Mine
An
inventory:
Two
lips indifferent blue
Eight
ceiling stars soaked in glow in the dark paint
23
typos in a story about slugs
One
newt or else a salamander or snake
I keep him in a safety deposit box
I label him with red pen
I organize her into star charts
A decade old and I made the solar system—foam sitting
on a dark matter poster board. Twelve and I made the ocean—earth fired and
glazed into waves. 19 and I cannot fold an origami woman nor do I have the
paper to begin. I substitute skin and follicles with a red hot itch. My face is
three layers deep.
I need to peel out the sheet in the middle that fizzes
like a hot tub when the jets are off. I need to soak the boiling oil out her
pores. He wants ice that is cold enough to stop indifferent lips from moving or
changing hues. But who do I tell.
Plastic stars don’t get to shine without the sun, so
make paper ones instead and fill them with words that mean sounds that mean
nothing unless they get heard. Wonder if you accidentally put them in place of
the salamander. Wonder if safety deposit boxes are sound proof. Worry that you
lost the key so far from skeleton but so deep within her bones. It landed with
four of the ceiling stars, a pinch of salt, and a thumb tack.
Her banker doesn’t know the combination. Nobody has a
spare. They don’t understand what is locked away. She signed the dotted line in
a foreign language but it was still binding. She never meant to keep so many
things.
She is not origami neatly folded. She is blown into
glass at 2000 degrees and capped by the strawberry jam lid of a mason jar.
Paper pokes into her edges.
Inventory:
24
typos in a story about a girl and all of them written in invisible ink.
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