Egan Walker

MS. DEAD SECRETARY

Bar river-shape. Midnight black and reflecting stars. No moon. My hand over the rapids
and no shadow. Fish quiver and rush past me their scales silvering. Shiver and
blue. Fluttering historiography. My favorite song canters and sails through me. Full
silver regalia. Mare made of dark sky screaming and leaning back jangling knight
screaming too. Heel turn. Black velvet T-straps slamming into the silt and my heart in sheer
black tights. Gold-plated confetti in eddies around my thighs. Unruly hair clipped back don't
worry it still falls across my eye. Pink sparks. On the banks, the cops seethe crawling over
each other cars in a pileup tossing their handguns into the water.
Gutter. Hope sink. Waterlogged. Blue sand-gun. Blue rock-pistol. Blue-barrel deep cut.
Me and the ghosts dripping blood and laughing. We whoop and splash our feet spiked collars
and lace daubed corsets and big insensible shoes and black ribbons in bows circling our throats
and hair on the brink of an excruciatingly greasy death. No shadows. Hot blue
heart. My best friend screams bloody hallelujah half an inch from my mouth and a
ghost with checkered pants buttoned up to her high hell chin hollers and jumps with us. Dark
water scorched and rushing us. Clean spiralling falsetto. I take the ghost's hands which are
decorated with cheap chipped black polish and through my vinyl opera gloves blooms
hot blue lace and out of my mouth blooms another hotter red mouth and out of her eye purple
stars spill. Spile. Cherry champagne. Clock-remorse. She looks at
me and I look back and away and back. I haul her downstream West and into some city
where we are dead and gone and still singing. All corpselight. All stars. No shadow. My heels
and her heels ravaged by river rocks. Short-range corkboard soles. Waterlogged. She slips her
fingers through my hands like it is just ripped lace. On the banks, the cops drop to their knees.
Hell-bent. Bright fury. Us brighter. Look at that
the telephone lines rising in the East. I'll call you!!!

Read more about Egan’s work.

Egan Walker is an artist and writer living and working on unceded Ramayatush Ohlone land. He makes work about weird people and blue rivers. One of his poems is forthcoming in Ignatian. You can find him on eganwalker.com, but he will probably be out, hiding in the crowd of a pop-punk cover band or skulking along the banks of the Yuba river.