Try to be the only person living in a dark country. Everyone else is a ghost. It’s very lonely here. You should come. It is always night so that means there technically is no night. There are no stars or moon. There is no way to get from me to you. Reach into your backpack, I put a flashlight in there. Don’t be afraid to explore, there’s no way you can get lost. Walk across the country until you reach the center of the universe. Throw yourself off the cliff. You will land in a mansion and will be greeted by a family of four with two children who died too young. You will find something different in every room.
A nude limbless woman with perfectly painted lips
A farmer dying from an infected wound
The corpses of the family greeting visitors out front
A tornado of bees and limbs
Two young lovers having sex and making promises that will not be kept
An elderly woman with no face trying to find her glasses
A girl making maps out of old letters
Another farmer dying from the exact same wound (they are business partners)
A boy dissecting his own body for anatomy class
The boy’s mother advising him to make sure the knives he’s using are sterilized
A girl slowly dying in a piano made for two
An orchestra made entirely of skeletons
A woman drawing a bath of her dead husband’s blood
You
Me
Mariah Krochmal is an eighteen-year-old aspiring poet fresh out of good ole Keene High School in Keene, New Hampshire. Mariah likes to keep it classy, enjoys a good smoothie, crime documentaries, and anything written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Mariah hopes to one day publish her own book comprised of prose poetry.
