false memories.

I have been dreaming. There is a camel bent into a mathematical quandary. It carries Latin in its hump, hungry for the lost languages bartered away. In this one, I am woman and when I drip sun from between thighs, I learn of pregnancy. I have been warned. There is a hanger made from desert sand and railroads which gut me. Here in this part of brain stem, blood gasps into clouds of self-cleaning exhales. I am getting married to a midnight roofwalker. On our first date, she eats the revolution out of peaches and spits them into nearby satellites. Without words, this music becomes a biblical rant of slayed tongues. These are all facts and they have been documented into stained-glass soliloquies lies. How far along is this education. How tender is this snowstorm which buries several men and preserves the sick they have yet to learn in their bodies. There is a cracked spine, deliberately severed in order to use the bones for ores. When all that snow melts, someone will need to lead us out from the cold and drown. I meet a woman dressed in passport and what I thought was lipstick now calls itself Syrah. She gathers up everything that falls from me and we head into a cloud shaped as instruments. Her kiss erases every scar from beneath my body. And then knuckles rap against front door and I am told that there has been a mistake. With fingers stretching miles, this human unzips me out from all the skin keeping me in and transports me into another torso. This is where you were meant to live, they speak. The blood is still warm and my limbs appear in tact. But the cells are harder here and though there is blood, I do not bleed as frequently. And yes, I still have hair, but it covers me more. And here in this body, I am called elsewhere. How much of this is believed; how much of this is drunk. How many books must be read in order to understand the symbolism of announcements. Are you a doctor of your skeletons, yet.

none of this will be remembered.

“Before one can experience feelings of grief or loss, there must have been a genuine sense of attachment.”  Dhillon Khosla

When I sleep, you visit. This is the only time. You grab my hand with forearm tattooed by rosary beads. You breathe your days into my neck which smells of Sunday morning church incense. You wrap your martial-arts-softball thick thighs around me like evening seat belt. You administer midnight medicine of your tongue, warmed all day by the oven of your mouth. You let me run my fingers through your hair, wild enflamed parentheses. You read me Neruda or the latest gender memoir. You tell me where I can’t touch you and then you touch me there. You extract all my salt hidden behind the window treatment of my eyes. You hear the loud footsteps of humans above us and the sirens outside my bedroom; you do not hear me mourn you. You remind me this is the last time. Final kiss on railroad track. Final shot of whiskey in bar so dark, I can barely find your freckles. You do not mention I will never eat the same again. You forget to remind me that there was always someone else who distracted your bones away. When I wake, you will haunt my breath. None of you will be remembered until I close my eyes.