hallowed, lightless

 hallowed, lightless (for my mother)

photography by 02vin

No face in the wine-dark mirror. No light in this room. No lights under the skin and bone. She tilts her head owlish. Textures in the dark suggesting motion. Soon an eerie light wavers behind her eyes, at the back of her throat, beneath her greasy skin. Something is always coming off her, misting candle wax and paper ashes. She runs terribly hot. What was inside of her that had to make room for this? Something that grew in her and something she swallowed. Something old: drive in creature feature trailer or stones under skin. Stacking stones in driveways and sliding them in gas tanks. B thriller with A list stars. What’s in her is out of her. She replaced it with a tongue of rotten flame. Fire’s nothing nowhere. It’s in her but it’s out of her. When autumn ends at last and winter falls over the earth like a rain of ashes the fire will go out and she’ll be gone. She’ll deliquesce into drool and darkness. But autumn won’t end. This year September is forever. September is hot and dry as burning leaves and time’s asleep in a smoke-filled room. Time’s asleep forever. Time like a third rail that always runs beside her. She has to keep her hands in her pockets and her pockets in her coat and her coat on a peg. But it’s hot and dry as burning leaves and someday there’s meant to be a hallowed peace but that day will never come. Someday they’ll dance through the streets celebrating the water they carried and the smoke will slip through their fingers like a shadow under the moving sun. They’ll feast with the living on sugar bread and the silhouettes of rotten apples left in ice and every sweet thing they imagined was in them but never was in them. They’d take a terrible vengeance too, exacting and awful, but we blew the budget to fill the sky with stars so they’re only shadows in that starlight. Second grader paper cutout skeletons. We living who are buried with the dead will see the shadows dance and we’ll dance too without permission with the top down and the lights off in the dark. In silver starlight and hot September sun. When September ends we’ll forget the whole thing, and in ten five four two one it’ll all go up in flames. Greasy film reels flaking into the sky like a pile of burning leaves. Screaming. But this year September is forever. 

She’s making faces in the mirror but she can’t see them. Textures in the dark suggesting motion. Bones under skin, stones under skin, darkness under light, wick under wax. She’s somebody new. She’s nobody new. Two thousand callers for a song nobody’s written. Somewhere off of Catalina a fish rises two thousand fathoms in a year. When it explodes it’s the first of its kind to have ever seen the sun. Somewhere here in this room something is crawling unseen inside her. It isn’t going anywhere. What’s to see? Suggestions? But the crawler came first, she made the hard choice he couldn’t, leaving snake-tracks in the dust with her fingers. She broke the basement where we were buried with the dead and set hot fire to the house at the end of the lane. On her journey nowhere she remembers how: First open like a mouth all over, and look: out it all comes, but it doesn’t know it yet. No light in this room, no lights under skin and bone. No record but memory. Action. She threads it all outside to inside, inside to outside, wick under wax. She fumbles in the dark to strike a match. The audience holds their breath… Creature feature freakshow poster! Drums like stones under steel and stones under tires! The lock and the door and the basement entire go up in flames but they don’t burn all the way down. They’re wet and mouldering and they’ve never seen the sun. The monster’s hot on her heels, in the audience couples are carving rivulets in each other’s skin with their fingernails and bleeding hot wax. She rises two thousand fathoms and the sun explodes. Song of the summer and no one can hear it. Sunstuff settles on the earth like a rain of ashes in the dark, hot and dry. 

She can see the house from here if she closes her eyes. It will never burn all the way down: it’s rotting faster than the flames can take it. Paint and glass flaking into the sky like burning leaves, stone and wood diving desperately behind the dashboard and covering their eyes. It isn’t going anywhere. It’s moving but it’s moving in a circle, axles broken, bathed in silver starlight. It’s always turning inward, away from the shadows, away from the ragged pit we called the sun, turning like a wheel and crawling in the body. Tangled gorse and rotten trees with reaching fingers and bark-crack scowls. But the stores won’t sell them yet because it’s still only September. If she cut the back axle it could roll down the highway alone, and the picture couldn’t follow, stars pinned to the screen like bugs on needles, gas tank full of stones, uprooted from the earth and free to go anywhere. Two thousand fathoms down the road where fire kisses stone the whole house explodes from the foundations. For a second it’s like the sun’s come back. But good riddance. No hallowed peace, no summer and no winter, no lights (camera, action), no lights (over the earth). No lights under skin and bone. No lights in this room. No face in the wine-dark mirror.