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[progressing-on]

Sardines

Plagued with unknowing, the air grows narrow under all of our noses. Only synaptic space between sardines, we're getting no closer. The dull hum of the perfect electric rub is warming, each of us moving pistons in the people rug. No need for clothes who are easily shredded like scaled skin. Eye caps and sealed nostrils are just gills. Friction-feel the snake twist torment and how it leaves the sardines hapless, packed tight in brine.

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She put on my tights and my fat skipped over white seams into quilted pools of shorn velvet. Young buck of deer or elk.

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I've been talking backwards. Listlessness hidden behind fistfuls of fruit mash. Prime rotten, air bidden time that scraped the slit from the bottom of my tummy. Reuse the reduction and filter it through the holes in my teeth.

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You're a sun spot on a bed spread. You're the warmth of cotton linen cast into soft silk. A hole in the head space who holds my hand and presses my chest till gravity is a reservation. You linger a little longer than the dust took to settle where the wind dance whirled it round. This room, neon green, at least the last I heard from the quiet hum of the electric lungs who hide inside of me. Fairer grounds, safe measures that cradle the light and her shadows as surely as a surrogate mother wields her flowers. You carry me in your underarm and feed me the kisses I breathe. Beautiful light, carry me by the curves of fat that hide my mind beneath.

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Another sliver past the morning. Wonders behind the minute hand, how hilarious it is to find privilege in this suffering. It lingers in the throat like RC Cola and caramelizes the tips of fingers like individual apples. Skelton heads on five long necks, no minutes left to make last. Jaw breaker, peach pit, just a stone in the stomach. Churn the grasses to vegetable oils and stain this stomach green. Fill me up buttercup and watch the drippings drain away.

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Ode to being locked in an adjacent

Behind your interlocked fingers I see my parts entangled like decaying seaweed flowing in the salt brine of the dead sea. For I am the larking bird inside your eye who hides inside the room adjacent you. A keyhole or a sinkhole could not hide your cheekbones from my fists, I would find you beside it or beneath. Splintered wood or aluminum shraps a pinecone person is all the better for scraping at insides. A fingernail full of your eye's second layers or a thimble full of whatever bit of my spit lingers in your sinus. I will find your memories where I lost my owns and sort them by color and taste. Purple ones and licorice ones and grey ones and peach ones brought to a boil for a marzipan of illwill and posthumous tasting. I spread it thick over the sink, a bright veneer of enameled cream, it glides down the sides and into the perpendicular cracks of the checkered floors. Taste them and scrub them from your toes, fill yourself entirely and know the space was wasted with a boundary between. I am a woman of little scale, my hips are arched angels, birds with wide beaks who flex into your marmalade skies and leave room for toads who wart your flesh until it hurts all on it's own.

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I'll rest once you find me in my gown. Flowing flower how you hug and hold me in the ways I needed when I was just a girl. Is this where I find you? This shadow behind my brow is lost in the light green I'm showered in. This is where I stay, the sweet places between washings where I'm allotted breathing room. So I rest in your hands, soft like cotton and await the pulls of my heart's strings. Under these pearly white lime lights I rest between your finger valleys. I rest in the streams of aquamarine and feel your hands steep me in cerulean.

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I wish you had known me as a child. In that time my senses were sharp and reflective, I felt the leers of the mornings in the eyes of winter suffrage. Mac n cheese and peanut butter, I have the morning to watch the news. For better or worse it's like losing a limb so I wish I could put them in your mouth like little losanges. I had words at one point and a face at another and I dream you see it in the back of your hand,

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We mostly deal in unkempt mattresses. The unsure instilled in a sheared pillow case, I am the loose down and you are the broken spring. The other is half as imperfect as the other one can take. I don't see why we sit at the bottom of a hamper while the bed bears its bones. Teary and stained and improperly chaste, single socks stuck under your soiled sheets. Wraps round your waist, a lock in hand for other people to wash before they breed.

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The space I live in. The room I fill is large. Two worlds in forced perspective sit in the peripheries I can't keep in focus. Faces and bodies lost in dust, paint strokes and wood knots are time lost to the intricacies of your most dead skin. Gold outlined hands and lesser wounds in a burgundy accent. The air is stale grey and smoking with the screeches of dry friction. Cogs are turning and I see how I could be a simple machine. Binary and symmetrical, a pulley and a wheel. Each rushing to the end of its rope. Risk assessments lie in the tall grass you tread though. Audits and safety measures are ticks between your tiger toes. The nature of your words is the vitriol in their tongue chatter, not venomous but consistently daring when it darts beneath your most dead skin.

