Almost midnight and there’s a crackle of strange bees at the window and dead rabbits eating the cabbage. I could speak of how they died, of how they still seek their infant nests among thorns. But I have been the fox pleading with her trapper, the one with ghosts sleeping somewhere in her bones—hunched down within the marrow. I have been both the garden and the herbs, jostled by cutworms and moth larvae. I speak only a language of nightmares.

Listen, together we are reckless, monsoons as they thrash against the glass, nailing driftwood to every house, forcing open every storm cellar. You can scream until your throat is raw, but you won’t revive the rabbits unless you can carry lightning in your mouth. Unless you can dredge new veins. You’ll still miss your exit on the highway each time you travel east, your own ghosts adjusting the radio as you zone out of one nightmare and into the backseat of another.

Croon your umbilical lullaby and let me empty my mouth of bitter milk as I howl with colic. I’ll hold constellations in my body’s dark hollows. Drop into orbit. Pull the tides up like the hem of a skirt; let me cling to your ankles like a child. Read to me how Galatea was chiseled from ice instead of stone. Let me show you my snow-mottled self, this self who fell for November boys where the mornings after were grief not glow. Show me poems in cracked bottles on the shore, the way the edges freeze and shatter. Show me the sky that hums gray with its weather; hide me behind each unknowable seam.