i break the silence in two. one half i put in her mouth, the other tucked under the pillow. in the morning i find rumpled sheets and petals from a flower i do not understand. she walks out of a room, the curtains hold back an angry sun. i cannot to bear to follow her down stairs that creak into forgetting. i rub my eyes to find grains of sand stitched into the corners. above me the ceiling sags and buckles while the walls bulge outward into the cold. the apartments below squeal with television sets that have never been turned off. i imagine her unlocking the door, a series of clattering metal tumblers and a knob that’s been loosened. my jaw sets itself against numb lips as the wind breaks through the window.

the tears are broken half mast stems shot at crooked angles out of the ground swelling the horizon as it rips across a lip of tethered spines sunk into my eyes as lashes braced for your kiss.

fizzle drizzle frazzle dazzle jigsaw rickshaw dizzy tizzy and shine. adore uproar cement ferment alight twilight table sable and shine. lucid putrid whisper blister cutting rutting broken spoken and shine. shatter batter mutter stutter crackle tackle crying prying and shine. oil toil meat beat heal steal night flight and shine.

hrmm

and and and she says the jar is broken and and he twists the sheets into knots and and the fire escape is made of rust and and and the panels have cracked where they are joined together and and and and and she cries when he leaves and and he cracks his teeth on the bottle and there’s a shattered window that no one pays attention to and and and and and when the wind howls he lights a cigarette and and she rips the pillows off the bed and and and and and there’s a stain on the floor there and she wouldn’t believe it and and and and the leaves whip through the air and and and his hands shake and she’ll have none of that and and and the blinds have a thin layer of dust and and and he cannot stop and on and on it goes

i feel within him the flash of sawdust. he reaches out to me & feels the smooth cold edge of a blade. she touches my jaw & you feel nothing. i touch her lips & the soft pulp of having been bruised. he snakes between us like water from a broken pipe. she sways her hips & you reach out for them. he grabs hold of her hips & kisses her. she grabs hold of my hair & kisses you. i taste soft salt and wine too sweet. i place my hand on his sternum & feel your heart race. she reaches into my mouth & pulls out a string of his breath. i break her kiss, i break his bones. she breaks my heart, breaks your bones. hunched over in the dark, we feast.

i’ve always had this thing about the other, the not-you within, the odd quality of dreams of being in your home that is clearly not your home, of seeing yourself while dreaming yourself, of being someone else in your very own skin. the comforting displacement and the unnerving familiarity, the yearning and the despair.

my father who was a butcher would come home with slabs of meat tucked under his arm tied with twine that was a stale pink. my mother would avoid kissing him until he cornered her against the kitchen sink and she had no choice but to press her lips tightly together into a grimace that wished he would die. he would then turn and find me in the dining room doing my homework and place his thick but impossibly tender hands on my shoulders and lean on me the weight that his hips like tree barrels upheld the entire day. my sister yelped when his head suddenly filled the space above the bassinet and he laughed plumes of the cigar he just smoked outside before coming into our apartment. every night was like this save for the weekends when he took us to coney island, riding the train and i stared out the window at other apartment buildings that looked harsher than ours. he always forced me onto rides that turned me green and slapped me on the back laughing whenever i threw up between vendors selling hotdogs and cheap rubber souvenirs. these were the things i thought of as we buried him, the funeral home ushers pushing a waterfall of flowers off beneath the casket and men much bigger than him in construction boots lowered the corpse into the soft wet earth.

disheveled and quite drunk, he stumbles to the couch fingering his nose. somewhere he’s left his cigarettes and although he doesn’t know quite where, his finds his lighter and starts flicking it in the dark to find them. of course, they’re underneath the coffee table, rumpled and he’s quite sure they’re not the same ones he bought earlier in the day. lighting the first of undoubtedly many, definitely an old pack, stale and rough, he exhales and falls heavily onto the couch. it was supposed to be his big night out, his wife having taken his sister-in-law out to a surprise bachelorette party, but since he didn’t know the groom, he wasn’t invited to the corresponding bachelors. that was alright though, he never quite felt comfortable around strippers, always stared at the game playing above the girls’ heads whenever his friends dragged him to a strip club. and honestly, he was annoyed with the way other men would paw and gaze at these women: there was something passionless and disturbing in their eyes as if the women weren’t really there at all.

blech