There are ghosts born here among the rime, treetops wrapped in marbled
vein-blue ice, limbs of frozen broken pickets buried in deserts of white.

The mountain is exposed, cold smoke scratching across its back, impossible
soft pockets, stars of ice igniting silver to blue.

We shiver through the cold, weightless in the whisper of the trees, turn
after sharp turn, frozen brevity tracing scars in white shoulders.

Moments of snow to cover crags, cracks in the thick ice encasing our frozen
silhouettes white, forever quiet in time.

I had my hands cut open and was racked by the ropes I found inside. I
wrapped those ropes into the bloody knuckles of a noose and set to hang
myself from a nail. I pulled the thumbs from their sockets and broke the
fingers at different angles until each hand was a rusted bent fork. Then I
rolled them over and over in broken glass brown, green, and blue.

But the hammer of doubt peened a needle of bone with which to sew the skin
closed again. Alone and with great difficulty I set each hand's fingers
back, with a deliberate crack, cocooned the thumbs together with wire,
caked them in sulphur, wrapped them in maps and rode their black tracks
backward to begin again.

I pulled back the cramps, ate food with elbows, and turned pages with
tongue. I poured my hands into warm water and forged them in ice,
rewrapping them in new maps, making sure nothing was out of place, no flake
of blood, no finger nail grown too long, learning the names of every bone,
every muscle, waiting until I could turn a new door open.

Published On: July 1, 2007
Permanent Location: http://www.forgetmagazine.com/070701a.htm