Best 4 quotes of Amanda Sledz on MyQuotes

Hurricane Katrina arrived without a confirmed weather category, or a name that adequately addressed anger summoned from a thousand leagues down. When the levees broke in New Orleans images escaped television screens to tattoo every skin with the shameful reality that America’s towers fell twice. There was no phoenix. Only mosquitoes escaped the ashes, promising to puncture any still unbloodied with the needle kiss of plague. Then, a great swarm of dragonflies, sent by some other to even the odds. They feasted on the thin-limbed vampires, devoured body and virus, and then hovered around the floating bloated bodies of forgotten grandmothers, armored escorts of the dead. Their wings hummed swamp sonnets while their mouths swallowed maggots, thwarting attempts to hurry death beyond spring sunsets and autumn graves. They kept up their holy procession until New Orleans rebirthed jazz and cut the bodies loose and let saints march in all over again. As I steer my bike through one puddle after the other, making the street music urban rainforest dwellers know, I ask the splash to summon the dragonfly. Call her from the swamp into my throat to name the lump that will never loose me. Be my escort, gobble the flies ever entering me before their children become my whole.

Insomniacs should not be forced to exist in a realm with reflective glass. From the first look I’m boxed in a prism, rainbows charming the other dark-circled self into sharing my prison. One eye turns on the other, each accusing the other of being responsible for an appearance oddly elfin, before exiting head and bouncing like lottery balls through the mirror walls and then drifting up and out the open and unguarded Well of the Wyrd. There, everyone with mirrors and mushrooms is waiting for me, faded and dissolved into giggles.

Monday ushers in a particularly impressive clientele of red-eyed people properly pressed into dry-cleaned suits in neutral tones. They leave their equally well-buttoned children idling in SUVs while dashing to grab double-Americanos and foamy sweet lattes, before click-clacking hasty escapes in ass-sculpting heels and polished loafers with bowl-shaped haircuts that age every face to 40. My imagination speed evolves their unfortunate offspring from car seat-strapped oxygen-starved fast-blooming locusts, to the knuckle-drag harried downtown troglodytes they’ll inevitably become. One by one I capture their flat-formed heads between index finger and thumb for a little crush-crush-crushing, ever aware that if I’m lucky one day their charitable contributions will fund my frown-faced found art project to baffle someone’s hallway.

We are all descendants of murderers and thieves.