I was lying in bed with my mom and this strange man came over and lay in the bed next to me and started telling me a scary story about bodies. I kept telling him to stop but he wouldn’t, he told it slowly line by line and each time he said a new line he reached beneath the covers and touched me. I kept trying to squirm away and I pulled close to my mom but she got mad that I accidentally bumped into her and pulled away. Then I killed them both, violently, and after she was dead I asked my mom why she did that and she said it was because I touched her. I tried to explain it was an accident but she wouldn’t listen and anyways she was dead.

I lay on a

table, the kind they use for giving

exams, naked in a dark room, while

a woman gave me a manicure/pedicure

thing and started painting my nails.

Softly unidentifiable music played in the

background. It was supposed to be

relaxing. She kept painting my

nails though, layer after layer of

hard sticky film and then I realized

shewas painting up my fingers and toes

and they got all stiff and stuck

together and I tried to move but

my hands and feet were heavy

from the polish and I was

sedated by the perfumed vapors

and thestirrups held me in place. I

tried to scream but my voice just

blended right into thev music.

The woman kept painting and painting,

up my legs, down my arms, around

and around my torso until my

entire body was covered in feminine

shellac and my pores tightly

sealed in maximum girliness and I

suffocated deep inside it.

1999

I was in the bathtub and
my mom wasbathing me, wringing out a
sponge over me, but all the water that
dripped from the sponge was tinged red
with blood but she didn't seem to
notice and kept washing me until the
whole bathtub was filled with
bloody water.

The Girl You Never Kissed

I dreamt that you arrived on my doorstep in a hurricane of Amazon, African, enormous snakes, the cobra kind with the long wing bits against their necks. I ran into the house and slammed the door only to watch it dissolve in front of me and as I turned the house dissolved behind me so that the whole world was only you and I and snakes. And you stood right outside where the door had been in a long dress of furled and gleeful black—the fabric thick and heavy as though it was a kind of velvet woven out of tar or pitch. And you smiled like a Queen who sees her lover led to the guillotine, a slightly deranged smile that opened a little wider than your mouth should have been possible to move and you held in one hand an enormous and dignified boa that swayed its head just a little back and forth as though wondering that a mere I could be worth all this fuss and you smiled wider, looking radiantly evil and I knew you were a queen of something and the snake was coming towards me to strike and it just got worse and worse the more I tried to back away and I couldn’t move under the glee of your smile and I tried to call for help but I couldn’t move my lips or find my voice, all I could make was this sort of whistley/whispering sound and the harder and louder I tried to yell the softer my voice became; your smile grew thicker and wider as though it was eating up the skin around it and I knew perfectly well that I was only dreaming and that I had only to wake up and have it over and I looked at the depth of your smile and the disapproving sway of the snake and realized I could not wake up until I let it strike me and you knew this too, and that is why you stood there so calmly waiting and grinning because I was trapped in a disintegrating dream and you held me pinned there. So I held out my hand, very slowly, and you smiled so triumphantly it began to crack the tight skin over your cheeks and the snake’s head flew out fast and bit my outstretched hand with lusciously long fangs which didn’t hurt in the way it was supposed to and afterwards I looked down to see a strange mark like a primitive tattoo on the back of my hand just as you and the snakes began to swirl darkly around me as I finally woke up.

Double-Feature with Cartoon

My body was a mannequin folded neatly in a trunk but someone had replaced the eyes with glass. My excavated eyes tapioca-stared out from a lumpy bowl of grits on the kitchen counter, and it was also a different color -- orange instead of Formica gray like usual -- there was no spoon. The bowl was china with tulips round the brim like my mother's always are, but I could not see the cupboard where it belonged. This dream is a double feature with cartoon –

An apple-fat woman in purple petticoats and a brown felt pointed hat slashed her leg with a non-serrated black-handled butcher’s knife and butter ran out. The doctor was made of newspaper and he could not zip her up. The village children pressed in with greedy tongues, adults appeared, people with wooden bowls and faceless heads. Clouds broke out observing the picture before any count could begin. The clouds made crowd estimates impossible -- the music jagged like a record that could skip both ways. What do you dream when the viewing screen dissolves? The images fade and the house-lights do not come up.

Disembodied

You dreamt I stuck a finger in your ass
and asked "like this?" You dreamt you rolled out
of your body to see how it would respond.
You dreamt everything felt good until we did
it. You dreamt my fingers left trails
along your body, glistening sticky that numbed
against the skin. You dreamt I said that
you were going to need me. You dreamt
I tied you up to watch you starve.

The Night You Flew Away

I dreamt I woke to find you in my
bed. I dreamt you wore a million faces—
none of them real—occupying them as you
did my cunt. Taking up space as it seemed
to serve your purpose. I dreamt each time
you spoke a face fell off you. I dreamt
I watched their bodies pile around you.
I dreamt you struck a kitchen match
into the fleshy pyre. I dreamt I
knelt above it, rubbing my hands over the
greasy flames to warm them. I dreamt about
the night you flew away.

Reunion

You dream:
about a huge slumber party
held in a school gym.
You dream about drugs.
You dream you waited, looking
out the window, watching people
ghost by in the darkness. You
dream you had cancer and didn’t
tell anyone for fear they should
laugh if you died on the
wrong damn day.