genuflection ovenbird The moon bleeds its light out on the stone walls. My eyes are in my hands, trailing their ocular nerves like tentacles. I think of the calamari we ate in Greece, rubbery battered rings of flesh served with a side of tzatziki sauce and a wedge of lemon. Greece belongs to the sun-touched world, and it is far away from me. I can see my eyes with vision’s phantom limbs that wave weakly in my empty sockets. My eyes can’t see me back. I genuflect. My knees press painfully into the cold cobbled floor. Before me: a demonic deacon, tattered skin stretched over the bone trellis of his bat-like wings. Knowledge rushes into my mouth, stale and laced with mildew: this is all I will ever see, this twisted, embodied horror, hungry, vampiric, all slavering fangs and blackened nails. Worse than blindness, this gaunt shadow that hunts me like a black heron. The dark can look so much like safety, though it hides a sharp beak, waiting to pluck you from the shallows. I scream. And throw my eyes with all my strength at the demon’s heart. They transform into bats, stripped of their skin, two tangles of muscle tumble erratically through the air. They strike their target, and all goes black, black, black. There is nothing. And I don’t know who I am. 260611 what's it to you? who go blather from