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lyrics

The lights on the highway are carnival lights. The lamps on the distant hills where the rich people live, they're campfires from the army of Alexander the Great, or maybe will-o-wisps to lead me astray. The wind rattles my window, held together with masking tape. Let me out. Let me out.

"Were you reading?" my mother asks.

"No"

"I thought I heard you laughing," she says.

"You didn't."

I will read these stories with the hope (the real belief I will not admit) that they are true, that they will take me away from here. I still believe. Shhh, be quiet, you.

Every day after school I am a girl-spy. I know the secret path on the stairs. I know the names of the floorboards who will groan beneath me and betray me. I hold the fear of discovery tight--I must sneak into the control room, before the villain finds me.

But then, caught! I am a slave in Pharaoh's Egypt, scrubbing the dining room floors with a toothbrush. He has so many wine-spots from his Greek-style symposiums, the careless Pharaoh! His stern wife watches over the slaves, not knowing of the plot. Crossing the Sea of Reeds will be difficult, but oh! the wide skies of the desert, the barefoot freedom of the hot summer sun.

"It's got maggots!"

"Clean it up," my mother says. "You're not done scrubbing the floors yet."

The maggots birth themselves from the grey feathers of the songbird, writhe across the dirty white linoleum, scatter the daddy longlegs, hide in the art supplies among the broken paintings, among crayon pictures of screaming women.

One day I'll wake up and my arm will be broken and I'll say, "Maybe I need to go to the doctor," and she will say, "Here, let me help." She will pull me across her lap like she loves me, and break all of my bones with quick twists of her hands. She will bend my arms and my legs so that the jagged shards of bone rip through muscle and skin. Then she will pull out my bones, one by one, and stack them neatly beside us.

"There you are," she'll say, kissing my forehead. "There you are. Free at last."

credits

from The Listening Engine, released January 8, 2023

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Michael Bell Bellingham, Washington

A Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too.

Some of this is music for video games. The rest is a fairly raw document of my ongoing attempt to find something new among the blinking lights in my studio at home.

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