let will, child prostitute

I.

She wills herself to suicide herself. She mourns and preps and wears black and makes her face look bloated and drowned: like it has swallowed too much water, too much urine, too much waste. I am a waster, she thinks, and it seems like it is mild and cooked water in her blood—oh sweet, oh sweet: I am alive again.

She smiles and ssh-es herself and stares at her rounded eyes in the oval mirror. Once, earlier, when she is twelve—on her first sauntered and dipped Tequilla binge—she wills herself to the less difficult and more simple return: to suicide her mother.

“She is a prostitute,” She says and she wears knee-highs and she is comforted in the twilight hold of the evening pantry. The summer has turned already. The heat that has made the men and women look stale and spared—opened by lynched drawls and So-Co wisdom. The heat has gone and twisted itself into the death marches, the staunch steps of a leafless and ironed flat.

“She is a prostitute,” She says, again, and now she is on the porch. Once, she is twelve. And then it is truly the orange and yellow and red and the crisp that is—that must be—the way it is to death if it is the way each year the world is to death. They hear, perhaps both times. They hear it in the living rooms, close to the swinging doors of the pantry, the screen door of the porch. They squat on the Italian couches and the rugged, offseason wallpaper. The inned men and the outed women are silent together.

But in the riffs of the next day, the waits are un-done. The open and deadfaced tongues run and come out. Soon, the town is in circles on her lawn. They hold fire on their fingers and they tell her: “You Whore! You!”

She was a prostitute, she thinks now, and stands bare. Her eyed opened tunic shows this now seventeen skin. Her windows are opened and see. The property is widowed into her name, or widowed-heired, or perhaps just left for her once. She stands, a smooth skin silk skinned, and wears the week in thought: my waked, alas.

The pauses and the wait are, generally, unbearable. Until she will actually suicide herself. Until she will walk to the bushes behind the school auditorium and urinate and turn herself bleeded.

The after party, for the woman, her mother, her suicided prostitute whore of an uncouth nature, was more or less adequate for the occasion. She even felt herself enjoying the company of the tonic downed men, the limp dressed men. They were often on site in heaved ho.


II.

He wires himself into the pit of women. Perhaps protests at his own childlike death—no, the childlike death of his wife, after his mother. After these women, cut and bleeded on tiles and ice wells, swamped into the terror of web feet and prophetics, heretics: wizards. While he, alone and barred into a soiled solitude, is the hand holder, the hand soldier, of the ministers.

He is the leading authority on the nature of women and their tragic yet oddly familiar interest in death walks, suicides, passionless and egoless existences. Yet surprised and seeming to hawk their eyes into the resourceless, the women are benevolently disposed to dispose of themselves in horrific and necessary acts of heroism and stupidity. It is only fickle transgression, capped in the end by meager and pointless drama—boiling points. It is best to stand clear.

[s]