i am inside her skin, expanding to fill every fold and vein, everything stiff and taut and thick with pressure. i am her fingertips, her kneecaps, the back of her throat—and i can feel everything. like liquid i pool and congeal where the surface gives way—a hand is on the back of her head and suddenly her skull is a quarry after a long rain. her tongue meets something hard and becomes a root in damp soil, heavy and swollen and pregnant with water.

i want to feel how he touched you, exactly as you felt it. i want to know where you slept on this bed—i want to lay exactly where you laid. i want to watch every movement on his face in real time, study every twitch, follow his eyes everywhere. i want to hear every word he said to you—i need to hear it like it’s being said to me, i need to feel his breath in your ear. i want to know what the room smelled like. i want to feel your ***** rising.


a forearm, frantic and blind, reaching; submerged shoulder-deep in freezing wet, disembodied at the surface refraction. a fist finds the small of her waist at the bottom, latches on like a pitbull with lockjaw, so desperate and helpless, so violent—she is reeled in like a world record muskie. the pressure suffocates—the tension breaks and she bursts on impact, paper-thin dermis ruptured and insides spilling all over; virginal and spongy, even through the hardened rural water. there is nothing left but pieces, deflated: scraps of a water balloon on the pavement. a starving fisherman left with loss and waste, defeated by his own panicked desperation. he throws what’s left of the body overboard; lets it float dead and weightless, belly up, embarrassed.

a glance is a puddle of spit on the floor; whatever you did is a school bus-sized ditch slick and deep with black water.

her nausea becomes me.
i can’t even imagine you doing something like that.
i can’t even imagine why you would.

and, again, i am wide-eyed facing the wall.
again, i feel this same deep-belly despair, betrayal, gnawing and beating,
filet knife in between my ribs again,
and again i will feel this.
and this will not be the last time.
(you will protect me from the world but
i have to protect the world from you?)

-

the fish is gutted,
mealy flank flayed clean through and removed--
nothing soft or fleshy wasted.
the fish remains with her structure; bones fixed, exposed yet intact,
viscera still-trembling,
eyes alive and unmoving.
in the sink are two neat cuts of meat; one from each side, each about the length of a pocket bible.
the trash outside the shed is full of bluegill waste tossed whole,
bodies robbed of flesh and scale but still moist and twitching,
tiny mouths still quivering, gasping silently for something.