still water growing thick

Evenings, I slithered past the porchlights,

crept into the quiet like a possum into a garbage truck.

I remember the van rumbling loudly to life

and me hushing it: not even the fog lights lit.

The night sky, slow and heavy as magma,

crouched over me when I sat in the driver’s seat,

pressing red bruises into the peel of a peach:

enticing red bruises on my cheeks.

Then the crush of bodies and salt and filth--

that tempest of sharp elbows and slavering tongues,

of skulls twisted into nautilus shells

hurtling endlessly inward.

I sank into their decay.

Revelled in the rattle of cracker-crumbs at the top of my lungs

then gasped in hot air, muggy and sickening as the air inside my house.

And it was all of a sudden as if I had never left;

as if I’d stolen away with a fifth of Jack Daniels between my knees

only to arrive at the same old unbreachable rift:

Her and I almost overlapping on one side

and that wide stretch of horizon on the other,

with everyone I knew standing on it.