by Xochitl L.
Sometime during their first breath they forget their names.
It is common, this act of resetting completely when cold,
when forced to realize that faces are soft and hands are solid
instead of angelic like the pa**ing of stars. Their fluttering hearts
ache to fly, but alas they only stare; eyes like black lagoons full of hunger
never quenched within those sharp, spidery bones.
Over time, they forget forgetting and learn to love their wingless bones.
And when the bad men shriek their names,
they stumble forward with a trembling hunger
that wraps around them like dripping petals. They wish to escape the cold
and climb back into their mothers' beating hearts.
In the cobwebs, they glimpse a time when knives were not solid.
“We will be god,” they shout like heroes, with muddy feet stuck to solid
Earth. The bright sunlight licks their watchful bones
and drips hope into the cracks of their small hearts.
“Someday, the whole world will praise our names,”
they say. They will discover the cure to cold.
Everyone secretly hates that all miniscule heroes know hunger.
Their worlds become collages of unhappy faces, who choose hunger
over lives in which pure fear is solid.
They stand with their backs against the cold
and stare into moonlit mirrors that reflect only their pale blue bones.
Everyone smiles, and whispers about their blessed names,
not knowing that they are walking through fields of empty hearts
As they grow tall, they grow greedier for hearts,
but their bank vaults fill only with exponential hunger.
They sit in solitude and repeat their own names
louder and louder into the dark. They like the way that solid
lips formulate words. Now the corners of their bones
begin their slow journey towards the welcoming cold.
They are planted like rows of cotton in the bitter cold.
All that is left of their shriveled hearts
and hollowed yellow bones
regret having never shattered. By the time their hunger
perishes in solid
ice, no one remembers their names.
Their golden bodies burst in an explosion of miraculous cold, and joyous hunger.
All that remains is their winged hearts. They are finally free from their solid
prison and able to move their bones. Sometime during their last breath they remember their names.