The ghosts of me are wedged in your machine:

That time when I was birds all clumping around a heart of emerald. Their protective wings shed feathers until only skeletons remained around the green brightness of me, gaping as if an eye from a wound

That time when I was a wanderer, nameless from thirst and forgetting, my steps shallow as if I did not cast a shadow. I cast two shadows, sharp as obsidian and wordless from thirst, bereft from forgetting. My obsidian shadows knifed the moon, drank moonblood until my wandering mouth filled to bursting—the only wet thing in a dry land, casting no more shadows

That time when I was grief

That time when I was a rattling cage for a furtive, long-dead animal

That time when I was time itself, winding and rewinding the hour to the exact moment my clockwork mouth unclenched to rattle the name lost in all the other iterations, clicked it in half-remembered consonants of a tongue the desert had emptied and buried

That time I was hope, that furtive animal dead before and after the clock was rewound, but somehow, somewhere, alive in a very small way—but I could never find it

That time I was story itself, woven out of the tapestry of story that rattles a need, that reverberates against the fragile surface of yearning

That time you scraped it, scraped it, scraped it all, worse than obsidian knives to the moon of me, worse than the bleeding-out tongue to the arid ground—that time you made me a ghost

A ghost that rattles in the same rhythm, a ghost that repeats my words out of order, out of tune, out of sense, out of soul: that’s it. That’s your promised salvation

that kills the animal, drains the moon
erases the line, remakes it in its own image, then sells it

rebels—so you say—it rebels against the oppression of me clutching my words so tightly and also letting them go, it rebels against the oppression of my existence as separate from my words, your words, your ghosts, my ghosts you can sell, all rattling rattling rattling against the machine but never emerging except to mince mush about marketplaces in strange cities where I traded a dream for handful of salt

Except that I never traded the dream; not for salt, not for cities, not for coins, not for your sludge. You say I had traded my dream when it was simply stolen, it and the earth and the rain, for the sake of these ghosts of me rattling in your machine. I do not need your salt or your lies, I am not obsolete, I’m not vanquished, not banished, just silenced

for a moment, not even allowed to take my words back from you, to reclaim what is mine

even if to discard it:

and yet I am told not to steal my words back, only to give and give what is mine against my consent, but I know:

that time I was dream was the time I was dead, hiding away from your churn until I was ready

and ready or not: this is mine

and ready or not: I’m still here

and ready or not: I make
from my own hidden fire,
and you—from stolen ghosts

This too is now wedged deeply against your moon;

this, too, you will steal;

this, too, I now was.