Ajax Kallistrate

when you are the light
there are no shadows

August 1, 2026

What pitiful things we are!

So easily abused, tortured, corrupted,
controlled.

If I were a god I would not love us.

August 1, 2026

What a foolish girl I am to believe in
what doesn't believe in me!

Quiet as a mouse I am at least
(sometimes) loud enough to
walk away.

August 1, 2026

I had a father once, when I was
a little girl.

A blurry bug-eyed man in a photo-
graph I keep in an old-fashioned
album.

I remember his voice when
he said my nickname.

I can hear it in my mind if I
try hard enough.

Playful. Happy.

(But what do I know about other
people's happiness?)

I remember his mustachioed smile.
His teeth.

I don't remember his laugh.

I remember climbing onto his
sunblock greasy shoulders.

I remember shouting in a burst
of joy as I jumped into the ocean.

I remember a picnic table, a glass
carafe of wine.

I remember my mother saying
his name the way she always did.

She was afraid.

He wasn't a good man.
He wasn't a good father.
He was a man.
He was a father.

He was The Man.

I remember gritted teeth. Locked
jaw. Eyes illuminated from within,
a manic match to a Joker grin.

I was sixteen. I remember standing between him and the dog, him
and my mother.

"Over my dead body," I said.

(Which in hindsight is pretty
damned funny.)

I no longer remember what
happened next.

I no longer remember being
dragged down the hall by my hair.

It's only from long repetition of
memory that I remember being
folded over, my face crushed
into the carpet, lights exploding
in the darkness, a needle
pressure in my chest.

I no longer remember sitting
on the carpet, drool smear on
my cheek, looking at a clump
of my own hair.

I'm sure my mother was hysterical
(she was always hysterical) but I
don't remember.

I don't remember standing at the
window looking down at the
patrol car in the driveway as
my father and the officer
shared a laugh.

I don't remember the time of year
or the weather.

I remember the year only from
long repetition.

It was referred to in whispers
as "the incident" but it wasn't
the only one.

(He never struck her, not once.)

I remember frenetic energy.

He was always up at dawn.
He ate almost nothing.
He ran, he jogged.
He went to the gym.

He was rarely home, less often
present.

(How do you spend seventeen
years in a household without a
conversation?)

That's where I get my frenetic
energy, the drive to do too much,
the curiosity to learn more, to
try the new, the different, to
strive for self improvement,
for enlightenment (even if it
turns out to be wrong, sadly).

I got his Polish nose, though
my hook is less pronounced.

I got his brown hair that always
looked like it needed a trim, as
if he'd never quite left the 70's.

It's funny how a moment of so
short a duration has elongated
through time, faded in its
particulars, lost its details,
blurred into an afterimage,
a backdrop, a slow motion
scene behind frosted glass,
an infinite reminder of
finite possibilities
that has left me
unable to
recognize
the
world
without it.

I shaved my head once a month
for seventeen years.

I used to think about writing him
a letter, but I never did.

He doesn't know who I am,
who I've become.

He can't remember who I was.
I've been blacked out by blackouts.

In the end it doesn't matter.

I've changed too much.
I know too much.
I've grown too old.

I used to have a dad, but that was
a long time ago, when I was a
little girl.

I don't miss him.

I don't miss him anymore.

August 1, 2026

Nature Girl has been beaten
into shape, beaten out of me.

I've been left alone on a foreign
shore, a foreigner abandoned
in a world I don't belong to,
inside a world outside
the outside.

I
can't
breathe
in here but
that doesn't matter
to anyone, not even me.

I'm a space cadet without a helmet.

There's no path back to where
(or who) I was. I am bereft
of context, an orphaned
asterisk.

Eleven
years later
and I still don't
have one right answer.
I'm no longer in the wrong
class but now I wander the halls
in a stupor. I no longer try the
doors, I just look out the
windows, unconcerned
as to their reality as I
can no longer count
their dimensions.

A pixel, a picture, an unreachable
reality, what's the difference
to an old woman trapped
in the perpetual motion
of poverty?

I know the score, I've done the math.

Sometimes when I drown,
the water is cold.

Sometimes when I drown,
the water is warm.

Sometimes that's the only
choice I have.

When it rains on my virtual island
I stay inside. I pretend to shelter.

She did too, back in the long
ago day, crawling in between
the skinny legs of sumac.

She thought she knew things
and I learned to disbelieve
and now I get it:

She knew the important things.

But none of it was enough to
fill up a world that's been
emptied out. She'd
never heard
of
the
strangler fig
and wouldn't have
been wise enough to be afraid.

I'm afraid, but not for her.
She's gone.

I killed her.

And I've lost far more than I've
gained from it, all said.

I thought I had no choice, and
maybe I was right. Poor thing.

She sat in that dorm room alone
and cried. Heartbroken.

I have to do this, I said and wrote
(I may still have it somewhere).

I can no longer follow the changing
of the seasons, each sign given
freely, like a gift.

