I own a pair of scissors. I found them buried at the entrance to hell. Many places mark the opening but not all smell of sulfur. I buried them and dug them up.
There is a woman who watches me. She wears black lace and hair. She stands in the foyer hidden from my grandfather’s portrait. Her face is smooth and gone.
Her wooden dowry chest now holds my mother’s clothes. I repeated ‘if’ and it became another body. I stopped asking questions when the answers started coming from the scissors, as mist through the floorboards.
I never realized the women in black and white were all from photographs. I can’t remember whether that old woman was in front of me as flesh or paper.
I cut off my words inside my throat. I ask how old I look.
I cut off my breasts with the scissors. I ask if I am beautiful.
I cut off the fat of my ass with the scissors. I ask if you would still fuck me.
I raise the scissors to cut off my ears and hear an annunciation of truth: ‘I love you’.
Someone once whispered to one of my beautiful corpses that life is long. I whisper these words like strings. Lace on river’s light hair, flowing outwards. I dig again and bury the scissors.
– Nikolai ELENA