Strange Like Me

by Avra Elliott

Wiki Sinaloa

I remember a story he wrote about seaglass, followed by the words of Dybek whispered as foreplay. It isn’t easy to fall in love. There has to be strangeness. There has to be a dead ladybug offered as a bridal shower gift. I’ll seal it with modge podge and lace. Make it a bracelet, an adornment covering scars from toy cars thrown in jest. She’s weird like you, a coworker says. The pumpkin vine climbs the apricot tree, and the color of the fruit that hangs heavy from branches isn’t wrong, it is magic. A pumpkin tree. A tree you love. A branch you break and take. And she is gone, but this new one tempting, when she speaks of falling in love with trees, but she is a soul in a bell jar. He says he can break the mechanism of the altar where I keep bell jars and bones. A rock with striations of deep black that I can never recall the age of. Is it millions or billions? It shouldn’t matter until someone tells me the difference between a billionaire and a millionaire and I realize maybe I should care more of volume and weight and time between lover sightings. Watching the pharaoh episode of Sesame Street while high is not love. Even if he brought you a watermelon slushie. Even if you’ll miss the horses in the field near his home. The woman you once gave your only water bottle to because you thought she was pretty leads a mind game. She says to picture boxes, ladders, and a horse. She says the horse I picture represents my love life, but I pictured two horses, and she laughs. One woman counts a horse’s height by hands. I write her a poem about radishes and socialism. Her fingertips to my throat, constricting my veins she tells me I have a pretty pulse. I add this to my list of strange compliments. The ultrasound tech that said I had a beautiful cervix. The woman who said my hair felt like baby skin. Three fates appeal to me, the linograph on my wall that made me think of my sisters and matched the morai tattooed on the arm of a man I brought home but never see again because he wasn’t weird enough. I tell a love that elbow should be longer than five letters because I picture a whole arm, but an arm is only three letters, and foot is longer than leg. He understands, and our brains will dance across the pink and grey of each other forever I think. Strange like me. Like insects that thrashed the pins from our limbs and created beautiful monsters of ourselves, taking and exchanging body parts, shining locust wings cajoled into a June bug’s cavities. We are the vaults of each others’ unspoken moments, keeper of maps of microscopic trails that lead to selves we’d swallow if the other wasn’t there saying come on now, what is there we can’t say and we rush the words to find out.

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Avra Elliott is a queer writer of Mexican and Celtic heritage from New Mexico. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Elliott’s fiction has been published in Waxwing, Sweet Tree Review, Shadowgraph Quarterly, Contrary, and Noctua Review where she was runner-up for the Neo Americana Fiction Contest. Elliott’s poetry has appeared in several journals including Louisville Review, Barrow Street, Crab Orchard Review, Tinderbox, Tupelo Quarterly, Comstock Review, Southword, and Fairy Tale Review. Her chapbook, Desert Selkie, was a semifinalist for the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize.