your heartbeat quickens,
a rainstorm in my ear.
(what don't i know?)

a quick glance at the screen
the house talks
(why don't you respond?)

i'm next to you
i think about
the things i'd say,
the things i'll say.

it's cold outside
i hesitate.
does this even really matter if you
love me in the little ways?
i hesitate.

i know im not the only one.
i think you know i know.

it's only a matter of time
your mouse-paws pitter patter
when i leave the room

something is turning, turning. it unfurls and bloats before me; unrecognizable, aside from the eyes. they were always the same. she looks healthier, i say. healthier half beat to death. i let myself grieve.

quiet, as always.
there’s never anything to
worry about, seriously.

(the dog inside me growls, thrashes and whips his chain, splits his maw on his confines.)


Anyway, it wasn’t that dark out yet. The moist, hot breeze licked at their shoulders as they walked home. They oozed in through the back door like smoke, sweating and cursing, I appeared in the living room like an apparition. The curtains were drawn. The TV was just static. It all happened in slow-motion—I see five skeleton fingers clutching cigarette butts, someone scuttles on the porch, the screaming door bursts open

And, yeah. That’s all I can really remember. Looking back, I feel like I should’ve remembered something like that, right? Yeah. That’s the type of thing someone remembers.

a dime,
a piece from my mouth

ask him to sit
he stands
I sweat

buck, gut, gralloch
send him off his balance
send him off with a ballad
a song of hands disappearing
up to the wrist, inside him

become a thick-skinned
being
or
shed it completely

fold me in two

I swallow, I spit
I learn to drink and laugh again

he
sticks a hand into the border fires
stokes that fray of running wires with his tongue and I warn him "it'll burn you up,"

sweet love of my life

living like
the moon pulls not just the tide,
but all manner of things

I pick every seed off the bun–get em all off,
every one

sesame
sesame
sesame

his shoulders slump,
eyes roll
nostrils flare
its barbed wire
another bucket
another drum on my already pounding heart I can't take it I can't take it I can't—

sesame
sesame
sesame

I'll forget
what I've been, I'll forget what—
I don't remember, but
I only want to stretch toward the sun

in the morning my back aches,
the sun rises with you everyday.
this obsession like cheap alcohol in cans
we throw up when it's too much.

i know your hands will be the ones to **** me.
not used to being loved more than you're loving
you fumble every clasp and button.

i long for nausea in tongues and on couches,
the sick feeling of love in my gut,
drifting off to the hum of your engine.

the room is warm, so warm it chokes me. the walls are draped with rugs and greyed with dust; the lamp-light struggles to reach my eyes through the smoke. cecilia wields her blade and runs her tongue along the edge. she has to taste it, she says. to make sure it's right. her yellowed teeth meet the hilt and she leans in my direction; the point of her weapon reaches my temple, caresses the skin there, leaves a drop of her spittle on my cheek from the pressure. she looks up at me--i hate her expression. i hate the sag of her skin; the way she looks at me; her cloudy, flitting corneas; dead and sightless. she's wearing my shirt. it drapes her frame. she looks terrible. i swallow my disgust and stare hard, i close the space between us. she kisses her blade, one last time, for good luck. love is oppressive. cecilia carves me a new pair of eyes.

i imagine breaking each other's noses. i imagine the bone-crunch, cartilage on cartilage like a car crash, the feeling of the skin giving way. i imagine a nosebleed so thick, so clotted and deep-red, oxidizing in real time, warm milk on my face. i imagine a day without nausea. marked by stomach acid, snot pooling above my lip, the face in the mirror gagging into the sink. i draw anything and hate it. i go for rides and just get tired. i try to write and i feel nothing.

bits and pieces of the last few years manifest themselves in dreams: the feeling of handcuffs and hard car seats like playground swings; a six-by-six room with words etched into the wall; being sandwiched between linoleum and fluorescent beams. i revisit myself; she never cried, just dug her nails into the palms of her hands and bore the weight, i admire her stoicism. i admire the way she held her shoulders.

it's 2017 again. i clean blood off the walls in suburbia while a kitchen knife exposes a trachea somewhere in west virginia; i should've known back then that i was cursed. she skyped me with blood dripping down from her chin to her chest. i wonder if the scar's still there.