Scheherazade

Dream: Gitana

My people worship in the desert and the jungle, far from the state religion of the empire. We remember with great honor the ways of those that formed our tribes. 

I thought I hung in balance, dancing on the sand with the desert spirits, hanging from bao tree branches, gazing at the moon and dreaming.

I learned how to smooth every muscle in my face, betray nothing in pupil dilations and tendons and tight skin. I practiced despite my safety beneath my first veil - gold. I was a beloved orphan and thus always wore a gold scarf, to catch the gaze of the sun, as my abuelita said.

I think I’ve been in love with the sun since I was a little girl. I slept so calmly in the night, from hammocks or wrapped up in a tree, but under the scrutiny of the sun, I have never been able to stay still. If not in a graceful recline, hoping to show my demure beauty and forced calm, I danced in a way that did not quite make sense to me in my age of innocence. I always felt a certain presence there. A weight and warmth and fire that I craved and wanted to wrap around me. I wanted to feel my sometimes pale skin warming to its deepest tan in an embrace from someone I should remember, but couldn’t.

Chimera

1a: a fire-breathing
female monster, composed of
multiple animals:
a lioness with a mane, 
a serpent for a tail,
and the head of a jackal
at the center of her spine; 

b: an imaginary monster
compounded of incongruous parts

2: an illusion or fabrication of the mind,
especially an unrealizable dream

3: an individual, organ, or part
consisting of 
diverse genetic code

“The term chimera has also come to mean hard to believe or difficult to understand.” 

Burnt Offerings

That far away girl
with a thin, worn mind
Agave in her throat

The lengths she goes into ruin.

Trapped inside her head
thinking thinking thinking
Pain talks so loudly

Tendons and muscles cry tears of opium.

She feeds the shadowbeast,
keeps him calm with rituals
Ash falling like snow

Why does her heart convulse?

Sulfur and ink and gasoline
infect her ribcage,
His stretching wings

But she is sure he heralds more than damnation.

Dream: Midnight Sun

I walked until I had forgotten what it was that I sought. And then I kept traveling; I had no where else to go. The air was behaving like water, cool and always close to rain. When the sky broke open, I ran to a lodge that I had passed by only a few thoughts before.

Men, if that is what they were, sat in a circle around the fire. One turned and welcomed me with a murmur, and though I was startled by the silver eyes that glinted at me, I sat in the space that they made. A bowl was handed to me, and I ate.

They appeared to be serious and speaking in low voices. But as I watched them, I saw that they often teased or tickled each other, smiles sliding from between their lips. Their skin was black, warm where my arms pressed into those beside me. They radiated the feeling of being too close to the fire.

It wasn’t until my belly quieted that I saw her moving slowly around the edge of the fishing lodge. She sang in a throaty voice, but her song only rarely rose over the voices of the brothers. She had sleek black hair, parted in two long braids that fell onto the furs she wore. Her skin was molten gold and she had eyes of fire, somehow both frightening and soothing in their intensity. As I studied her, I realized that she was dancing. Her moccasins scrawled runes into the sand, weaving blessings. 

I must have slept then, as all I have are half-dreams of ravens and obsidian.

When I woke, they were gone along with the rain. A strip of bobcat fur had been tied to my forearm in the night. It seemed to beg a task from me, something I must complete in this life.

I continued on shadowed roads, praying that someday I would understand what I had to do.

Sol

i.
Two men rise from clouds of ash and ice
and ask me where I’ve been.
I cannot speak, lost on the long trajectories.

ii.
I pull the woman and her paramour close
enough to feel their pulses,
measure the softness of their skin with my lips,
spinning into a brief eclipse.

iii.
She looks at me sadly. 
”How can you be so close and so cold?” 
My face hurts. The muscles won’t stir.  
I steal words and leave them for her.
Blame gravity.

iv.
When I smoke on the porch,
the homeless woman screams,
“Little girl, the demon has won.
She don’t even know the damage been done.
Do not rape me! No sexual activity.
We are approaching the edge of the universe.”

v. 
Perihelion is the part where I cannot look directly at him for fear of burning.

I remember us splashing in the lake, lying together in the grass, soaking up the sun. Climbing into my green truck and blasting reggae music as the wind rushes through the windows. I remember her eyes, patterned with Greek mosaic waves, and the way she would look at me when she knew I was going to kiss her. It was easy to be together amid the sun-bleached blues and greens.

