The Crown Prince of Hidden Meadows Trailer Park

When I ask how you’ve been

Walking through my dreams,

You say it’s brainless.

Like sorting through a current of satellite signals

Muddled by interference

Ultimately tuning to the murmuring FM Preacher’s station:

And the Lord said

Who ever

Kills an animal

Must

replace it

When you ask how I found you,

In the kind of uncertain darkness only children believe in,

I say it was like

Following a squirming tadpole beneath the surface of my skin,

Trapping it between my index finger and thumb,

Wildly thrashing until it gives in to the pressure

Of suffocation.

You grin and become something twisted,

Like a sick and evil tree,

Reminding me that

I let you tie our pinkies together

with a string of gauze.

I pulled until it snapped but

the thread grows back thicker

Like a phantom cable.

We were so young, back when

you came to me with

birds in your teeth.

Now you come home with what’s

left of some wandering child

Like a charred ragdoll, and

I’m forced to watch

You dig shallow graves at the far end of the trailer park

***

Charlotte Sabina is a 4th year philosophy student at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is inspired by compulsion, trees, memory, and stuffed animals.