by Grace Huddleston

Phobos

You were ripped from the earth
Your very existence, impossible
As you ascended into the heavens
Your limbs like a dancer
A woman threaded on a silver wire
Cirque de soleil
Hanging by your sternum
The silver metal hook, cold inside you
As you rode the fast track to the sun
Layer after layer peeled back
Painfully, like every last fingernail
Ripped from the grasp of your skin
Your midsection in knots
Head in a daze, haze, maze.
Delirium set in,
Rapid acceleration shot you to the great origin
Yet you were not any farther from here
Like a paperweight,
Granite rock, millions under millions
Being crushed, constricted, restrained
Disillusionment like funhouse mirrors
Confusion fogged your eyes
Sickness was apparent in the vomit that swirled
swiftly down the waterslide of your toilet
This was an unmistakable and inescapable hell
Violent white foam swallowed you whole
Traveling through the jaws of a boa constrictor
Plopped into acid praying for evaporation
But the atomic bonds held fast
What intermolecular forces
Left you racing yet still; unmoving?
Buzzing like the radio waves in the suffocating air
Chaos like the static on your tv screen
Blinders like the propaganda in the media
Heart exploding like a race dog at the end of the Iditarod
Collapsed on the floor like the man with a heart attack
Laying at the bottom of the stairs after a fall
Dead and blood puddling from the wound of a gun
The world never spun so quickly now
Being stretched into matter thinner than your knife blade
Your threats were ever thin
The black hole was eating us alive
The sands of time slinking through the wormhole
The fabric of the universe turns out to be concave
Fragility that is society,
Dangles on the hook in front of the blind fish
Far off in the valleys,
far off into space
I was being stretched and pulled,
Ripped molecule by molecule,
Laid out atom to atom
And made string from here to the center of the Milky Way.
Thinner than the veil of a bride
Weaker than the cry of a sinner
Darker than the space where matter was not found
In my hand sat my will
In my head sat the world
In the world sat myself on the surface made of crust
As I returned to dust
Thinner than the air
More quiet than a mouse
I had disappeared, and left the house
I was on my way to other galaxies but still here
I dreamed a dream
But it wasn't near
Not here
For fear had ruled us all.