Dream: Diosa

I always imagined the third eye as beautiful but ultimately lifeless. 

I was entirely unprepared for the reality of her skull curved into an eye socket, an orb rolling around in her head. Soft skin pulling into eyelids, blue and more translucent than the rest of the forehead. It was a strange eye, neither left nor right, as unsettling as a person poised between male and female and somehow neither.

Wings of small bones hung from her shoulders, trailing to the ground. The feathers had been misplaced into her hair, which hung in tightly coiled locks.

A triple spiral was carved into her chest. Her arms were more scar than new skin, raised and whirling in impossible patterns. Her opaque black nails curved like talons from fingers with one too many joints.

And then there was her clitoris. It started in the usual way, rolled flesh between her pale labia. But it extended upward, trailing up her belly and not stopping until it reached the last bit of soft skin under her ribcage. It should have looked wrong, should have made her deformed. But it was beautiful, tense and engorged with blood.

The Juniper Tree

Mina was ten, thin for her age, with close cropped hair like the lady knight in her favorite book. She was wearing shoes at her mother’s insistence, because there were scorpions everywhere. But sometimes she would dig her toes into the dirt anyway, just to feel the earth. She was in a desert with winter snow, buried in the mountains with obsidian and volcano rocks. 

Her parents stayed inside. But she explored the entire ten acres, and sometimes the neighbor’s land if she could get away with it. It was a strange property. Filled with ghosts.

Their first cat was buried nearby. He had been killed by the neighbor’s dog. Another cat had gotten leukemia shortly after being brought home, and their Rottweiler had a lump in her belly. She died before they could leave the small town.

There was so much Death in this land. She could feel it. But it didn’t scare her like when Dad would yell or Mama would cry. It was sad when she made friends with beetles who quickly stopped moving, or when she found a lizard that had been badly wounded and died in her hand. But it was easy to deal with. She’d wrap them in tissue and go to the little circle of stones by the lightning-struck tree, and bury them with a prayer.\

The dog, the cats, the lizards. They were her best friends. She was too strange and dreamy for most of the kids at school. Now she ran after a little neighbor cat, whose pretty white fur was usually covered in sand. She ducked under branches and hopped over lichen-covered stones. To her right, she could see a rusted out car and broken bottles. The cat was starting to get away. Mina sped up, before stopping completely.

She couldn’t see the cat, but she could see bones. Everywhere. Tiny little skulls and spines and femurs were scattered in a circle, radiating out from a hunched juniper tree. She crouched down, looking in reverent fascination. So tiny, so perfect. The bone tree scared her with its sanctity. She looked around for the cat, and then slowly retreated back across the gravel road.

“We bones, lying here bare, are awaiting yours.”

Dream: Blossom

Water caresses my hips. Shadows loom and I worry about what could be under the water. The little girl doesn’t seem to mind, so I follow her.

Glancing at the king snake coiling in my hands, I see that its eyes are cloudy. It must be ready to lose its skin.

A shadow darts towards the girl. She catches it by the neck, digging her nails in, piercing the fox’s skin. It screams and screams until she silences it by slamming its skull against a rock. 

Blood drips from her hands and her golden eyes meet mine. I stumble back and wade away from her, moving deeper into the swamp. 

The snake is wrapping around my hand more tightly. Its skin is falling away, along with bits of flesh. I can see bones underneath.

Cherry blossoms, blood red, float up from the deep. They surround me as I attempt to pry the serpent from my hand. Now it is nothing but a skeleton, and still it stares with cloudy eyes.

Savasana

My skin hovers like powder,
     distant. My eyes are dry.
I have betrayed Sleep and Sadness for
a chemical rush, and neither are speaking to me.

I am weak and fragile and hungry. 

Your arms encircle me with 
certainty.

I strain
backwards, hips tense,
     afraid to fall.
Even if
all you want me to do is
     lean.

Your insistence outlasts my
endurance.

There is a
     moment of grace as your
skin welcomes and resists
me  

     then I sink past your
     ribs and fall into a new torso.

A gentle gasp parts your
     [our, my]
lips and I am startled by how
easily your lungs move.

     Nothing like my shuddering,
     shallow breaths.

I send my
mind through your body and
     feel
everything,
     muscles and tendons and
a web of bones.

My
     [our, your]
face quivers, the way it does when
I cry, or when
you kiss me.

I smile, sending ripples out from
     drowning eyes
and fall back into
my
     numb, broken body.