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Honest as me as I am long. Will it even let me be, let me leave. Or am I here, beneath this, inside the long tall halls that sneak along my arterior walls. Grip and slime and feather and paint prime, coated in flies and magpies, breasting the roots and chewing on their little toed feets. Long and tall, short ripples in the plain. Wide and short, simply a child. Nose dive down the drain and feel the edges as you squish against them. Slimy ketchup, pulpy sweet and grainy on film. Shimmery shine that tacks the thought to the chest of drawers in the basement of your brother's house. I live there. In his drawer. The bottom one beside his socks. I hear him. I see him. And I want to know what he thinks of you. But he hardly ever thinks, just sits and fists the walls in searching for me and the little sounds I make when I think of the way your lungs move when you smoke. It shivers through my teeth and decorates the wait.

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Dusty shoe bug, crawl along my soul and annoy me like my father. Mandible to man, feed your mind with my ashy skin. Your presence is the honey bee in my Pepsi, meaning nothing till I know you're there. Footsteps like spiders in the cracks of my floorboards, skitter loud and fill my mind with ambiguities. I adore you, I need you and when I see you I can only think of teeth. So keep your corner, mind my lips and take only what you need from my feet. I am larger than before, and I have known the feel of those gnarly teeth.

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The soft curve of rendered fat and the shrill edge of bone. Porous and slick with oily globules drying into dust. The air pockets and whiteness pop and bubble under pressure. So pockmarks ride up your ant nest spine. Closed lids and sucken ships. Eyes and lips stiff and rough beneath surface. Vibrant blush that shades the face in deep violets like fresh raisins. I long for the tips of your fingers, as gaunt as they may be. I remember when they moved like grass blades in hurricanes and felt me. Held me. Each recall is a little loose, decaying at the curves and edges.

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Wet bed on a Monday morning

The dread of a Sunday is sopping in the late evening. Swallowed stones are harbored in its throat and mush my feelings like cereal in the bottom of a bowl. It goes down easy but curds too quickly, leaving a muddy smell where wet air leaks. Soon, when sleep hides between the folds of my sheets, my feet will dangle from the trundle and my eyes will linger on the carpet stains. Through them I see where Sunday sleeps, the dry coolness that lives for the early mornings when fear is infantile and hours are still days. I remember it there, how the dread would curl around my fingers and gestate between them like wasp larvae. When they curl like pages drying in the sun, it is bigger than normal. But the alarms will ring with the news of a new week. And I'll chew off the top of my fingers and swallow what I find in between.

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The air is slick with humidity. The city, silent. Peepless beyond the rattling of train tracks. The hairs of your neck are cactus spines, dull with the stubborn itch of fishing hooks. You've strung this slab of stone with the nylon strings of a ukulele, plucking senselessly to mum the night sounds. No tune, what you've made is prison wine in deficit. You've hid behind me, a stretching pillar of skin and salts. Wretching for the rings around my neck, tonguing the bottle lip. Loose me in the night blindness and throttle me elsewhere. Anywhere where the air grows stale, dry nails who climb the wall like earwigs climb my hairy legs. Press them against me, scrape them all around and make of me a spirograph. A map of the holy mountain that unwinds into a sea of deep green.

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The pill is slip-slidey in my throat's membrane. It was a dry run so the soluble case sticks to the sides like a silk wrapped beetle. I take a rescue breath and stave my hand from the drinking cupboard. A sip now would be an admission of poor faith. Where was it now? Is it in medicine or in someone? Is it in the childproof bottle or the cell phone reminders. Surely it is not at the bottom of a glass of water. The wheezing of my struggling breath is prayer in a deeper sense. A selfish beggar's hand clawing from my throat. Shaking for change it can pass to a man dressed in white. Just playdough in his hands, tip for tap to anyone wiser.

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Cigars

I can't help but leer at the cancer in the corner. It breathes like an amorphous lung that was once the color of teeth. Each breath is a mush moth pushing out on a cocoon membrane. Is it you there? Are you growing? Or are you a mouse in a haunted house, existing out of perceptibly?