Peacock Fingernails

A grizzly bear swallowed a rain cloud; he grew extra paws with fragmented claws and burrowed beneath my bed. Now there are thunderstorms in my closet, now there are cadavers in my head. Amelia doesn’t like the way I speak about the sea; she wakes from daydreams about Jacques Cousteau with oceans in her jeans. When the closet floods, the bear drowns. My mattress grows into the forest that Amelia paints in the concrete suburbs to lure in and murder the birds. She’s got feathers beneath her fingernails; she lulls me to sleep with her daytime television teeth. 



We bury our widowed organs in the backyard; she plays piano till there’s cactus thorns in my heart and my veins settle into their morning nap. We exchange our deflated lungs in rusted birdcages, she whispers against my lips her dreams of wolf packs roaming frozen village cemeteries and men in monster suits buried beneath the trees in her backyard. She tells me about the creature in her parents’ tool shed that begged her to kill her cat until she leaned on its neck and heard it crack. Her eyes shut to thoughts of splintered antlers that produce poison fruit and the night her uncle removed his face and showed her his real hands. To Amelia, my ocean is her swamp. It clots her blood stagnant with algae, and now there are angry alligators snapping in her belly.