Dream Journal (ongoing)

1

Bare black tree limbs singed of their leaves, the sky looking shattered against their jagged edges. Fog seeping through tall grass and I’m standing within it, ringlet curls damp and unfurling at my cheeks. The air is cold, and sharp.
Walking a gravel road under the moon, holding a candle. Wax dripping like veins along my arms. An ambient circus of cicadas & crickets all around me, an abyssal pool of sound behind the solemn, flickering flame. I stop to make out some roadkill. Then take a handful of hot soil to sprinkle over the carcass. I pinch at the root of some milkweed to prop up against the belly, which is soft, and spilling.

2

Red vehement sun, seething within the confines of a junkyard; metal scraps bleached by scarlet rays, rusty and aged. The barbed wire surrounding the property is frenzied, in a wild looping it divulges the manias, the massacres, the famines. I kick at beer cans that rattle across the gravel, play games by the distance they travel, the heights they reach. I hurl them at car trunks and they ricochet. The crackling of cell towers like a chiropractor’s table and I’m having strobed visuals of demolition in red light.

3

Boat motors score the lake in the letter “V” behind them. Rocks carpeted in algae wash wispy, scummy strands forward and back. The shrubbery is lush but unkept, it crawls with willowy limbs under the porch of the house, murmurs the wind’s movements, vines coiled around railings. I scrape at mosquito bites that bleed and swat at the needles in my ears.

4

A spring like rotting wood. Soft, decaying matter and the clarity of death that leaves nothing but smoke; it’s all-engulfing, chewing and swallowing. It crawls on all fours and prowls the landscape for green, the buds of flowers beheaded in its jaws. Lichen and bark are peeled from the trees and draped over their branches like animal skins, purling creeks are vacuumed to choking beds. It moves pervasively, inch by inch, the fume that turns the spring black. All skeletons and apple cores left in its trail.

5

Rain makes the road glisten. The trees harmonize as they catch the droplets in their leaves, ethereal sheets of the same song. The wind conducts and graces every warm, dry nest with the melody of the rain. Even my home resounds with its gentle, crooning song. We keep the windows open and our bodies are lulled by the performance. I can read and write in the same place for hours, he can sit over his work bench with the garage door up. Our dog rests at my feet and the house creaks with her breathing like it has lungs of its own.

6

I feel frail but look chiseled, carved by my famished tongue. I lick my own sweat like I’m hitting the bottom of a can of beans, stretch my back against a crate, and am satiated by my reveries. The car sways and creaks. Gin; the acrid smell and boiling stomach of gin. Let me drown in an acid bath of the damn stuff, hold my breath in drunken bliss and submerge into nirvana before I die. Really I’m sitting here starving with darkened railroad skin. Clanking, twisting, switching, counting calluses and grinding teeth.

7

A winter wind whistles through empty corridors. Cold and harsh, between-the-teeth gusts like a seething mouth. Old leaves litter the floor, disintegrating in their frozen jackets. They’ve formed piles by each window where they blow in, midribs and veins exposed, collecting dust like glass antiques. In the main living room, a blue venetian rug peeks between the disheveled leaves, still dazzlingly intricate but worn by the weather. Spots of royal blue tell of the life it once brought to the room, a centerpiece left behind now, victim to the winter wind like everything else drained of color. A pale grey, steel blue rug that tells the story of abandonment better than anything I can write in ink. A sudden shift in perspective— a doe and fawn framed by the jagged edges of a broken stained glass window; their bodies curled into each other, the fawn nuzzling the soft underbelly of it’s mother, her chin resting on the nape of the baby’s neck.