The Twins - JLG Clift

Sisters bursting mental blisters with copper nail scissors blood and water gushing out of the daughters in the midst of the monsoon nothing better to do their copy of Twister was tattered and scored and the board had no arrow they didn’t know where to put their feet and no money had stayed in the monopoly game they used to play it’d gone away in fives and tens and hundreds over the years and no there’s nothing left to go and there’s nothing to show for the exit just the red pits of plastic where they used to stay. There’s nothing true about their world or their lives clouds dart and dive dirty woollen knives burying themselves in skies that are all beaten and blue the moon’s full and flawless at the sky’s heart like a cue ball; the twins with matching heads of brittle beige hair twined up into balls with Chinese chopsticks whittled from red marble sit in living reflection no connection to anything nothing lasts neither cast word nor shadow no light below or above they’re just gazing getting nowhere just staring; there’s nothing but the haze of the weather and the harsh contrast between the shouting of the storm and the silence in their Ivy League boarding school dorm red bricks crackling like sticks in Brownie brewed flames back when the twins fought the leering wilderness of wild frontier peeling and popping in the hurricane rain ripping the colour from the stone as it falls from its home in the sky alone to die no not to die it never lived but it’s given millions of lives and now its mad now it’s sad and it wants to take some back the element lacking all remorse steers its course like the horse of death towards the sisters in silk kimonos of red white and blue with skin of milk and teeth of pearl girls drawing breath but for how long? The girls are too wrapped up in the sight of themselves to realise something’s going wrong their eyes blue and green have never seen anything so fierce have never seen nature before have never taken their eyes off each other but now they do for the drunken mother with a hurricane hush her whips of wind rush towards the twins who are guilty of nothing at all beyond self-absorption their world falls into twisting whistling contortions around their ears years of memories whirling around the silence of the dorm drowned in the sound of the scornful storm mementos of once-weres and never-will-be-agains razor sharp sugar glass from souvenir chandeliers floating with feathers from pillows and stuffing from teddy bears tear the skin and the silk as it glides on so slow it looks fast the blood from the girls drawn by the past cycling in the chrome rungs of the cyclone their faces are beaten and blue their skin white their eyes red; Liberty and Ivy the twins of America lie dead their bodies threading through the rubble like vines that have been cut down for reaching too far up into the crown of the atmosphere too fast too sharp and it is here where they died that they will lie found but unmoved their moods drained from their bodies their existence unchanged for the most part; they’re still looking at each other lying in the crackling covers of what they used to own alone, not even the vulture of the hawk or the regale now balding eagle dare to pick the flesh from these girls enmeshed in the rubble their memories in pieces poking out through the foundations like pre-pubescent tufts of stubble because the birds of prey that fly far away from the praying nation paying hand over fist for the actions of the dearly missed daughters know that the flesh is not worth the trouble that it brings after the taste has faded Ivy’s eye tastes like apple pie before it turns putrid and before the twin in the rubble becomes bone, a relic in relics and rags sagging into the shit shaded salt of the land that gave her and her sister birth and has now taken it away because the Twins of America had outstayed their stay and had become lazy, too lazy to even play anymore, too lazy to follow the laws she set out for them; she’s been working to weed the twins out for a while she’s lined their stomachs with dollar green bile that burns right through them in her flem she has spat down disease after disease to try to bring them to their knees to try to stop them staring at each other and look upon their mother and their killer who has now spilled their blood for another, their brother to the East.  But this action, the mother knows, will not give her peace either nor will it enable her to live any longer gleefully, but if the mother must lose herself to her stirring mass of iconoclastic children vampires by choice that take chunks not with their teeth but with bulldozers and oil drills driven in their millions by the voice of a thousand tongues from the top of its lecherous lungs then she will take a few with her she will take what she has given back as the children continue to hack away until there are no children left to speak. The mother will die, meek and mangled in the silence of a world without nations or occupations; a creation left alone to roam freely on its axis, free to be; that is what the mother wants to see.