I eat every word until I L U V U floats to the top he doesn’t notice instead, he reads the part of the paper I hate where dollar signs float old white men frown talking of percentages losses, gains the white crackle of paper keeps the silence I leave my bowl on the table, he doesn’t look up

They say put down as though she’s a stone that sinks rather than skips or jumps when she breathes it’s a bell, a toll a furnace with no light, only smoke we do it at home, where her tail wags her eyes brighten as we all gather around she can’t understand why we’re not happy, why our eyes blur and our stomachs burn, why our hands tremble when we pet her wiry fur, careful of the lumps that have grown to consume her after, we carry her to the car, to the place where her body will become ash rather than flesh, all wondering at how heavy such a small…

I found an old bottle once brown and distressed all silver broken like a mirror spent too long in acid inside was a drawing in charcoal not ink of a mermaid with melting legs her breasts covered with sails I sat on the beach writing on the back of that drawing writing of how her eyes glowed, her hair flowed, her wrists crossed just so back in the bottle it went while I waited on the sand nothing came back though I thought I heard an echo of dolphins laughing

We bought a child once a girl with hair the color of ash she spoke no English she spoke nothing at all Her mother, she sold out of an old truck near the turnpike where officers waited to catch speeding sedans She made the most delicious food tamales, hot and fresh wrapped liked Christmas presents The girl hid behind her long skirt pausing to peek at us when we spoke our language like the babbling of birds The mother said here, you take her I cannot afford this life We tried for a few weeks the little girl did not like our food our soft bed our stairs that creaked…

It’s not the waking that bothers me though the tips of my toes ache that crack in my skull throbs, remembering perhaps glass and steel pumping water over my skin fire no, it’s not the waking that bothers me it’s the waiting while I look down at phantom limbs my mouth blowing and blowing waiting for the nurse to show aglow in white resplendent in her crown of gauze we feeling better today? is perhaps the worst sentence in the history of the world where there is no we only me and the parts I have lost

theme; fourteener   I have changed my name to that of the flower which smells of ghosts and old cobwebbed ceilings in creak laden houses from my arms veins sprout like vines searching for sunlight where there is none, my windows are drawn closed, the shutters shuddering against winds and rain that pound my house down, searching for that one crack, that one breach, that one hidden pinhole allowing entry

my mother said once ‘when we die we all become stars’ i squinted at the black night dreaming of past loved ones grandfather was the star hanging just so hardly a wink or blink steady in place my father was the distant one the light so faint I wasn’t sure he was even there I would be in the center I was sure small, like a candle half blown out pulsing songs from that movie of mermaids and sea monsters