• Lightning

    I am falling. I am falling so fast the air sings like a choir and screams like an arm bent too far back.

    I am a tree on a hill, waiting to die. I dream of storms. My sap is poisonous and sticky, like vodka thick with powder. Like the liquid inside sleeping pills after you cut them open. Stings, as it runs down the bark. Numbs the tongue, tastes like a thousand parents leaving at the same time.

    You hear a lot of things about death, but there’s nothing like feeling it.

    Dying is a road paved with sparks.

    Your life drags along the highway, spitting up a molten rainbow into the night. When you feel death coming, it's a pressure, a humming, a brilliance, some great secret that hides behind everything. The dream starts to tear, the world shimmers, Clouds turn into starbursts, the universe screams in blues and greens and purples as blood vessels in your eyes rupture.

    I was a tree on a hill when I came.

    I was falling, white hot and raw. Electric and wrath, I am boiling air, and tortured light. I was a subway car, barreling down on myself. I could hear death coming and it is heavier than the sun.

    I was a boy, dying on a hill when it came, the hawk dropped from the sky like lightning, and snatched a gosling. It snapped its beak at the geese, trying to fly, wings beating like a heart.

    I was a tree on a hill, when I hit. The sound broke bones, the world turned white. The veil parted and for a second I understood something worth weeping for. I was a tree on a hill, and I am the lightning for which I have waited.

    I am snapping beak and blood. I am fear and wonder, I am fist and bruise, my face is leaking fire, and my embers twine into the night sky like burning prayers.

    The birds burn, the tree burns. We are a world on fire, a wheel ablaze, twirling and monstrous. Growing and bleeding, bursting and searing.

    Dying is a road paved with sparks, but death is molten. And we rose, the hawk into the air, dead child in its claws. I was dying, and so close I could have touched their feathers, life bloody and fierce, sad and glorious.

    I should have died. I did die. A boy lay on a hill, waiting for the holes in the sky to burst open.

    It took two days for the fire to go out. It took two days to wake up, and do something that shouldn’t be possible,

    Once, when I was a child, I caught fire. But I rose, a hawk stained crimson. I am something electric, I am something impossible. A tree not consumed.

    And I burn still.