Hold a mirror up to your skin.

You will be amazed.

=

I hold my hand before my face.

"The swept up, skinny bones of birds. The corpses of pieced-together, pink ants. Shelled and filled-up cocoon bodies. Tree-branches with God's stolen skin and slabs of white, dust-bone dough. Pasted, solidified pale mucus. The wrapped and tethered, life-given joints of dolls. Limbless and pudgy sticks, fleshed-out and caved in. Matchsticks coated, rolled and thickened with skin, virgin from the tongue of fire. Shrunken and weathered poles, scarred tissue of dragon, shriveled bone, poverty-stricken and skinned-straight gemstones, broken and bended fleshy heartstrings, pulled-out and wrenched—"

"They're just your fuckin' fingers, dude," he says.

He grabs my index, my forefinger and my pinkie, and he brings them down, softly. They rest by tree-trunk hips, garbled and shoveled thighs, stacks of paper feet.

"What the fuck? Calm down, dude. Shut up."

My hand dissolves. He smiles. They're just your fuckin' fingers, dude, loosely-tied rope, laced up around his rocking-horse steady jawbone says, turning dust into a painted-green circular bone, hiding under cropped and loose-leaf brows. They're just your fuckin' fingers.

"Calm the fuck down."

=

"The Earth will forget me. It will lose all my footprints beneath its expanse of blue and white and green. It will misplace them somewhere and the places that my feet have been, where the ground warped and pressed itself deeper and jutted out, nervous under my touch—it will misplace them, and they will not be found. It will take my hands and legs and limbs and chest and my face for itself, combing down my features with pale and shaken-up fingers, and I will be lost to it, and it will forget me, down inside its core."

I know.

=

"What's with all this skin?"

The ribcage is palmed, tossed and turned underneath her. She presses her forehead against her hands and looks down: shadows for breasts, Cinderella's carriage resting inside her stomach, hung-noose birds tucked inside her skin, breaking free with wings made of impounded flesh.

"I don't know."

The ribcage is two tiger's palms, bracing out to love each other, to hug anyone who is willing to hug back. She fingers each bone, delicately, as though there is nothing more to touch. The city flies by on wings of carbon, gas, iodine. There is fire in her mouth. She spits outwards.

"Don't tell me you're growing a fucking spine."

The ribcage is a flower that refuses to bloom outwards, extending inside with a neck as bent as a weeping willow, reaching to touch its toes mating beneath the ground. She holds onto every last nick and break in her back, rocking. She looks back up, hastily, a sea beneath her veins, worming its way inside.

"No—no. I'm not, I promise. No, I don't know. I don't know."

The ribcage is not enough. She leaves, turning her back against the wall, pressing every last digit into beige, faded green, towel racks and soap dispensers. She forgets herself; she tries so damn hard.

"I can't look at you anymore. Leave me the fuck alone."

The mirror turns away in shame.

=

"She will forget me. She will touch her back and she will lean forward and she will fall backwards and she will not remember who I am when she comes out. She is a monster, and monsters have such beautiful minds that I will be lost in the jungle, rolling hills and deserted landscape of her brain tissue. She is a monster and monsters are too beautiful, too terrifying for the world to inhabit. She is a monster and I am a monster and she will forget me and I will be lost."

I know. I'm sorry.

=

The future is promised to you. It is embedded underneath your skin: an expected destiny, a sworn prospect, an assured solution. They tell you that you will have roses, falling from your hair like they were born there, virgins dying in the expanse. They tell you that there will be no blood, that you will be a fruit, bleeding juice from your thin distance of paper-inch flesh. They tell you that there will be smiles, teasing your lips like dreams you found in your palm. The future is your given, your romance, your life.

The past makes no such promise. It lies on your bed and drapes its fingers on your shoulder and lays its face in your neck and asks you if it can sit in your lap and cry, just a little. When you push it away it lays in your corner and sticks its head between its knees and vomits until dark, where it crawls silently into bed with you and you wrap your arms around it, unknowingly, and it kisses you with its lips smudged together like dirty words thrown back up from childhood nightmares and rejections and deaths, and when you wake up it is stroking your hair and there are tears on your pillow. The past is your death, kissing your ear when you are unaware, tearing into the cartilage with teeth of skin.

For the present, simply look down. Take it between your fingers and squeeze; watch how it flares up pink and purple, flushed. It has been waiting for you. Let it inside.

=

"You will forget me. So what does that make me? A name on a list? A number etched into your palm, debating lifelines and heartlines and my vitality and my future and everyone I will love, ever, all of the people who grace my day and everyone who has ever stepped on my foot? What are they? What are they to you? Hairs on your brow? Fingers on your lips? A tongue, shushing you down? Are we simply a figment of your imagination, your screwy and hyperactive catharsis, your own personal monstrous demons? What kind of twisted fuck are you, anyway? Are we just a big, fat hand, petting your head and slapping you on the wrist, and eventually we will hit too hard and you will not remember us? What are we but flesh and flesh and flesh and skin and bone and germs and flesh, just piles of skin lapped up by the hungry tongues of air and the jealous wings of water and the angry hands of fire—flesh, is that all we are to you? Are we so easy to forget?"

What do you expect me to do?

=

She opens the bathroom door, empties herself. The future plucks the wings from her breasts and leaves, extra arms pulling his arms up, up. She sits down in the chair and watches me like she does not recognize me. I want to ask her my name. "What have you been doing?"

I drop my hand from my face. Calm the fuck down. They're just your fuckin' fingers, dude. "I've been talking to God."

"Yeah?" she sighs, falls backwards. Her thoughts begin to nibble at her ear and she sighs, holding her chest with her palms. "And what does He have to say?"

I bite my lip, close my eyes. A hand slips into mine, a cool envelope of flesh. My fingers crumple and die, a forest of fleshed trees, a piling of doughy rocks, a casket painted pink and white.

"Not much."