BY GABY WILLIAMS
G-O-D Hill at Salvation Mountain
On god hill we walk
over water-based haystacks
covered in fashion people
The woman in white
complains about all the others
in her photo
Imagine
wanting to appear alone
in the world
We’re on top of god hill
Praising this folk site
Posing behind big red G-O-D
I’m looking serious
Too much so
Nearly three decades
No one taught me
what to do with this face
& there you are
half bent over
Smiling like you usually do
When we’re out here
in the Mojave
It feels like
I could ask you anything
and you’d have an answer
Resurrection Bay
Before the sky fell
and all its little sky parts
rained down upon me
I walked a twilight beach of silt
The sun never set
Winter’s blue heart
stayed through summer
You’d like it here
The clear water forgets your face
as an act of forgiveness
The same mountain in different clothes
There is no more beautiful place
than the palm of your hand
But I can’t call off the hunt
The hounds are still out looking
Only so much happiness exists in the world
and we aren’t on the list today
Let’s swallow the sun and watch it
blink out over the palm trees
I'd swallow the moon too
If you promised
to hide the dark parts becoming
Goddess of Immortal Hysteria
I shot an arrow of pure light
straight through your heart
It broke you clean in two
I tried to piece back together a whole man
Made cactus glue from the sweat of your body
Washed your cracked pieces in the dying river
Wept all day into the hole of your mouth
Beautiful soul boy unbroken face
An arrow of light becoming
I pose your corpse into a cup
The disappeared people drink from
All your squishy bits slurped and swallowed
My cactus head turns your aloe blood
into water for later
Feel the depression here it indents
at the dip in your mouth
I wear a crown of death
Bejeweled with dead boy parts
It rots atop my head
The flower of the afterlife
and all
I push hard against the basin
I make the clouds flat-bottomed resting on glass
I burn the dead orgasm
Another false daylight
Purple-tongued sky bleeding sun
In the park on the court
Draw my body
like the ugly thing you dream about
Burial
The different kinds of trees
I wish I had names for
The blue of the sky
No longer a boundary line but a part of me
Mosquito Bay
I am 16 when the medusa stings me leaving a Z shape under my right cheek like Zorro. When I scream the others on our tour scramble back into their canoes. I too learn to walk on water. Run on top of it then I’m belly down in the boat cursing in front of my mother for the first time. We drove 3 hours into the bay. Paddled for another to the center at midnight to see the glowing plankton. The bioluminescent creatures that illuminate the surface of the water when disrupted. I too shine brightest when disturbed. Bothered. Encroached upon by outsiders. I too can only be seen in the dead of night at the center of water. I too hide painful weapons under my surface. Ready to sting and brand uninvited visitors.
*
It’s a myth that urine stops the pain of a jellyfish’s poison creeping up your body. They take us back to town and pour vinegar over my backside as I lay in the bed of their truck. I am 16 and have already learned how much it will hurt to have skin and nerves and muscle and body and woman. I am 16 and no one knows about the curse growing inside me. I am standing in the shower letting the feverish water come down on the scar forming on my ass.
*
We are on the island of Vieques, a small piece of land off Puerto Rico visiting Candido’s family. I am 16 and just learning how he grew up in pain and stung and hidden from himself for safety. I am just learning what it means to be a daughter of a man who is not my father but stays with me anyway.
*
We leave his mother’s house in the night after an argument I do not understand. An abuse he will never tell me about. A betrayal from mother and abuela and isla and I am too young to see his suffering reflected in my own. His quiet punishment. Which later turns into mine. My mother’s too. Three times. And the medusa, she was warning me my first day. To look beneath the dark waters and find what glows when you touch it. When you say I see you here alone, at night, with only strangers come to stare.
*
12 years later the wound has faded. Some things healed and others simply disappeared. What I remember is the fear. When I think about how I am to die, I hope someone is watching. Afraid to see their own future and remember when mine was still ahead of me.
Gaby Williams lives in Las Vegas by way of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Day One, Fairy Tale Review, Whiskey Island, and others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a BA from Columbia College Chicago. Find her at gaby-writes.com.