my skirt. I looked into their strange eyes;

I wept into their filthy

furs. They let me.

When I rose to go

they followed. Braying faces.

Grass for miles. Corn

dying by the road.

We are not out

yet.

REUNION

REUNION

We don’t speak for six months. You used to call me from an

ancient pay phone, in the old days, but only to tell me some

little thing—never where you were going, when you’d arrive.

I dial that pay phone; it rings and rings. I imagine the sound

slipping along the empty street, soaking into the floor of

the wood, where the fox hears it, and the fawn, and the crow,

keeping time. I imagine the incredible stupid deafness of

the entire universe, how I wanted something, how I never got

it, that pay phone nearly dead from disuse; I was keeping it

alive, until I wasn’t anymore.

When you do call I am better. Well, you say. What’s new?

There’s a choice then, to breathe or not to breathe; I keep

breathing. The sun in my eyes. I hear all the news. How you

moved house. Towns. States. Countries. There’s a drag on

the line because of the distance. Everything is going well.

For me, too, I say, and it’s almost true. We laugh at the same

time. I realize it’s really you. And then I turn into an alley

and put my hand up my skirt, my bag into a pool of thick

milk. The skin is there, waiting for me to slip into it. Please

dear god hit me, hit me. I’m sorry I thought I didn’t want

it. You want it? No one does this. No. No one. I fuse my ear

to the phone. You have a class in five minutes, but you talk

me through to the end. Ache in my wrist. We hang up and

my hair is stuck to the brick and it’s much deeper than I

thought, this wound. How thin the scab was. How fat the

maggot beneath.

AS TOLD BY ORPHEUS

AS TOLD BY ORPHEUS

So I turned back. They promised you were right behind but

I know the sound of your step and you were definitely not

stepping. Now I’m waiting to hear where they’re going to

send me. Not home. Not the earth, for sure, never again,

that’s what they said, though joke’s on those motherfuckers:

I don’t like the world I don’t like dancing or music or food I

like you, even shadow even silent even quite gone from me

harmony is overrated. I looked back and oh the lightlessness

over my shoulder black on black velvet on pitch. Your name

frozen between my teeth. That void. I held out as long as I

could.

THE MAGICIAN

THE MAGICIAN

I met him outside. On a bench. I had been running. Had