w Lapis Lazuli / Alexandra Cardona

Lapis Lazuli

Alexandra Cardona

How do you not know her? She’s the woman across a Railroad, just down an obscure alley, followed by a brown upstream river, past a sour-smelling landfill. Dirt dwells between her fingers, and sin beneath her nails, wrinkles drawn on her skin like highways on a map, her lips cracked like the prophecies she tells to passerbys, grey hairs like knotted spiderwebs, wrapped in blanket of dead cells. Her name mispronounced, jumped letters and twisted tongues ... Lapis Lazuli. She’s the current running the deepest of oceans, beneath bedrock and coral reefs, beyond squid and pollution, acidic carbonate and broken sea shells. She’s the color of fingertips on the coldest of nights, no chapstick or kisses or blood flow. She’s loneliness and bitter coffee, her glance has the intensity of galaxies and the hottest of stars, of spaceships and aliens who avoid dying planets. Her words thick from an unknown accent, she’s a fountain drink paper cup with one quarter and two nickels, contorted bones and ligaments, missing teeth and runaway souls, cuffs circling your wrist, a bracelet of old debris plastered to your arm hairs, she tugs you toward her body, eyes resting on your chin. Her breath hot and burning, she grabs you, and you can’t find the air in your lungs. She stares and asks, Are you not grateful?