#mick malone

It’s new years eve and I beg the host to let me into the party. I immediately drink myself to death in her bathroom to the buzz buzz of the dining room’s electric football tabletop game. All the pieces have toppled onto their sides and they buzz buzz together into a perfect serpent. I am revived and bleached, dancing wounded. People have now placed totems onto the vibrating gridiron odd cubes buzz buzz dented pyramids buzz buzz smashed up mellons buzz buzz glass eye buzz buzz empty picture frame buzz buzz jumbled guitar string buzz buzz radio antenna buzz buzz typewriter keys buzz buzz and the snake eats the odd cubes and the owner is killed by the local JV hockey team and the snake eats the dented pyramids and the owner is stomped to death by an eyeless horse and the snake eats the smashed up mellons and the owner is surgically dismantled by a doom cultist   and this goes on and on till midnight and everyone is dead and there is nobody to kiss and I place my totem onto the vibrating football board and my totem is a knife and the snake eats the knife and I am drowned in the bathtub and the snake’s guts are shredded and it’s a happy new year.

The limbs were bowed, bending and beginning to crack under the weight of the blooming bird cages. Newborns’, already rusting, filled with blind snakes trying to find sleep in the shade, their stomachs uncomfortably swollen with feathers and egg shells.

Underneath, Harriet told me about the ancient murder site recently discovered on the moon. She told me of the crushed bones, the victims’ enormous fingers, perfect hairlines, and of lead caskets with an uneasy whimsy.

The bird cage gates sway in the wind, slamming shut with a quiet fury and modestly creaking open again.

Soon, we’re talking of the evicted birds breaking their necks on too clean windows, and she tells me of the blackbird that survived the crash, stuck the landing and stood in her driveway for hours, dizzy and stunned, refusing water or seed.

“I’m Okay, I’m Okay!” The bird slurred. “Please stop trying to help, you’re embarrassing me! Just keep that fuckin’ cat away from me and I’ll be fine.”

And so Harriet kept her cat inside, halfheartedly clawing at the wooden door but comfortable in the cool, dark basement.

“You know,” the bird said, grooming his shiny feathers before leaving, “there are men out there who get off on derailing trains and dismantling bodies. There are poets eating lions in dens of stone. There are mummies, high on chemicals, crashing bike shed burials.”

“You can never be too careful, but it’s certainly something to see.” 

The centipede will stab your back a hundred times while you blink. Promise to spend a Halloween dressed as an autumn splashed tree obscuring the ruins of an elementary school and its tiny cupboards locked secrets.

You drained the river between your teeth! Paint your nails with battery acid! Crank the reverb in your sleep! “I’m gona be so stoked when I die!” No more plastic, everything is glass. On and on, your flower seed teeth rupture child size coffins in a plague town. So there go the neighbors, so there goes the hood.  

Strip away my face like an expired billboard; We’ll share our chests between our teeth like sea foam beasts Remove my heart and its confused rivers and crooked dams, feed it to the dreariest beach in Glasgow when the water swells like your lips from too many front porch kisses.

There’s an orchard beneath your dress, a dizzy albatross napping in the leafs, thirsting for the secrets in the hair tucked behind your ear and there are saints whose names I’ve never learned buried beneath your wrists, nestled within the roots with peppermint leafs beneath their tongues and dreaming of helicopter wrecks in the mangled chain link fence teeth of a lethargic hilltop.

Speak to me something foreign, like growing hornets nests in the chipped wooden drawers of your desk until we fall asleep sleep to the sounds of humming birds and wheelchairs drowning in the oceans in our wood grain fingertips.

There is ink beneath my feet. Once a drop, then a puddle and now an ocean. You are a strong wind with open arms and fishing hooks in your hair attached to the things that hide beneath the surface. I rolled off my mattress into the water, I spoke nonsense through jellyfish air bubbles and covered my eyes from the hooks. The stained coral buzz with radio noise, a digital glitch that had bled out from my bruised palms and vibrated between my teeth. There are sharks in the dark, there is treasure in the muck. I’m blindly raking the sand at the bottom until my fingernails are cracked and missing.

I miss you when the air is still, when the leaves bunch up on the ocean floor like sheets of paper beneath your desk. There are no waves to carry me to the shore, just the gashes from your fishing lines across my back and hands and the weakened taste of mint on my tongue.

I wrote to you, asked you to come with me to watch the cardboard skeletons melt in the rain at the high school. You said I’m a depressing malicious fuck, a bastard with dubious teeth. I threw your last letter into my swimming pool, watched the filter swallow it whole. I pulled individual characters out of the mesh with dead wasps and helicopter seeds. You were inviting me to sit at a table with you, fold out a map and make a plan.

Step one: I’ll unravel three yards of cinnamon dental floss and chew it for the next few hours. Step two: You drive through my panic attacks as I frantically stomp a phantom brake pedal. Step three: We make out for twelve minutes without breathing. Step four: I will punctuate everything you believe in with air quotes. Step five: Jean jackets. Step six: I bite at your fingertips till we sleep.

And when we wake up next, you’ll have to pump my stomach of gallons of ink. I’ll kiss you till your mouth is black. Till an ocean becomes a puddle become a drop becomes nothing. I’ll kiss you until there is nothing.

Lime Hawk Literary Arts Collective is a group of storytellers, artists, and activists committed to promoting social change through the written and performing arts.