Rapunzel

    I see once upon a time you were jaw bones.* The old woman at the dining table doesn’t speak, doesn’t cry. Her eyes disappear, her words—they begin to flow. It was the only rupture. Her face pebble-studded, having defeated every disease, she turned around to rest. When the anti-freeze flows from the lawnmower. The last drop of blood curdles at once. Now, if you could find someone to part with, wouldn’t that be nice? No one’s leaving, everyone’s on the floor. The white hair disappears, black hair grows. Why do you leave the door open all the time? In the opened hour she sticks her hand and gropes for her disappearing eyes. I’ll pour a little water on myself and take a look at my body. I’ll wash the panties, and I’ll pick up the towels too, I’ll put them in the basket. When the urine slowly dries where I’m squatting. I shed each layer of my skin under the sun. I see bones from long ago. Every ancestor became bats in the sky and monkeys on trees, owing to the capacity of solids. When she entered the ocean without a word and tried to grow into a whale. Not a day passed without pulling out the hair from the drain. Never have I failed to notice the crisscrossed bones in the hole. The black hair lumps in lumps. They say a mammal is a hole whose skull bones have fused completely. The day the old granddaughter reads a book. How to preserve the scene of rupture? The granddaughter’s white hair dances on the skull. The anti-freeze flows. Such tender palms, but they’ve never felt an alphabet. Child, why do you keep on leaving the door open? When on the floor wriggling, searching for the hour, the whole world must part ways. Touching the jaw bones. A ghost sits even at the tip of a needle. Though she wants to part with someone, she holds tightly in her hand the black hair. Doesn’t cry.

* Moriguchi Mitsuru, The Reason We Pick Up Corpses


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