Annmarie O'Connell
I
We move in and out of tragedy then pick a thin layer off just to see it. In the house we say, that's all the oranges. In late Spring we all leave Earth on an escalator so he fires four shots through the bathroom door to kill her. Like she was an intruder. He said he loved her in his restless body. The lawyer questions him about the precise screaming. He says, I wish she let me know she was there. No one says never again genocide. Another season of trespassing deaths just hit us like a river of grief.
II
She is always inventing a way to believe again. I am always a bedside with long hands fumbling towards me in the dark. A video camera running beside the bed. When she is dead, people in thin layers of different flesh will sprint across that square like pain illuminated in one blast. When I am dead, the darkest heart screams over the sound of your scraping chairs what I am.
IV
I just woke up again. This room is so small it's a dime. I wish I knew how to scream perfectly. Once I met a girl named Eleanor. I'm not like her. She is nothing like me. She is not into forever horror stories. She is a turtle with a beautiful face and wonderful eyelids and specialized lighting. She dances into a green box and comes out Eleanor.
V
If you leave the knife on the table, I'll let you bite my lip until the blood runs down my chin. Stop looking up when you throw me against the bricks. Let me slide my hands through gravel as you step over my body. I lock you up then wait like a welt. When you get out and in the backseat, you're as filthy as a bed with your hands trembling for a fix. Around my neck they still craving things. If I'm on top, I think about what living people do. If I'm on bottom, I can feel my mouth almost ask you to build me a free woman.
VI
After something like a dream, look out your window to the left of the curb for a tiny quarter stain that the streetlight always makes flicker like a blue-gray sky dragging its long face right before the next rain. Or what God throws at you from the heights-just enough to prove it was there.