The night wraps it's dripping rime hands around my neck, catching sweat on Python fingers, their tongues flicking the flyaway hairs. It's nails creep up the soft cape of flesh of my throat, dragging their way up to my eyes. They peel my lids open again and again, jagged cliff edge knife pulling at thinly veiled corners. I can feel the vessels pop within my eyes, a New York New Years firework show of running red.

Dead silence is swept away by the whirring waves of a fan. I am awake and rolling in routine malaise. Guilt tugs at my heart and disappears in the instant I try to pin it down. It is frightful and flightful and with its fleeting nature, leaves and then emanates a trace of soreness in its place. There are no alarms and no time taking place. Everything is frozen under the fingernails of a great beast.

A dull tapping at my windows tells me dear fear wants to braid my hair and whisper gently in my ear. I toss and turn a few times more, trying to shake the animal off of me. It's nails rap again at my eyelids and they blister, hot tears spilling and I look up, staring death in the face and seething from something that I can't quite see, nor feel.

I'm chewed up and spit out, gum in the mouth of you.

I am riddled with the soft impressions left by molars on my back and stomach, I am gnawed and shaken like a bone in the jaws of everyone I love.

I am hollowed out by turpentine stomach acid, stripping me of my insides. I purge what is left of my rag doll body into the sink every morning after looking in the mirror and seeing nothing but bones.

What used to be eyes are just holes.

This reality, different from yours.
Sandpaper ice-cream cones sold
in engulfed, aflame stores.

This body, tense yet soft
tears underneath
the rub of rope.
My friend's feet swiped
a flailing chair,
And her neck did snap,
feces everywhere.

This sky, wrapped in saran wrap,
becomes pregnant when it rains,
the plastic weighed down by water,
slumps down the aquarium sky,
we slump down as it kisses us,
crushes us, mashes us, thrashes us.

- It all changes here,
from god to god,
from year to year -

Her hips lay like cursive,
pale, promising, pent up
like the shoulders of
an anxious angel.

Her hair a burnt brown,
wrapped around a whatever-count pillow,
like a L'Oréal snake, sleeping sullen,
drifting off into a designer dream,
unsure of this, unsure of me.

I see her as a child --
No, I see me as a child --
No, I see us as children.
This. This surreal feeling I get
when you're around me.
When the world is around me,
vibrating underneath my Toms.
Vibrating in my prescription bottle.
Vibrating between her legs, my ribs.
Between each page, so much is hidden:
my early swearing that my late love
is slowly draining.

I am envious of birds and the way they never seem to be seen dead, how their thread thin porcelain bones break in silence and even sprayed and flayed, their wings still taper perfectly. When they are fallen angels with eyes rotten out of their skulls, they are still angels and I am just ash and cracked ribs. I am concrete break, I am gentle bearing of dead life, I am dulled claws, I am mothers weakness, I am fathers burden, I am small afraid, I am just earthly unworthy.

I am jealous of the albatross, her sleek flight and winged eyes. I am envious of the way she can cut through air and tear through broken clam shell seams, find flesh through rock. I am loathing of her pristine white body, her untouched and unbothered brain. I am looking right at her bold and light breast, the blackest parts of her towards the sun. The rime of her feet is nothing compared to that of mine, the mariner, floating face down in frozen waters that she finds delightful. She is simply angelic, simply heavenly, simply God herself.

Hummingbird tells me child, you are not light enough for flight. My dearest angel your wings are just clipped but oh? Who holds the scissors? He takes off in a gust of sweet summer wind, that I so often chase.

I hear the chickadee calling my name and telling me "Young goddess of pain and power and love, seek not the answer but answer fast to the call of difficulty."

I pick apart your bones

just to see if there's any flesh left.

I'm looking for the last of your cologne.

I am looking through your clothes, trying to find one strand of your thread-bare hair.
(Was it ash blonde or ***** blonde? I swear it was more ashy.)

I don't know where I lost you, where I left you, maybe it was in the soft cradle of my bed as you waited for me to turn over the record.

I don't know. I don't know what the curves of the bird bones in your hands look like anymore, and I can say the same about the size of your eyes, watching me always.

But I can tell you I miss you, I miss your head resting on my shoulder. You're so much taller than me, and I can feel myself lowering what I had felt into the ground, and I swear, if you weren't so high, you would have noticed.

(Everyone I love falls asleep.)