Do I keep you in a film canister once you’re dead so I can bury you in my backyard in Brooklyn? I pondered to myself, while lovingly plucking a giant bloodsucking tick, who exists with total self-awareness, from underneath my left index fingernail. This tick is currently re-reading Nietzsche and with some disdain because it remembers how, in its youth, Nietzsche explained everything and the effortless love-affair with the world that followed. And now, the tick’s middle-agedness tastes bitter on its sterilized, burn-too-many-times-with-coffee-and-pizza-cheese pallet, that cannot, for the life of it, articulate why such a cynic ever made him so feverishly uplifted. The tick recalls its sore throat, open fly, and wearing its favorite ten dollar hat, when it illuminated its 34th print additions of Beyond Good and Evil; while it now traces the chicken-scratchy, babbling marginalia with one of its several hairy legs. It will not comprehend the original inspiring intention, but secretly hope, for a somersaulting moment, that the page will swallow him, tip-of-the-leg first.
“No, don’t leave me, you-delicious-you. Baby, I’m cold without you. Come and let our bodies collide in sensation and synthesis.”
It seemed to say.
Instead, I throw this tick into the zealous tongues of the bonfire, as if to reply: to the beaches of Albemarle and Pamlico sounds, your shores, I have never seen, but made plans to visit while being eaten alive by all manor of vermin on the flats of the Carolinas and on the mountains of Appalachia. To you, Guilford County, who is made of Terra Cotta that radiates with pollen, our Rendezvous must end without amity. To you, you cascading-into here-ever waves, who have the power to make sea glass, turning an abrasive shards of broken malt-liquor and Sailor Jerry bottles or the pangs of nostalgia into a smooth, soothing, and beautiful stone-tear of the Atlantic; Arrivederci.
Louisa Casanave is openly a schizophrenic, Neo-pagan, bisexual and college drop-out. She lives in Brooklyn and is 21. Most recently, she has been published by The Bloody Bridge Review and decomP, among others. She also has an online poetry blog at LouisaPoetry.blogspot.com.