Kayla Spirito

Oval Blood Flower

1. All I can remember although I think it was a thousand years ago or so when I was a kid and it was winter then summer again and I could pick things up with my toes and hand them to Mom her nails were longer than licorice chains blood red her face was kept and facing the white wax light of the sky where the lord lived or so she said and I believed her. There must have been a million or so birds slipped into the wax everything was a cuckoo and a glow and a beckoning and a hallelujah Mom’s belly was widening I talked to it like it were my own even though I was not a woman not yet but I could push out all the air from my knees up and hold my breath and pretend it were inside me too. When Mom told me it died and would not come out I was standing on a broken porch howling and wishing I were dead I walked very long and slowly berries fell in death from the trees I walked for many years thousands maybe until I was a woman and the berries washed the insides of my legs and my stomach swelled.

2.  I knew it was dead inside me swimming as I watched Mom smoke out her kitchen window one linen cloth swaddled around two brick-pale nipple dimes. She told me she had the same dream as me she told me she felt I was dead inside her too she would wake in the middle of the night and scream for me to wake up. I asked, how did I end up carrying all the babies of all the men, the no dream men, the un-pretty men?

 
3. Lab coat hands me a hand mirror and says LOOK I feel like he is fish hooking my mouth to my shins when he pulls me close to the fuck mucus and oval blood flowers. I do not want to look I drop the mirror on the tile and tell him it was an accident. He looks at me like I am drooling, smiles a piano smile and says I am lucky. I want to tell him it is dead, that he just can’t see it yet. That memory is an ill man locked in the meat cellar with only his shoes that the past is acne scars in face flesh that the rush of flowing water makes me sick. I do not care if it is sometimes the only sign of life.