“Placatory Congregation”: A New Haunted Passage by Steve Castro, Christopher Citro, & Dustin Pearson

The music of a wall decaying. Stars. Rivers in windows. Moon low over houses. If we stuck a fork in it, juice would fall over us. Build a play cave, cover it with thick blankets. With a small hand tuck the final flap in. The play cave was unique like our town’s pastor with a $ tattoo on his right forearm. The play cave was situated in our backyard. Our home was surrounded by a massive iron gate with enchanted runes that kept the moon from breaking apart and falling on our beloved town. During the flood of ’32, I learned how to properly float on dead bodies, and how to best communicate with decaying walls. Now eight years later, we bask in luxury. Our play cave with blankets thicker than Grandma’s cornbread and softer than the moon’s light letting, its slow staining of our shoulders down to a place that exceeds us, a place we lose track of as the tide makes knowing torsos of us at the highest points of our town. The river gets so dark before the moonglow peaks, but our eyes fixate on our fingers. The light emanating at their tips splits into two branches that draw upward. The world dilates as we swirl our forearms that make the cartridge, as we place the needle on the wall to claim its breaking as song.