by Jude Wineke
Outside my door, someone is sobbing – screaming – sobbing. It’s a laundry machine cycle, so strangled it transcends our frequency and then falls back to earth in the thunk of a canvas sneaker.
I sleep beside my stripped mattress yellow with piss, muscles stiff against the cold. There are beads on the table in the hall that I can never seem to reach because my feet can’t hold me up anymore, and I can’t string together a thought.
There is a plant on my windowsill folded over on itself in defeat. I have glued half-closed eyes to its pot so it could stare out at the world, but now all I can think is that I will never achieve its Nirvana of death warmed over, lids the vanishing point within release.
I once read a story about a girl who befriended an old man. He made her promise not to let the powers that be turn him into a pickle, so she dug his grave in the snow and came home with black fingers. If the price of dignity were to lose the things already white-tipped like unlit candles, I’ll consider it.
Outside the window, there are rocks and torrential sleet. I become convinced I am gargling on pebbles, my throat dimpled, and my lips split. It would be so nice to be the one filling cups instead of the one emptying them so I will spit. I will fill acrylic tumblers with bloody rocks and bitten-down nails and the sleepless bites I’ve taken out of the moon.
I drank so much water to have the sloshing keep me company, to have my stomach spring back in an admission of my consciousness. I threw up half a chicken breast onto the table, and it should’ve been fish for the oceans it summoned from me.
There is a bird with a gaping unfeathered ribcage that I think I imagined because I wake up wailing and he is there and he will never be there again but for a second he is wailing too and we are one in a cosmic eschewing of tradition because we are dying but we are not dead.
I once opened a letter from my front-running grave digger to find it filled with dried lavender. There were words, too, but I am deaf to them. I worried the buds between sweaty fingers until they became a paste, and I pressed handprints onto my thighs and stomach and chest.
Outside this street is a resuscitated dustbowl town with puckered asphalt and a roiling river. I will fall into it in this misty-breathed winter, and my gasses will only relent when the warm rain pours months later.
Someone will lop off the top of my skull and take a pull of algae, and we’ll sit together, awaiting some eclipsing technicolor yawn.
