Dementia

Emilia is a bag of glass. She’s a fractured humerus. Snapped ulna. Fingernails peeled from their beds. She tries to piece herself back together, slathers porridge on her broken bits like salve, waits for it to dry. The doctors say it’s useless. Accept the inevitable. The inescapable decomposition of a childhood memory, putrefying on the windowsill until mice gnaw at its pulpy rot. Her husband’s name goes sour in the refrigerator next to the spinach. Her own face goes missing, and her head is all mycelia.

Angel T. Dionne is a surrealist professor. She likes her coffee black and her fish tinned.