such an unaccustomed way of speaking, this seldom-eyed girl, whose unfurled fingers flutter — no clichéd caged bird but a stone-turned thing, sometime separate of her own flesh, sometime seeking something serpentile, half-stopped sentences flaying impatience from salt tongues — until, cage-burst and hide-shed she slips through unseen channels, choosing depth over decorum, dredging down to where the unlight flicker fades in time with her ticking eyelids

Lay me out like a carpet; unbone me here; roll me into the gutter like roadkill. Do you know? There are magnets in my arteries, pulling in discriminate directions, drawing aches likes brushstrokes, like a cat's tongue, like a hook through my cheek. Did you know? A fish gapes not to breathe but to be submerged. The weight of water has always been a regulation — you can cry freely there, and no one will ever tell the difference, chlorine-eyed and stutter-lunged, breathe, stroke, kick, breathe-stroke-kick — just so you know: I am trying. Ever seeking the rhythm that will keep me afloat.

— a forty-five degree backward tilt, face open to the false sky. It doesn’t matter which show: the midweek lunar matinée; the purple storms of Venus set to Wagner; the slow-mo explosion of our one and only sun — you can talk to god wheresoever there is light and the absence of light; wheresoever liminality slides into dissociation, quiet as a dovetail joint. And by god I mean the starry starry night mural on the ceiling; I mean the way that minor seventh slips between your third and fourth ribs in the final bridge of Vincent; I mean the inside of your eyelids, rose-tint veins blurring into constellations.