i recently came to live above the town where i grew up. this was a town full of bikers, strangeporks, mountain men and losers. nothing much has changed... the park where i once played still stands- new shiny plastic swings have replaced the old leather seat ones that i used to raise the ire of the mother by wrapping my legs around the chains and hanging upside down while laughing wildly and sweeping the ground with my hair. stately old oaks still stand and i wonder what they saw and what they would tell if they could about the young woman whose head was severed and placed in the womens bathroom one night at the park i played at when i was a kid.  

this, the stripes across the ruptured sky that look like scars on the belly of a whore. this, the broken man stumbling down the middle of the road garbed in a torn and flapping yellow raincoat. this, the dog who someone wrapped in a pink blanket- fastened it's snout with black tape and left in a quiet place on the side of the road. all these things...ignominious and pale.  

as a child growing up in a cult that believed in reincarnation and was adept at putting it to great use in the art of upmanship and favoritism amongst one another, i was told that my father was leo tolstoy and that i was his daughter in our last lifetimes. when i grew old enough to manuever a library, i began to research this russian girl who lived in snow and grief and learned that she had died at a young age of tuberculosis. oddly enough, i had been born to this lifetime with both lungs full of infected water and spent the first month or so in an incubator- struggling for breath. i remember some elder in the cult waving a picture of the dead girl near my face and everyone exclaiming exitedly how uncanny the resemblance was............ call it what you like............. i've no aversions to snow or dying- just the listening to your spiritual feelings of interconnectedness to the illusion that surrounds us.

the sign scrawled on the back of a beer box reads, "in loving memury of merk therston" and is affixed to the gate with three shiny silver pieces of tape and the candles below were snuffed out by the dark and quiet rains that came late last night.