Spring 2022
catching flies Elle Provolo
I stay awake until I hear the last fruit fly hit the tape and I wonder if its last thoughts were a memory of sweet flesh, the apple in a serpent’s eye. I watch my window draining light until it no longer speaks in the cool whispers of the moon’s secrets and it burns rose colored streaks on my walls, a reminder that its maker is made from fire. I call out your name I scream it until the room is engulfed in the flames of my own hunger but I realize I am a forest, a fallen tree is not heard if you aren’t there. I strip away my clothes my body’s vulnerability a shadow of the woman whose barren figure waits to be filled by a deity who knows only emptiness, I am no god, a fiend fueled by destruction.
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