I stood in a gallery of another woman’s house reading out loud from an aubergine dress. The dress was her poem, not mine. Each tier of the chiffon skirt needed translation. The bodice encircles the heart. Lines stitched into circles of skirt. Stanzas the stories of a house. Body of a woman, the form. The woman wearing it was dark purple, her face a port-wine stain. She had neglected to tell me about the fish in her indoor pool. Hungry, it came out of the filter but I didn’t know what to feed it. Bread? Fish flakes? The pale gold fish swam in the air above the water and I pet its muscled back as it moved through my hand. It wasn’t a bird or a cat. It was still a fish. Too late (for the woman had left), I asked the dress, where’s the fish food? I was taking care of her home while she was away. Everyone out of the pool I said, and dashed through the cement corridors of the compound searching for the stash in vacant stores. The fish was good for the house. Night fell. The bright conical skirts of security lights came on, lit the shadowed portico. Houseguests mumbled drunk in their sleep. The woman had left her dress empty. I was afraid of changing my life.

A rusted padlock locks someone else’s gate. Ferns and rhododendrons are locked in and I’m walking home with the forest in my mind. The trees want to rip themselves from the earth. Roots make rooms underneath and I see their apartments from the edge of the river. Water striders are busy walking on water with their haphazard work. The air feels like walking through clouds. Filled with drizzle. And I look for owls but all I see is a robin, look for deer but only find a squirrel. The abundance of lesser creatures. There are ground webs spiders made — canopies over moss. I look down the barrel of a hundred year old fallen tree. Its spokes with pockets of shadows. Home for anything that needs to be invisible for a while. The air in there is murky, spongy with damp rot. I’m smudgy with clouds. My body needs nothing.