Beneath A Tree Of Wild Beasts

I was caught sleeping beneath a tree of wild beasts. In dreams, I bury pieces of myself into paperback books, constructing agitation and inducing sickness for unsteady fever dream parties. And there, we were bank robbers with wounded throats scamming quiz shows, kissing between Osage diamonds.

I wake to my teeth tearing mutiny from bark, stretching fiberglass webs to stitch the constellations to our lips, building another town for every clumsy sentence fragment I collect from these ghosts that haunt our box spring.

I can’t accept all these dead letters dropped off broken and bleeding on my front porch by these phantom cats, I can’t keep painting you portraits of decaying trees, their stripped bark arms can’t tuck your hair back behind your ear, but I can. And I’ve still got the cuts on my knuckles from the zipper of your jeans, spending night after night falling in love with your mask that melts plastic on my lips. So I’m not sleeping in your back yard, not tonight. I’m wide-awake listening to the secrets you’ve tried to abandon as they call the fire department on your most peaceful dreams. I’m collecting your orphaned piano keys and burying them under my tongue to grow staccato note divisions, our push and pull.

I’m hoarding all of the sweetest things you say in my bedroom until I’m trapped, and I’ll have to chew holes into my wrist to escape into a bleeding orchard that we’ve grown from violin strings and broken dishes. I’ll have to wait for the sun to rise, for the dull tree line to wilt into silhouettes and I’ll say

“Just look at all those beasts girl, sitting up in that tree. With all that matted fur and silk feathers. Do you hear that song? It’s Yellowstone lake music, the Bristol hum, four knocks with tears in your eyes. And I can’t count all those claws and teeth on just two mangled hands.