Playing with Fire
It’s late. Very late. I hear the furnace light and the return air duct sucking. I listen to the ting of a few well placed jelly beans tumbling down the aluminum piping. I wonder if they congeal in a molten pool at the furnace base. I don’t sleep any more. I don’t know when the last time sleep found me unencumbered by all the decisions before me. A bubbling, melty mass of blue and pink and yellow speckled sugar slowly burning off, forming and cooling-like the tectonic plates that formed millions or billions of years ago. I imagine a disk of smoothly fired pastel carbon being the base for all the structures I have built. Liquid, solid, liquid solid-again and again and again. Then a floating Icelandic form sailing across fridge waters, its roots not yet connected to the oceanic floor.
I was dreaming of our daughter just before. She was still born. She was the deepest lapis and her face was frozen mid cry. I put my nipple into her mouth and milk streamed out filling her. She began to swallow big gulps. Her toes became pink then her face and shoulders. She sucked greedily at my breast until she was satiated. She squiggled down and I put her in her room. I gave her life, I coaxed life into her. Will I? Will I choose to give her life? I awoke and it is dark. Still dark or dark again.
You are snoring lightly beside me. I press my lips to your back and breathe you in again and again calming myself, memorizing your particular rhythm. I count your breaths. I listen to the furnace shutting off and the house is still once more. The sugar is cooling, forming, hardening, growing into a multi-colored disk never quite solid enough to stand on never quite liquid enough to swim.
I was dreaming of our daughter just before. She was still born. She was the deepest lapis and her face was frozen mid cry. I put my nipple into her mouth and milk streamed out filling her. She began to swallow big gulps. Her toes became pink then her face and shoulders. She sucked greedily at my breast until she was satiated. She squiggled down and I put her in her room. I gave her life, I coaxed life into her. Will I? Will I choose to give her life? I awoke and it is dark. Still dark or dark again.
You are snoring lightly beside me. I press my lips to your back and breathe you in again and again calming myself, memorizing your particular rhythm. I count your breaths. I listen to the furnace shutting off and the house is still once more. The sugar is cooling, forming, hardening, growing into a multi-colored disk never quite solid enough to stand on never quite liquid enough to swim.