Meditations on the Devil

To lead one astray, you must offer an ashtray, Morse code. Somewhere to tap out the sediments of a once glowing hope.

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Imagine a newborn, still wearing its sweater of blood and vernix. Imagine, with its first breath comes its first knowledge: death, like a cord, around the neck. This is the house I live in.

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Such a delicacy, to eat a man up to his waist. Sometimes, when I'm caught, people call me woman. I do not correct their mistake.

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In another world, murder is a ceremony of golden wounds and violins. There is no other world but this. Every sin deserves a pageantry of music and teething.

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When the body is a den without light, the spine is a snake, the heart is a snake. To shed one's skin is not a rebirth. It is the body's violence distended, gleaming.

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A selfie of the soul looks something like this: a suit of yolk-string, phallus-pink scarves, a halo of whispering flies circling eternity above the skull.

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Death is an endless swallowing of stones, a heaviness any Sisyphus would trade for a black hole.

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God does not understand how any of his creations could become symbols for evil. A goat hoof is a goat hoof is a goat hoof. A wing does not become more than machine.

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The infinite will of God is only a fish—unhook it.

- Meghan Privitello (from Nightjar Review)

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