Flumes Volume 2: Issue 1, Summer 2017 | Page 43

Chasing Pictograms

by Richard King Perkins II

A pearl cat

pretends to be a woman;

slides easily through revels

and bizarre human requirements

chasing pictograms

of spiral luna dancers

gnawing through the halls of other people's lives.

Furious gazers will sometimes speak to her

and demand she do things for them—

she’ll follow the part of me

that is tempting meat

nimble as a sub-human, disfigured,

ripe for dissolution

wandering the pine-tree world

wearing her face of lost renown

and the soul of her remnant self;

a mortal beauty

she can’t let go.

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