Gut the mattress and hide all our money, so we can measure our worth by the kink in our spine.

“I took a Rorschach test”* she lamented
*“Though I admit, it was accidental
A bouquet of Cherry smears splotched on toilet-paper
Through liquid lines and violent streaks
Miraging shards of an eight month Terra-cotta
I saw a dishwater boy
Sifting dirt in a garden
He hid among the tomato vines, smiling behind strawberry stains
Oddly reminiscent of that picture I stole
from your mother’s house
I turned the paper square in my hands
Another child
A young-eyed girl
drowning in a pair of peacock heels
And a floral patterned muumuu
Involuntarily closing her left eye when a laugh turns to tears
You've always said you love that about me
Raw images framed in a sharpie-circled day
It’s permanence displayed on the kitchen calendar
A mind’s-eye mosaic that shattered when
I felt it around my insides
A searing grip, and gravity wins
The porcelain bowl is filling now
Like a bloodroot squeezed from toe to crown
None of my tears could wash away any of the red
And all the sirens came
But the tiny shoes stayed wrapped in tissue paper
And some mornings, not many but some
Before the bluish tint of pre-morning dawn
When the slivers of my thought wake me
I feel that invisible hand
Squeezing a butterfly inside my stomach"