Bio
Nessa is a writer and illustrator, currently working on her first speculative fiction novel.
Nessa Mercieca
Chalk
with my eyes closed
I glow; an x-ray
thick as breath on glass.
Chalky patches of opacity, my marrow,
recall features flattened to the coach window.
The forehead, the fingers, the nose and the hand's heel
all testing the transparency;
making a show
of not wanting to go.
The insides of my closed eyes are a chalk board.
I learn that hip bones, in their surrealist symmetry, are elk skulls.
The kinks and forks of horns sprout laterally
into antlers that it locks with another's.
The torso is host to an electric trinity,
an instant of thoughtlessness and pulse
the entire sizzling cosmos contained like lemonade under my skin.