The Anatomy of An Aguamala

the grass licked at her ankles
Fire swayed at her feet
The sky swelled up beside her
But it was the ocean she breathed

There are too many nonsense words in my mind right now. I need to write everything down and then I’ll get back to my usual stories. (I have so much to say about that party but I don’t even know how to explain it!)

Oyster-slick lotion sat high on his cheek bones where he had tried to heal his wind chapped skin, paper thin and salted with freckles.

Odd for skin that hadn’t seen the sun. (Maybe the light seared through the water like it filters through magnifying glasses to set fire to dry grass on hot summers days; it found its way through the glass sea, reflecting off the pebbles, little dots burning themselves to the flesh hugging his alabaster bones.) His eyes were perpetually wet.

I once had a girl tell me she made her self cry every morning before school, just because she felt beautiful when her eyes sparkled from the streams of salt water, as they purged themselves of sleep dust and dreams from the night before.

He just looked tired. The folds of his skin purple colored like a ripe-plum bruise. Splotchy puffs of color like someone had taken a fat stub of charcoal to the underbelly of his eyelashes, painting his skin raw and inflamed.

His brooding eyes hid under feathery, moth-wing eyebrows: lush, powder white, fine as spider silk but thick like caterpillar fur across his forehead. Twin moth wings fluttering horizontally, entangling themselves in the air, knitting together in a thick bunch across his brow.

But it was only tears. The water he was so used to, beading under sleepy eyelids, rivlettes eroding the fine hairs on his cheeks, carving canyons and crevices and wrinkles into the corners of his mouth.



Just something I’m working on, a dream from years past. It sits in my mind and sometimes the wind or passing time stirs it up. For some reason it makes me lonely, but maybe if I write it we can be lonely together.

Claret lips on columbine skin, I was that faded, washed out portrait you find crinkled at the bottom of the wash cupboard. Ghost-like and ethereal, like a vision through the fog. White silk, white stitching, white fur, sheer stockings clinging with white-hot static to pale, dove freckled skin. I’ve lined my lips in poppy red and rimmed my eyes in heliotrope.

Oh, and I’m probably blushing.