the phantom limb traces over her cheek. he traces over her lips. the ghost, the echo, the wind pushes against the pane, rattles the door. she turns over and draw the sheets around her, buries herself. he feel the phantom limb touch his arm as he moves out of each room. how useless that extra limb. the house moves through the night and the moon stops it cold. outside a cat huddles behind a tire, paws a leaf trapped beneath the tread.

I lack the eloquence to untwine out of bounds and unmarred but find myself instead with rope burns and chaffed lips, splits in the skin between fingers and the delusion that I had seen her between clouds bursting into weeping grey sheets of rain.
I inhale ravenously a cigarette drenched in gasoline.

the compression of that
slow thing into a snowball
fist of hate and rage from something
beautiful like the shiny points
a fork makes plunged deep into the belly
of forgetting. i had said once
in the beginning, i know
how to disappear,
and the curb stretches even further
away from reaching it. i chew
my knuckles to keep them
from breaking

stunning and broken, orange seeds down the chin, sticky lips and a mist of rain that washes across the fender. all things come to the road, all things leave it. it begins and ends with exhaust, finds her fingernails before exhaustion. he tears at it, the canvas, the grass, the skin of an organ slick and wet and pulsing, nothing inside, black jelly, wet ants thick like gravy, warm and overflowing. i had dreamt this, she said and laughed as she pierced my ear, my eye, hooking a silver chain on both ends and tugs me to her.

you have to crack at it lest it crack you into porcelain shards falling from a wall that’s been plastered over and over and you become the scratches the pieces make on the floor when someone you love steps on them and slips and you become the wound in that thin patch of the sole and the chips of paint from the crack in the plaster and the sound she makes as she lands on her elbows to keep her head from splitting

i had always been one of meat forks and bludgeoned lips and badly healed scar tissue an internal rage expressed through a foul mouth and an affinity for mortal disaster that fell on my knees weeping for something to break this seal of thick skin while my thoughts snow balled into dark and wet masses of moss and mud and shit i had always been a pin point of the roar that hummed in my bones and crackled around the edges of my ears until i screamed until i coughed out my tongue and stamped it into the dirt lest it wiggle itself free and find someone to tell all this to lest it escape and make sense to someone other than me

and in the shower i had the idea if only i had seen it in a dream and it would’ve been better but i was naked and the water finally turning hot and i split-imagined a river of ants coming out of my penis, a stream of roaches and bugs crawling out, snuggling out, dripping out, marching out and down and around my scrotum and thigh, pulling free, pushing through, one over another, until at the very end, and the only moment i felt any pain, a monarch butterfly struggled free, as if from a cocoon, and spread its wings and fluttered away

the less likely you on harps, the less likely you strumming along a note slammed sideways through your fingers, the less likely you had been an adam’s apple bitten by an eve entrenched by the river where factories dump sludge and remains, her ankles cut by tin cans and an admirable achilles heel before a bloody calf, the less likely you would remember, the less likely you perched with fishing hooks and throwing a line, the less likely you would pitch yourself forward, more than ever you towing out to past the river banks, unsteady but sure, broken glass and the stench of leaving, or arriving, whatever is more likely.

and the moon was this haunting orange looming over the horizon and i was driving towards it unstoppable undeterred and i thought of her how she wept of her father’s death how she held my hand and then kissed my lips and the night seemed to catch up with us and we were too far away to ever return home and all there was one empty gas station after another one abandoned motel after another and her skin was dusty and my eyes burned and i wonder now if he hadn’t died if she hadn’t asked me to bury him if she hadn’t asked anything of me at all would i have delivered the killing blow would i have begged for her forgiveness eventhough i had done exactly what she had wanted me to do?