Blue Screen of Death

by Margot Miller

The paper is blank, my hard drive is empty
It's the blue screen of death
Something terrible has happened
And I've not been told
My words go out, messages in bottles
Small, persistent acts of faith
Tossed on the sea, intercepted, plucked away by vultures
Deleted from memory, the pages withdrawn,
Stuffed into a seabird's nest

Chora¹ falls into the deep

Panic

I wake up in the emergency room, wearing a wetsuit,
am offered a choice between vanilla ice cream and hot salsa.
And I'm discharged, back to the sea.
I start swimming, slowly

¹In Plato, chora is used in a sense close to space, or place in space; the milieu in which Forms materialise. [...] it signifies, at its most literal level, notions of "space", "location", "site", "region", "locale", "country": but it also contains an irreducible, yet often overlooked connection with the functions of femininity, being associated with a series of sexually-coded terms -- "mother","nurse","receptacle", and "imprint-bearer".

The Author

Margot Miller's work (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) has appeared in or is currently featured/forthcoming in ChickFlicks Ezine, Write Side Up, A Long Story Short, Subtle Tea, LitDispatch, Moonlit Thoughts (dogma publications, UK), Static Movement, BluePrint Review, Salomé, Insolent Rudder, and Moondance. Her essay, "Handless Maidens: Grimm Tales in Contemporary Cinema" appears in the November issue of FRINGE. Miller's web page can be found at miller.margot.googlepages.com.