Failure of the New Gods

There’s a woman with her feet planted in the surf of Coney Island,
waiting for a bottle to bob her way.

During the day, she works as a contortionist at a freak show.
"Come! See Freyja the Human Pretzel!"
("Freyja the Human Pretzel" is not her legal name.)
She bends and twists her body into the alphabets of long dead languages, spelling out all the stories you’ve ever wanted to read, but didn’t know you were reading.
She becomes the sheet music of every song you’ll ever be married to.
Her body is your next tattoo, spelling out, in what should be Celtic, the word "YES".

A few years ago, she graduated from locksmith school
and now spends her weekends opening car doors for grateful tourists and
safety deposit boxes for newfound orphans.
She picks broken-hearted pendants based on a sliding scale of questions whose bottom line currency is whether you really deserve to ever see that face again.
Under Thieves Moons, she breaks into the safes of the Russian mafia, taking nothing and leaving behind the love letters of their parents from the old country just to remind them that, with patience, nothing is impossible.
Ya tibya lyublyu.
Ya tibya lyublyu.
Ya tibya lyublyu.
Ya budu lyubit tibya cherez nashi DNK.
...
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I will love you through our DNA.

At night, she works as a teacher/stripper/goddess
dancing backwards into clothes, stirring memory within the confines of a song, breaking hearts at the speed of 70 beats per minute.
She teaches men to reflect upon the nature of time and motion and void, realizing just how short and poorly spent 3 minutes can be.
For $10 a tutoring session, she gyrates a telepathy, pushing them to invariably think "Please let this be the extended remix version!"
(It never is.)
"You smell like home," they breathe.
She whispers, "Call your mother."

When I was in high school, she was abducted by the KGB
trained for espionage, becoming character in instants, and disappearing in the spaces between.
Her backstage was a compact mirror and she traipsed through all the stages of global theaters of cold war, seducing diplomats with poison lipstick and pirouetting with knives.
(What she really wants to do is direct.)
"You could be anyone," her handlers boast
She admits, "I always will."

Getting her doctorate in cryptozoology involved
1) becoming a cult leader
2) and committing deicide
For her post-doc, entire pantheons fell before her.
She measured fate in alchemical missed connections while casting spells through rolled eyes at misguided undergrads.
Tracking legends was merely for lesser cryptozoologists, while she reeled the unreal, proving that even monsters need love, too,
and then she loved them,
soothing men who would be wolves within a song
deciphering fingerprint messages in the half-hearts of tin men
bending crooks to genealogical memory and Kaisers to ideals over ideology
uncovering apocryphal dances to trap time
applying for headmistress positions at girls schools.

There’s a woman standing amongst the flotsam and jetsam of Coney Island waiting for a message in a bottle that I’ll never throw,
because,
Lynn,
this locksmith contortionist will never fit me like you.