I can no longer watch for the
Wild Hunt or listen to the
chorus of a billion
insects or delight
in the antics
of
snapping turtles
and wolf spiders and
tree beetles and water scorpions
or search for the bubble eggs of
frogs and toads and newts or
peel the bark from wild
grape or run my
fingers
over
the silky
smooth wood
of fallen pine branches
or listen for the trickle of snowmelt.

(She was always alone but
never lonely.)

It's all gone now, I said, I wrote.
I have to give it up. I have to
join this world that closes
off the world that isn't
beholden to time.

And I did.
And I wish I could go back.

None of it was worthwhile.

Over thirty years later and not one
moment was worthwhile.

There's no key here.
There's no breadcrumbs.

It's just a complicated mess,
all backwards. And yet,
I'm not bitter.

Only sad.

I remember her.
I remember who I was.
I remember who I sacrificed.

I never want to forget.

August 1, 2026

Don't touch me, SIR.

"He's such a nice guy.
He says Hello to everyone!"

I'm not your buddy.
I'm not a man.

Don't clap me on the shoulder.
We're not on the same team.

I don't know you.
You don't know me.

I am another man's wife.

I can't keep my dignity so
I keep my distance.

I earn less than the man who
mows your lawn, sir. I earn
less than the woman
who cleans your
house, sir.

So don't touch me, sir.
I am not yours.

I didn't make the rules but
I will not play the game.

July 30, 2026

The man I married and the man
I spend all day with both
call me 'kid.'

This disturbs me.

There's nothing I can do about it.
There is no remedy.

This is the world I live in.

The older men who politely stand
aside to let me out of the elevator
will also politely stand aside
to let me struggle with a
heavy box because to
do otherwise would
be to endanger
my ability to
support
my
family.

This disturbs me.

There's nothing I can do about it.
There is no remedy.

This is the world I live in.

The young men who manage my
time, my space, my movement,
and my body are indifferent
to it all because they were
raised by single mothers.

This disturbs me.

There's nothing I can do about it.
There is no remedy.

This is the world I live in.

July 30, 2026

I wish I could stay home on
a rainy day but I can't even
stay home when I'm sick.

I'm just a tiny woman in the
teeth of the machine, working
my tiny brain to understand it all,
working my tiny feet to put food
on our plates.

Is
the
world
a collossal
phone screen?

Degradation everywhere I turn.
Demoralization just a part of
the routine. I squint to see
past it, beyond the
women on
YouTube
jiggling
their breasts
for children, beyond
the men so exhausted by
female liberation that they eat out
of cardboard boxes every night,
beyond the Jewtainment of
broken families and the
mocking of White men.

And what do I see?
The only thing I can still afford
in an artificial economy: nothing.

Bereft of kin, ancestry, history,
mythology, and divorced by
no fault from the divine,
I'm left to ponder
in solitude.

Our enemies have rewritten
our stories so I ignore them.

I buy books I don't have time
to read and steal time to write.

How can I elevate my spirit
in a world where nature itself
tortures innocence for an
evolutionary advantage?

The pelican mommy disgorges
the chick of another pelican
mommy into her nest.

He trembles, bewildered.
He's coated in digestive juices
and tries to shake himself free.
He expects his own pelican
mommy to look after him,
to soothe him.

Instead he's eaten alive by the
offspring of another pelican
mommy.

And thus he dies in fear and
confusion, and thus nature's face
is besmirched by its foundational
premise: eat or be eaten.

Top to bottom, nature itself is a
machine that crushes innocence.

Are the baby-eaters among our
own kind then akin to nature?

Is self-sacrifice then false?
Another lie?

What is evil if not the deliberate
destruction of innocence?

And so I'm consumed by my own
thoughts on a rainy day at the end
of July. Safe and warm and dry
only by sacrificial separation
from my family. My family
safe and warm and dry
only by my sacrificial
separation.

I have no answers. No answers,
honestly, would satisfy me.

'This is why you suffer' or
'your suffering is your own fault'
has no meaning when I can't
find the time to think in
between my labors.

I know only that it's raining
in Albany and I wish I was home.

I am a tiny woman caught in the
teeth of the machine. Some day
it will grind my bones to dust
and everything that I am will
blow away on a wet wind
and all my questions
will be forgotten. 

Maybe that's
the only answer I need.

July 30, 2026

I grew up in a blessed place,
at least for a few years.

A valley.

The sky always painted with
the faces of mountains.

Snowy winters, humid summers.

I thought all places were like this,
forgetting in a child's way all
the other places I'd lived.

It was magical.

All the trees were taller than
all the houses. Oak, maple,
dogwood.

There were special places
for a girl with a bike.

Wild raspberry thickets.
A tree swing. Fieldstone walls.
A seasonal pond that filled with
tadpoles every spring.

But the most special place
was TPBTM.

A sacred name for a sacred place.

I had to ride my bike through
the neighbor's yard to get to
the boulders that blocked
the dirt road.

I always left an offering of
flowers. I was always
filled with joy there,
especially at the
swamp.

Painted turtles, snapping turtles,
dragonflies, bullfrogs, snails,
minnows, sunfish, poke-
weed, pitcher plants,
mullin, skunk
cabbage,
and
bugs,
amphibians,
and birds of all kinds.

