she asks, “did you think it or did you dream it up?”
as if the dreaming and the thinking were two points separated, serrated, cut and distant as the difference between a burst of laughter and an accident between a cracked tooth in the mouth and the floor where the tiles meet exactly beneath our feet without peeling upward into lemon rinds stuck in my knuckles against the mesh of chicken wire to the point of uprooting the two by fours and nothing more, nothing more, nothing more
but he asks, “was the leaving and the going the same?”