Teeming with tender electricity, his scalp became a playground for her bitten nails. That’s when he told her about the ceremony. He’d learned it from a bearded man with a gospel name, who’d learned it from a boy called Strawberry.
The first step was confession—not of sin but of the weight of sin. The weight of dream. We’re all afraid of the tongue we dream in. But that tongue is our only tool. So they’d start out by talking, talking truth. Language to ruin language. Then he’d have something to show her. Something that would change everything. Something to spread like petals of stolen white roses, something to spread like rebellion. Something to suck clean the cowboy horizon, to burn up our tyrants with alien bullets of starlight. Something unveiled and apocalyptically pretty.
The ceremony. She wished he would explain it more. But how can you explain an abyss without color regulation? How can you explain the dream at the base of your spine?
Emilia Joan Hamra lives and teaches in Philadelphia. She studied Creative Writing at Arizona State University, has worked as a copy-editor for Four Way Books, and was the recipient of the national Norman Mailer College Poetry Award. Her work is published in Occulum, giallo lit, Recenter Press, Santa Ana River Review, the tiny, and others.
photo by Vincent Ledvina (via unsplash)
Crow & Cross Keys 