Gluttony put some worms inside of my mouth. They crawl along my tongue like the maggots that they haven’t turned into yet because I was alive. Hail began to grope its hands along the earth. I start to suck her thumb and drool comes down from the corners of her lips. I continue to watch them vanish as if the sun licked them and wove them into springtime grass. I find two snails behind the shrine of rocks. One had dark brown stripes swirling alongside light brown; it curled all around its shell. It had “SALT” written on it with fat sprayed on letters. Next to it was another snail with the word “ME” written in the same thick spray paint. I named them Hansel and Gretel, but they had no breadcrumbs to find their way back, they only left behind these two silk saliva webs that they knitted with their snail skin. I followed their trail and was brought to some wall, some dome that smelled like urine apples. I was in the tunnel leading up to a river. It had these bubbled up letters, phrases and words that looked like they were about to pop. The river was no thicker and no deeper than the snail silk. I took out Gretel from my hand and drew a smile with her silk on the wall.
I was born from the tunnel, feet first. It was true royalty, gilded in spray paint brain damage. Then, I’d go to school and learn how to read, and that was when I understood the words written inside. The tunnel unfolded into this place that began to make sense to me. When it rained, my kingdom was drowned and then dried, and then the criminal artists of the moon would repaint it again. Right above the slanted walls of the dried up river, were fig trees. The ripe ones looked like purple onions whose core had swirls like that of a snail except they were red and filled with seed children. Whenever I’d eat them, I’d be terrified that the seeds would make her give birth to fig children so on many occasions I’d pick them out, one by one. I tried to imagine getting pregnant with a fig child and giving birth to this purple fruit baby with leaves for its hair. Adam and Eve’s loincloths would be sprouting from her child’s head. Once I realized I had no home, I knew it was time to walk down the slanted tunnel walls and hyperventilate my life into it to make my tears just another part of the city sewer.
When I got older, Las Vegas glued feathers to my head for the night and lady luck plucked two seashells from the ocean and placed them across my breasts as she smeared her tube of scarlet lipstick across my lips.
The acrylics of lady lust took me by the hand and kissed it. She brought me to a Vegas pyramid where I saw a man who’s black eyeliner dripped down his lower eyelids like it would on mine when I cried. I looked at the leather jacket he wore, and thought how strange it was that same cow that you drink from in the morning to your cereal can be the same cow you’re wearing. His harmonica breathed its blues and skinny lasers of air gorged out from the rectangular holes of the harmonica. He was the man that would preserve his brain not in some scientific tube filled with embryonic fluids. His brain would be preserved in the hole of his guitar: the stories that cupped his brain in musical liquids would leak through to his audience. The radio waves of the world were now curling from his scalp, to replace the hair his skull had lost. I was only a showgirl, with red lips, and duct taped thighs. I was only the jelly-injected love of his life that lay next to him beneath the surface of the desert realms.
One day, the blues man I loved was standing in front of his reflection admiring his beard and leathered shoulders. A hand of acrylic nails reached out from the mirror, grabbed him by the collar, kissed him, took out a Spanish revolver and made his leather turn to raining crimson. I smelled a dead cow in the air. I rest my head on his chest and cry his leather into rubber. His chest became another “SALT” “ME” mural for the earthworms.
The hole then filled up with skin and blood, I felt it rising into this lump of life against my face and the Spanish bullet fell out and with rest in peaceful grace, sunk into my own shoulder.
Now, when the desert mosaic sprouts flowers of snow that wets its once lip splitting and life-dissecting canyon, I’d put on the outfit of a Mirage showgirl and walk across the water-salted dunes. I’d swim in front of my trailer, in the heat waves of the desert, wearing a beaded bikini of clams and pearls, and a red feather headdress matching the Mojave sunset. The trailer was the only home I knew.
If this was heaven, where was the purity I once had, where was the music I loved?
