Introduction
No one sleeps alone in the dark, but often aloneness bears down upon you, heavy and impenetrable. You struggle to breathe, though air is all around you. Even the presence of loved ones can hold you in paralysis. The dark, you think, strains with the steady oncoming footsteps of your enemies: the fascists, the police, the bosses, the hard-drawn borders of the world. You might get up, quietly, to piss in a cold bathroom and drink a glass of water and sit in an empty kitchen devoid of the sounds and smells of daytime. The creatures are disturbed: the cockroaches inch around the sink’s base, mice rustle inside cabinets, moths bang against window screens. The sum of all their nightly movements becomes a dense scribble just outside your protective bell jar of sleep. They live in the dark. You are vaccinated. You are slathered in cream, a layer of defense from the environment. You are alive inside a thick shell of canvas. You claw, you burn through, you slough off. And one day you could simply be replaced. You have no guarantors for your survival, your existence dependent on a series of low-level scams, one creditor flipped onto another. One day it will all catch up to you. One day you’ll think you’re alone in the dark. God, you feel alone in the dark. You’ll go to bed and hope sleep will find you. Instead, we’ll be there—the creatures you couldn’t forget. Our edges glow. All the struggling against the seams, wearing them down, making yourself threadbare. You’ll be with us until the light comes back on and the practical needs of the day urge you to dismiss anything that gets in the way. But you can’t keep us back forever. Once you know you’re not alone, you won’t really forget. You’re with us, we’ve got you, we’re coming for more.
Survivor
being all soft and shrieking
each bleak line
gifts
knowing more
but soon “circumstances
change”
everything I wanted to see
I saw again
teaching me what a tiny hole
my desire fell
through
widening
the hole and widening the eye and
pinching memory into a
ball
still soft, still shrieking
Dolphinarium
Enter the
ruins of the Dolphinarium.
Clumps of
seafoam-from-
a-can,
party aftermath.
Light filters in
from one high window
grid
skewered by a
tree.
You are the lone survivor
in this unmarked ceramic chamber.
Your foot beds
molded into the gum soles of a predator.
You stalk the insects running themselves
past tall weeds.
They enter this trembling
new forest,
not knowing you.
A plastic tag dangles
from an extremity, like
a missing earring left stuck in the curtains.
One long string of identifying numbers
ping and ping,
but there are no receivers left to track them.
Moving in the dry
bottom pools,
no longer the site of your unwaged work--
instead, you dance
with your
resentment. Every day
you wake up thinking:
The world is hot, and yet
not ending soon.
Scam me out of here
Strip the
shells scales
of sea
animals.
Leave them naked, twisting
worms, with
ass-to-mouth digestive
tracts. Nail their
unfleshed parts to a wall
and call it a
mermaid. Applaud
a relationship expert
who says—
this is either
the beginning
of the end! or
the end of
the beginning!
Wait in line to be on
network
TV, to convey to
viewers the feeling
of a crowd.
I wanna stay inside with you,
I wanna go toward a crowded place.