Poem Collection

A Blind Dream

You said you wanted to get away

from all the screaming inside your head,

so you scraped it with your nails and

smacked it with a fist, desperate to crack it open.

Blood vessels meandered,

wriggling across your scalp.

Your brain swelled and sizzled

beneath your skin and skull.

Poke that brain,

you said,

poke it and squash it hard

into a strawberry jelly paste!

The dead fish swam from

your nostrils down to your throat.

Phosphenes danced before you as you

slowly pushed your eyes inward.

You claimed that you saw it,

a light in colors only the blind recognize.

Welcome to the realm of the real beauty,

you heard the blind man say.

Don’t let the voices get to me,

kill them,

you begged, eyeballs congested in red,

please, just kill them all.

I didn’t know what to do,

but I stood there and watched you

crying blood and

coughing out the last laughter.

Another Dream

In a cheap hotel room decorated by abstract paintings of ugly vases and withered flowers, I received a call. “Two men,” a voice said. Somehow I just knew that they were coming, and they were coming straight for me.

A silent winter morning. Ice thawed as the river tranquilly wound through a forest of bare trees. I sat on the riverbank and waited for the show to start. From afar, a boat drifted down with two maimed mannequins sat in there, one male and one female, mute, unmoving, their arms and torsos twisted and entangled. Another boat with two more maimed mannequins followed. And another boat. And another. Endless.

The two men arrived wearing horse head masks. Blindfolding myself too with a white cloth, I began brandishing my knife in the dark. Swish. And swish. Warm liquid washed over my hands and I felt the blade cut through flesh in such clean sweet slices. When the room finally fell dead and still I tore the cloth apart, my vision painted in red. The bed I was standing on was soaked in a pool of blood, sinking beneath my toes. Thick splashes of ruby drip down, like dying centipedes, from the walls and the ugly paintings down to the floor. But I couldn’t look at the floor; I knew I wouldn’t like what was lying on it.

I stumbled out from the room and dived into the river. Below the surface the water was dark and boundless like the ocean, dragging me deep down to the riverbed paved by amputated bodies. More limbs came into view as I kept plummeting; piles, hills, and even mountains in the distance. I landed, sifting the pulverized meat through my fingers. The cold skins became almost alive as my left cheek slid past them.

The water was dark, and there were thousands of limbs at the bottom.

In a store an old television was showing a mid-ocean ridge at the bottom of the sea. A man sat beside it, holding a talking zombie head. “He eats a lot,” he explained.

I closed my eyes.

Waking Up

Fact: mom is leaving.

Sitting at the bar, my partner and I

Pretended to be strangers

Two shots of vodka at hand

Ice clicking against the glass

Raising my machine gun, I fired at the bartender

Shell cases danced around my feet

As he fell amid the heavy rain of

Flying bullets and glimmering shards

Porcelain slid across marble

Grinding against shreds of shiny diamonds

My partner pushed a plate in front of me

A big chunk of cheese, grilled steak, and three pieces of bread

I wake in the backseat of a car

Sit up, look around, I’m on a bridge

Speeding through the darkness—

The midnight kind of darkness.

The steering wheel is turning on its own.

Mom?

Where are you?