The Divine Heap
After Sam Gibbons

by Amanda Chiado

I am a thousand body bags heavy with heart.  My mother says, “You are all of these trinkets.”  I stand upon the hoarders’ tower like a death drag.  I want to unzip my collection into a deeper backlash of plastic devils.  The original black was an opaque white.  There is a crest to this oblivion and the mushroom skirts hover like the know-better.  There isn’t any supervision in this intermediary, but cardboard dreamscapes, crushable keeping.  You cannot save me here where the Sasquatch hunts me instead.  I was born to be a doll and maybe that is the echo of hunger here, among these iceberg guts.  I was trying to become that hiker who is propelled by her weight, who shoves away from the lava, who is a winged triumphant instead of a whore without a head.  The screaming was supposed to be a fan that shot me into beauty.  Even when I tiptoe on my divine heap, gently enough, as if were my mother’s body, it continues to shift and roar, and the marionette strings that once tethered me to life, now are losing their starting point.  I dig into my burden for an engine.  I swim toward the surface; even the bricks stuck to my feet want to taste heaven.