Today is one of reckoning—or reconciling, reconfiguring, re-structuring. It is like this every day. It will go on like this so long as the rope continues to tighten and burns the thin skin as it does. Its bristles are like a spider’s legs, sharp and singular up close yet dense and unassuming (to those who do not care to take a better look) from afar.

The train lets out a hiss—call it a warning—and then it arrives. Before you know it, it’s gone again, and no amount of standing and wishing you hadn’t taken one faster step will see it return, no berating yourself for not having done a jog down the sairs rather than a walk, for not having considered time in all its urgent haze. We usually never do. We stop and watch our roommate tie her shoelaces on the bridge above the expressway thick with gray smoke from cars below and lick the dripping dark plum juice off our hands and try to make something of the evening light.

When somebody else’s mother cradled my seventeen year-old body in her lap on the stone balcony of the family’s old house on the island outside Venice and I sobbed hard, shaking sobs, she spoke to me of time. Some people burn out fast, she said, like they know already. In my mind’s eye a stubborn comet soared.

Some people burn out fast, she said, and I took it and ran. They say this and here I picture myself grabbing from her hand the white sheet of paper onto which she wrote me six things she knows about loss and one question about whether I would be joining for dinner and bolting away barefoot down the winding road lined with oleanders, their poisonous flowers hanging low over the gates that guard the watchful Italian villas.

The clock runs backwards as it runs forwards. This is the nature of things.
The girl in the porn clip looks down, hugs one arm and speaks shyly at the ground, face down/eyes up is how they like it. She has never done this before. She has done this too many times. They would like us to believe it is against her nature, a thorn pricking her side she cannot ignore.

Porn is the theory rape is the practice is printed in white on black on my friend’s mother’s wall. Also: Stop butchering the bodies souls and lives of women and Starve a rat today Free the female body from pain put motherhood in a test tube I’m drowning in the typing pool Bitch sister, bitch From Adam’s rib to women’s lib We haven’t come a long way and you’re not a baby Sexism is a social disease

I think this and wince as I watch eyes roll back into skulls and dream them mine and play marionette with myself, imagining strings attached to limbs that aren’t there turning me over and pinning me down. I am the doll and the puppet master hidden in the wings. I control that which controls me; I control myself, I control no one. They cannot say the same.

In 1988, Boogie Down Productions’ KRS-One wrote the line illegal business controls America and spoke it ten times on the track “Illegal Business,” the fourth on their album By All Means Necessary. When asked what his ‘message to the youth’ was in a 1991 interview with Blast magazine, KRS-One said:
Organize—organize amongst yourselves, and prepare for war.

In 1992, Shuhada’ Sadaqat (née Sinead O’Connor) sang the song “War,” recorded by Bob Marley in 1976, of which the majority of the lines were said by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in a 1963 speech to the United Nations.

War in the east / War in the west / War up north / War down south / War - war / Rumors of war. / And until that day / The African continent / Will not know peace / We Africans will fight - we find it necessary / And we know we shall win / As we are confident / In the victory / Of good over evil

Sadaqat substituted mentions of Africa for the phrases “children” and “child abuse” in her performance.

In a 1991 interview with Rolling Stone, of which she was on the cover, Sadaqat said
“I’m having a hard time letting go of being a girl.”

There is an eight year-old girl standing on a wooden floor that rests on the same earth you and I are standing on now with a child growing in her that she will become a mother to in less than a year’s time. If she is lucky, the birth will not interrupt the celebration of her ninth birthday. She is hoping for less morning sickness, more sleep. Some cake.

Illegal business controls America. War is in the east and the west and the north and the south and I’m having a hard time letting go of being a girl. The cool kids are sick with doom. They wrap themselves in flags and hope their lucky stars will save them. Time is not so much running out as it is running laps around us and our aching shoulders, our hazy red eyes. Lovers knead each other’s knots and rabbits dart out of the road at the last second and two people hand him lighters when he asks for one. The king has decided to look Tangier in its scarred face. The soldiers chainsmoke and lean on the wall with holes from which little yellow flowers grow. My people are tired and sore and high. They live where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic and watch the warm dance of the sea meet the frigid blast of the ocean. They see small rubber boats stuffed with hope capsize and disappear. They sit in Africa’s mouth from where she sends for her own by call of the wind. I walked Hercules’ grotto when I was young.
I felt the rough rocks under my soft palms. I thought of the golden boy and his strength that split us in two.
I imagine if he tried he could have pushed a little harder.

Every day well-meaning people make me want to bash my head into the wall. The half-lemon in my fridge grows worse for the wear and he lies in his grave and she doesn’t call. The money in this country is so soggy with blood it drips through pockets right down into the soil, which is facing its own sort of rot.

They do not understand this is how it happens. Books and bodies. What goes in and what comes out. You can follow the paper trail to the cabin in the woods the trees have started to mistake as one of their own, dense strings of leaves growing tangled and knotted over the doors and windows. A guy stumbles upon it on a hike and says to himself, nothing good is going on in there. It is always about the money.

We say Bans off our bodies! And those who have never really cared because the chains with the chipping blue paint on their wrists really aren’t so heavy smile and say, good for you and oh those poor women you can’t even see their faces. I can see their eyes. I cannot see yours.

I can’t see yours as you tell me you care about the living when all the living have gate-shaped marks on their bodies and ripped-out crossed-out stamped-out pages of their passports and more soul in half a glance my way than you could die looking for. You tell me you care about the living while the half-born come out dead for lack of water and the sign outside the door says ‘Resort Coming Soon!’ Tell me you care about the living. Tell me you know what it is to be alive and taste the food that couldn’t be cooked and hear the language that couldn’t be spoken and speak to the woman who wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the ten minutes that afternoon they had her breathe deep. Tell me you care about the living and it may be enough for mother earth to finally scream through her choked-up lungs.

The living sing their revolution with movements of the tongue you forced them to learn.
The living are all around us and when I think of the apocalypse I do not see women in red cloaks I see me and you.