I spent so much time there
I dreamed of it as I slept,
partially submerged,
my ears filled half
with water, half
with the ever
present
drone
of
miraculous life.

I keep it only in my heart now.

I grew up.
I went to college.

Bulldozers filled in the swamp.
Chainsaws cut down the trees.
Pavers paved over the black-
berry bushes.

All the houses there are taller
than all the trees.

I grew up in a magical place,
at least for a while.

Not yet harnessed to time,
I never saw change coming.

I imagine her, me, still pedaling
her bike (it had a name too)
as fast as it could go,
down the street
and through
the
neighbor's
yard and straight
up to the boulders that were
enough to stop a grown-up with
a car but not a girl with a bike.

I see her reverently placing her
gathered flowers, asters
and white clover and
violets, her mind
only on spotted
salamanders
and
maybe
a blue heron
if she was lucky.

She climbs over the boulders,
her bike in tow, and disappears
into the woods, into the place
behind it all, beyond it all.

Unbowed. Unbroken.

I can leave her there.

And hope someday I get to
see another mountain painted
sky, taste a wild fruit, glimpse
an orchid, and so fondly
remember TPBTM.

July 24, 2026

I am an iteration on a theme.

I look at the back of my head
when I look back six months,
six years, and maybe I feel
my eyes on the back of
my head now.

It's less
Who am I? and
more When am I?

(Are we all like this, unrecognizable
to ourselves in the main?)

My reality now is vastly different
than my reality six months ago,
six years ago.

My reality on a Saturday afternoon
is different than my reality
on a Monday morning.

My reality in the company of my
family, nestled in my home,
sheltered from the
elements,
from
the unknown
quantities of strangers,
is different than my reality at
work, driven second by second
by the toothy whip of time and
the judgement of the over-
seer's eyes, my interior
self perpetually
alert
for the
unpredictable
reactions of foreigners,
my mental hands shifting
here and there to buoy my mood
and restrict my words, my head
bowed to reflect my obedience.

I am an iteration on a theme.

Themes of homelessness,
loneliness, sadness, misery.

Which iteration outside of the
mayfly selves who exist for
only a few moments or
hours have been un-
burdened
by
the
weight of them?

Not me, surely.

Not she of six months ago,
trapped in her mind in a
windowless refrigerator
for eight hours a day.

Not she of six years ago,
freefalling in the
electrified
terror
of
living
alone for
the first time,
for the first time
relying entirely and
solely on herself, breaking
down over and over again
on the hardwood floor
of that dull empty
room in between
working two jobs
and learning
how
to
speak and
not knowing (in hindsight
as I look at the back of her head)
just how breathtakingly naive
she was, how profoundly
vulnerable, a prey
animal who
slipped
through
the
cracks
of the sprung
trap and narrowly
avoided annihilation. 

Or maybe she was annihilated.
And now she's me.

I've been iterations who held on
too tightly, like the one whose
last act was to step onto
a plane (she died before
she disembarked),
or even my last
Sunday evening
self who clutched
her head between her
hands and balked at knowing
that when the lights go out
so does she.

It's a mercy really, mortality.

What's one more death after a
hundred thousand?

That final self won't have to wake
up and wonder who she is, what
trials and humiliations she'll
have to endure just to end
up in the same position
all over again, another
day, another point of
bifurcation, another
interior mutation
that can't be
predicted,
directed,
negated,
or
controlled
in any way, a
spiritual crap shoot
for a spiritual being trapped
in a spiritually dead reality.

That is, until her, until the last,
and for that I envy her even
if she doesn't exist... yet.

For her no more anticipation of suffering.
No more enduring what can barely
be endured.

With any luck she'll have (maybe)
one memory of having been lost
in bliss even if it was as
another self, another
iteration,
one
that existed
for only a brief bright
moment, a bloom of spirit,
a reunion with the divine before
sinking back into oblivion and
darkness.

Even I have a few of those,
faded as they are in the
imagination of who
I am now.

Half a day spent under the spell
of my drawing tablet. Singing
a silly song to my cat as
I cooked dinner. A
conversation
with
my husband
that was half laughter 
and half dark banter over
the ridiculous darkness of
the world, about sleepwalkers
and the things that destroy
the soul.

Remembering isn't living.

I'm here now, at work.
I dress the way they want
me to dress. I speak the way
they want me to speak. I labor
the way they want me to labor.

I am their little daemon.

I can only hope I'll be someone
else this afternoon, barefoot
on the cheap rug in our
borrowed home,
listening
to
my husband's
beloved voice, reaching
out to pet a cat, an iteration
who absently slips into an eternal
moment unbound from earthly
shackles, who can forget for
the length of a breath
the weight of bills,
the aging body,
the scores of poverty,
the uncertainty of
the future
and just...
exist.

I am an iteration on a theme.
Themes of dislocation,
solitude, madness,
and loss.

I am a puzzle piece without a puzzle,
a question without an answer, 
an anomalous soul, a traveler
on a journey to no
destination
at all.

July 2, 2026