Danielle Pafundafrom THE BOOK OF THE SCABDear Mom and Dad, This, a tether between syrup and sort behaving oddly. It runs hot, pounding up into the pink gloom, an orphaned seal pup, tangled in slurry, over again. It runs high, now, as an engine, takes names, slurs them in mud. It grips by the hair, throat, wrist. It wrenches cartilage and spits in a way that can be framed as assault, but when the police come they have a piece of paper and a pair of tongs and never ever make a cultural arrest. We get a letter from the hospital asking for another week in my spine. We assent, we bring them me and they go into my gates with the crude keys. We ask them to make a graph of these cryptic fluids and strangely isolate citizens. The lymphocytes are fat with longing. Nothing in me scans pure enough to count as itself. One after another, my cells rise to the surface and burst. Oh, love! Oh, any other body in whom I could bury my hot, raw eyes. Stupidly strung to the window's split frame, hatched as a tin can, all manner of laceration coming my way. Then it was spring, and as I hitched the screen, as a shower of flies their bodies making discreet patter, as a skin sound, a wet patch of kin, all piled up in the least dank corner. I'm capable of that least little kindness, you know. It's the very least. The lease signed, the least done. Watching the kitten hemorrhage in her cardboard box, as you instructed, as you left us there. I could loop the reel repeatedly 'round its neck, but actually I can't. I'm every type impacted. This continuation wolfpact, this tacit agreement that it's live or live endlessly, and so I let spacetime's meshes pronounce every syllable in my stead. It's film. It slits my gills as I surface. Your Ugly Little, * * * Dear Mom and Dad, I can't go to sleep until I do something really special. I've got six pounds of sugar and a blowtorch, I've got burns on my hands already and burned sheets, but I'm not as good at it as the other girls. The girls my boyfriend writes songs about, the girl who lives across the street from him with her curtains open and live flames licking out the window. How she ever managed to make such a mess, how she imagined herself in the movie and wore the clothes from the movie and reenacted the part of the movie where all the girls get cut up with their own knives or whatever stick and glass are lying handily around. How she ever managed to get her own mother to tear out such a hunk of her hair and stuff the hair down the garbage disposal until it protested and spat all the night's dinner back. How she ever managed in tap pants and heels to make it as far as the mall. Like every other kind of girl she puts her lipstick on in the reflection of a chrome bumper and rips her collar and takes a punch like a pro and goes with a trickle of blood so becoming and a bruise under her eye like a secret letter under her lover's pillow, every night a camellia blooming below her waterline. What am I, yellowing thing with a skinny lip perched on a fat lip popping open to let anyone in or out? So I can't go to sleep. I let the yowling cat in the screen and out the screen I spill some puke, and then I start again with the sugar and this time matches and a set of tongs and a spiked heel I dug out of the trash in the dead neighbor's yard the heaving among the willows trees with forty years of uncontestable dissatisfaction. I took a frame, I took the preserved paw of her nasty dog who used to nip our cheeks and behinds, I took a repulsively pilled heating pad and an unopened package of doll needles. I took a package of crackers, opened, and one cellophane sleeve untouched, I took a lipstick labeled envelope with a series of x-rays of two different skulls. I took a child-sized spoon and fork, a copy of our local telephone book from twelve years before I was born, I took her personal address book, one of many from a brown paper sack in which there were address books and rubber gloves. I took a can of hairspray and a bamboo trivet, ace bandages stained with iodine, a tackle box full of safety pins and lawyer's bills, clippings about prostitution rings and Catholic priests in scandal. I found an uncured raccoon skin cap and vomited as quietly as I could into a pink plastic tub. I loaded my treasures into plastic bags and heaved them, then myself, over the fence so that her daughters wouldn't see, or train their red eyes on my back, or come to my door and ask me if their mother loved them, because I don't know. I don't ever want to speak to another daughter in the moment she commits an act of daughter, when she considers the caramelized mound of shopping lists and receipts for medication, the hairnet, the plastic salt shakers, the yellow knee-highs and the pale violet ribbon glued cheaply to a snap barrette. When I consider the time by turning around an alarm clock with luminescent dial and crabbed tick, when I consider the medical tubing and the silicone pump. I cannot go there, too deeply, knowing how I do that a daughter is herself an act, a minor devastation that occurs in dark suburban closets like Your Ugly Little, * * * Dear Mom and Dad, I'm puking my guts out from meeting all these twins of mine. Everyone has been told how boring her prose is or has peed herself in public again or has become the dull and vast girl-shaped graveyard. Here comes my twin with the scar in her navel her box of bitters and her paint thinner visions. Here comes my twin with his boxcar compromised, very upset about the new administration. Sometimes when I'm wracking back and forth on top of a body I can hardly stay put. Here go my mechanical limbs in a doll shaped igloo. Your Ugly Little, * * * Dear Mom and Dad, In this adorable atrocity, every muscle comes alive Your Ugly Little, * * * Dear Mom and Dad, Indicate to me that it's acceptable to feel this way forever. In my ribcage, which is broad and shallow, I've got a perpetual conviction. A gilled sliver of phosphate on the bone shadow frog-kicking back up from under river, taking the steps by two, leaping shank-limbed so cheerful into bed! Precious flesh kin! My chest withers and blooms with it, a new organ feinting over the old one. But as it turns out, I won't go. I won't into night either rage or whimper. Instead I follow a cranked up voice into the basement of a half-built display home. I'm a saunter-free drownedfaced pilgrim. My head a lantern, my heart a slippery eel brocade all turned out for treasure. I take a cat to my breastless panting. I leave the windowpanes all in wrenching tact, and step carefully over a coiled cable. I'm telling you what I was doing out there alone at night meeting that sort in an unlit, desolate. In the brain there's a mutilating wire that runs from hilt to shame in the name of memory. Barbed fatty brain, whose spikes make slut-raid on every whorled thing there, a stump. A puzzler. Screwed in gob-tight as a bulb, pulpy lamb flash gasping through its lacerated cask. Its hood. Or caul. Lodged there with baby spring's fuckfrost retributions that garbled, gray, speculative loser. It's a party. Impromptu. Guess what weeps out, now? Love? You know where we're headed? Any floor can be the killing floor. Which is how we can remember the peopled world, filled as it is with plastic constraints. A line of rock salt between my fearsome and yourn. Your Ugly Little,
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