[published in the 2016 issue of J’Parle’ Literary Magazine]
It’s hard to sleep with the fish hooks tugging taut lines under the sheets, between my toes, and out the westward window, strung up like power lines between here and there. As tight as guitar strings, sometimes, and I can almost hear your voice reverberating across them. I pluck out messages in Morse code, but you only pluck back the most beautiful music. Sometimes I wake up to the slightest tug… and I wonder if the other ends of these strings have been tied off to a tree, and if what I’m hearing is just the humming of the wind, and if what I’m feeling might be a bird landing somewhere in the middle.
Night sweat desperate, strumming strings at 3 a.m. to wake you next to someone else. Maybe half asleep you still love me. Digging in a panic for that buried piece of you that still remembers what it was to feel what you felt. “That part of me is dead. I’m not that person anymore,” says the wind, whistling over all the holes I’ve left in you. “Put down the shovel. It’s not there.” The you I once knew is sand through my fingers, and now sand in my sheets, and there’s no comfort here. This bed, this body, is saturated in you, and I’d burn it if I weren’t so goddamn determined to drown. What things I wouldn’t do, what black magic I wouldn’t cast, to dig my fingers into time and drag it back to the moment just before I said “I’m not ready.”
