She sits, still. Click, clack.

The rich, dark-wood German cuckoo clock begins to strike; with it’s gnarly and distorted ghoulish faces smiling it’s sinister, splintered sticks straight under the fingernails of sane and intelligible thought. The biting lesions, of which have become a fatal scar on the broad back of a barely adult-aged life, crawl across her lips and rose-enflamed cheeks, still pale with youth. Sweat prickles this fresh, full face that she calls, “mine own,” her shame, hanging stark naked in front of all, of all.

There is no name for her in this open and swollen world. A world that knows not of her, but of her horrid, scornful blemish. The disease that crept in through the passageways of her body’s tiniest fragments…not even taking time to use the doormat. The leprosy that touched her with firm, moist hands to mere simmering bones.

She sits, still. Click, clack.

The hours scratch tally-marks in the red, red muscle, burning front and center in a falsified smile, engraved in the back-drop the very hour the radiation came over (like a sheet of gentle, pruned fingertips). She bears her body, a chair her haphazard and blazing thrown. No poppies, no posies. Spirit and once haughty beauty eclipsed by humanized, homogenized misfortune.

She sits, still. Click, clack.

The smoke interlaces it’s grinding teeth with the clouds, a glorious and outspoken relationship. They make the sweet, nectarous sound of failing civilization and forfeit in one shimmering second, overshadowed like the proud, gorgeous youth grasped in one frail wrist and pulled away like thread extracted from a smitten spool. The sky opens it’s jaws and reels up a city of material, maternity, and grief. Culture and soil, uprooted. Bodies caught between subway trains and the heat swelling in the atmosphere. Chaos, chaos, the ratio of chaos and death parallel and shake hands at the whites of every fractured eye.

She sat, still. Click,…