i dreamt of a witch who would not leave my home, having snuck up the stairs and transformed before my eyes from middle aged real estate agent to wizened old grandmother who bore no children. broomstick to her throat, how ironic, i held her in her place until the police could arrive who were masked witches themselves, and just as they all had convinced me i should let her go, i couldn’t stop asking, how did you get in? why this house? and she backed out of the front door and all was revealed and she smiled, i can only watch others have children, i can never have any of my own. never any of my own.

hardbound, hard lived, against the rails, she wrote of gaps & pressure, of shifting place & possibly the error of momentum; how were we real like this? she said,
all i can feel are gaps and pressure from where the gaps should’ve been.
all i can feel – i can feel nothing else, this is it in its totality, everything is this feeling
are gaps – empty spaces, absences in a sequence, things in a row then suddenly not, but resuming again; gaps do not happen in isolation, they can only by noticed in a crowd
and pressure from where the gaps should’ve been – pressure from things that are there now, non-space, filled space exerting, pushing back or on, things that do not belong.
there should be nothing there but instead, instead, instead.

the ghost of it, remember. it lingers. the crack through the glass, racing towards the lips. we smiled then, as all things. the pitch of a staircase too narrow to navigate. she told me the children were sleeping. were they mine, i ask, to this day. echo this, hips on parchment. hands pressed into a mirror at dusk. i turned suddenly and she had me. and the rain, the steady rain.

don’t make a habit of it. of trailing through the dark, through the bushes with spider webs tangled around your waist and pine cones snagging your collar. don’t make a habit of waking up out this nightmare and into this fantasy life you are living with an elegant wife and bouncing two children. it is the night that strays you, makes you a vampire, a junkie, a zombie, the lack of sunlight, the lack of life, these long hours into silence where the streets are draped with nothing, no one, not a single fucking sound.

how to write this. the writing of. it’s old. said it too often. lies. the liar in me. lost. he had short nails, bitten to the quick from a nervous tension whenever he had to move from place to place. it was always the same. some apartment in some building where all the floors were tied into the same circuit. and then eviction. by his hand or the owner’s or even the city. he wore long sleeve shirts to hide the long elegant lightening bolts shattering the inside of both his wrists. not that he was ashamed, only embarrassed by the not so elegant stare, the gawking and lingering unspoken question: how could he, how could he even consider? it was never a consideration, it was an impulse, sudden and angry and necessary. he’s glad to live to tell the tale, but no one ever courages up the question. these things. late into the night. lost. i’d talk to him if only his ghost would appear.

there is no proper response to anything, only gauges and pressures.
no.
there is no proper response, only the imagination.
no.
there is no proper response to the imagination.
no.
there is nothing here i haven’t already given up on.
no.
there is nothing that i have imagined that gives me comfort.
no. a lie.
there is no proper response to what i have imagined.
no.
i fall in the dark stumbling after you, the not-you, i might have been.
no.

let’s leave it like this then. let’s leave it crippled, hobbled without crutches. let’s leave with its back broken and twitching on the floor. let’s leave it licking up dust bunnies and fingering the floorboards. let’s leave it naked and grimy and unclean for days. let’s leave it shivering and thirsty and blinded. let’s just leave it wretched but not yet dead. let’s just leave it alone.

and she came upon a man who was a horse wearing a diaper and shit trailed down his leg and there was a pacifier in her mouth and a riding crop in her hand and she would steer him by choking him this way or that with her other hand and we were all amazed by how far he had come, his palms and knees pink and raw and scabbed over and over, and she took offense and beat him with the crop, flogging him left and right until angry welts arose from his flanks and we all stifled a nervous laughter.

i unbuckle my belt and slip it off. she watches. sitting on the edge of the bed, she waits for me to take my belt off and slip it around her neck. she waits and i hesitate. i’ve never done this before. she never wanted this before. we were all waiting. the room was impossibly hot. she takes my belt off tugging it out of the loops. i wait for her. i wait for her to come into the room and take off her robe. i place the rope around her neck. she splays her fingers against the pane as i tighten the belt. i watch. i untie her robe and pull it down to her elbows, not any further. i kneel in front of her. we’ve never done this before. i am waiting. she pushes me against the glass and kneels. she watches as i slip the belt around my neck. she laughs as i turn her over and tug on the robe. the sheet was impossibly cool.

and i ran my fingers over wood splinters sharp and remembered. not many, precious. here underneath the tongue, by the window where the blinds are thickened by seasons. i had the cord around my neck and my feet dangling from the sill. it was wonderful to see a sky free of everything. the promise of concrete cracked aside by persistent roots. to be the seam of the world, where her lips remember my name and my children slip in and out of the sun.