Collection: Memento Mori, Winter Bloom, Exultation, Tools, My Skin

By Danielle Krakovsky

Memento Mori

Glossy white halls coated in the eye-watering smells of desperation and disinfectant

Stores cluttered full of animals with dry glass eyes and wires for bones

Quiet, peaceful hills dotted with unfeeling, unrecognizable, unmentionable monuments of stone

Rasping flowers pulled from between the yellowing pages of age-old books

All clawed hands grasping at skin and bones and weakening sinew

Paper-thin hands tightening around quickly emptying hourglasses

Winter-Bloom

I sit beside the window and regard

The dark afar the rising woods.

Beyond the fire-blooming trees and through leaves pulled by chilled air

Past the arch of chalk white granite

Lies the distant beginning of Winter-Bloom

Where ice is fire and the feeling of the wind is Void

And deep in the night, the falling flakes will be the only stars in a leaden sky

There is the end

Out the window I know I will lay
Staring out

Snow refusing to melt against my frozen skin

Wondering what is sky and what is ground.

Exultation

I take deep springtime breaths 

Just to feel my soul scrape my ribs.

I seek the placement of viscera and blood 

To carefully place the light of god in hidden red.

I trace veins under thin skin,

Seeking, feeling, the source of life.

I want to know where bones belong 

So I can grow flowers around them.

Clematis creeping up trellis-ribs

Lily of the valley blooming through the ischium

Wildflowers popping up near the tarsals

And a single perfect chrysanthemum

Carefully placed in the orbit

This is my divine purpose 

Fulfilled with relish and vigor

In service of the greatest Be.

Tools

With two firm hands, I have grasped my red thread and pulled it steadily through an embroidery needle

This is a gift I give myself to weave my existence, stitch by painstaking stitch, into the fabric of my reality

My parents handed me a chisel the day I wrote my very first word

An unavoidable providence to force out The Truth, my truth.

The bitten-down nails of my left hands are the perfect knife

To carve a haiku into the locked door, as it teeters on the edge of a cliff.

There is a calligraphy pen I am given when I see sunlight dappling through the leaves

Made for gently curving lines, made for small soft tremendous letters, made for single words and not stories.

The fruits of my labor are not for me, they do me little good.

But I make them still

In the desperate, silent hope

That the woman at the coffee shop will smile and nod at me again when I finish speaking.

My Skin

I want my skin to be a welcome canvas of everything I ever was

I want the scars to tell a story of what I said and did 

From the large-scale incisions across my knees and feet and back

To the tiny swirl on the skin of my thumb that refuses to fade away

I want a patchwork of ink to swirl across my flesh

As a beautiful and ongoing eulogy to everything that I love

To the stories that made me who I am, to the things that make sure the blood in my veins keeps moving. 

I want memories punched into my skin so I can look and see and remember

And so that when I die the mortician will see my corpse, stained as it is, and say “Oh. I understand.”

Even if they only understand a fraction, it will be enough.

And then I want it all to be burned away.

Like wind through the dying autumn leaves, or the fight between the ocean and the water-trodden stones, or the movement of ash mingled with the clouds

I want the mortician to see one portion of my being, see its insignificance and its enormity, and smile

And only then, only then, do I want them to smile again as I turn to dust and bone shards.