Autumn Slit

Arriving ahead of tide, ruffled from a run-in with the river, she blows inside midnight winds. Rarely allowed entrance, she slits her way in, numbing the pain. The ground is no good once she arrives, sucked out from under, propelled into a distance by the exhaustion of light. Keep moving, the distance compels movement, up inside the blackened scrub oak thrown off from where she came, off the edge, sawing restlessness in aspen groves, thrown into underworld, barely outrunning darkness, clawing her way in. She gathers momentum throwing fits and seizures, striking repeatedly with winged air, shooting arrows unsure of direction. Fanning out on street pavement, pockmarked pearls bounce up, translating rites to shift time. Sketching a cloudless façade, she defies revision, her tissue spreads, expanding night coaxed by her eyes, running her tongue over new terrain, skin oxidizing against skin, always returning to her tremors. After the rapture, after convicted heat, branches make room opening hills to stutter into her dark jaws, clamped ash in stone urn. She cooks sweet rot in swerved light, preserved, cracking her wrinkled hands, falling, caught in the heave.