t stay here. Flying down the steps, mind racing. How can they want to see, how can they stay? And yet something raw tugging at my jacket sleeves, pulling me back to a nightmare.

“What happened?”

“A girl got hit. She was listening to her headphones and didn’t see it and just got sideswiped.”

“No way.”

“She’s okay though, she’s alive. She was twitching, but she’s not even crying.”

“What a trooper.”

“It’s shock.”

“I guess that’s a lesson. I’m not listening to my headphones near any c-train stations, that’s for sure.”

She wasn’t dead. She had been hit in the crosswalk. She was under the train, hadn’t seen it coming. She wasn’t dead. But I had seen her hand. Her fingerprints burned into my memory. It was enough.

This is thrilling.


Hope for me.