h o m e........

p a s t   i s s u e s....

s u b m i s s i o n s....

l i n k s

MEG HURTADO

MAMA SAID: 'SLEEP PARALYSIS'

On the night of a thousand splinters, I sat in the bathroom sink, listening to the ever-faithful 
Shirelles, and digging with a disinfected needle.  All that childhood misery was paying off. 
 
It had been a beautiful day.  I’d had a fever.  Who’d known about that telephone pole?  
Or about my sister’s pet ghost, recently starved,

named away into dreams?  Angela — that was the ghost — I’ll miss you, I never saw you.  
We needed your voice behind the walls, your hands twisting beneath 

our hair in the dark, so cool and soft that we mistook them for our mother’s, 
which were never so soft.  You didn’t ask to appear, but you did what you could.  Your removal 

was minor surgery.  It had been a beautiful day.  Blind harmonic landmasses, essential, underfelt, 
surrounded my grey-and-pale apartment, baiting the night.  Spirit plus music,

overfed, leashed at both ends by brown-eyed sibyls who are growing up, galloped into the bathroom 
and licked my wounds.

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

Tea from England and cigarettes from Ceylon, pale as benighted venereal April, all because
you threaten never to call but then you do.  The curling spectre of Hello-and-Forgiveness 

is sometimes too much.  On her knees, even Guinevere isn’t much fun.
More or less a dry, imagined paradise, Love-then couldn’t hold my attention, its fatal

inequities grooved with untraceable aches and paints, a streak of apocalypse blowing 
blue across my indecisive moaning exit.   I wouldn’t settle, I wanted champagne.  Diseased 

Conviction, when it goes, leaves a mark not to be mentioned, cuddled, or frayed.  Instead,
it’s very simple: the kind of joy you can take for granted, the cool unamendable crack 

from which slip prophecy and floodlights, rich reasons for why you and not somebody else, 
why bloom and not shake the blue door of counter-proposals, pills, pins.  To be only 

one thing is to be ready — the cheapest plastic flags on their little sticks 
never go to half-mast.