2.13 am, inside a dictionary/ learning how to spell

“incantation”/ Iris-cuffing the print, transferring

from page to hand, from hand to cerebrum; the words

cast out like a die/ artefacts of decompression hulking

with incredulity; t’is a volatile parchment, the mind and its muscles

Contracting from the glaze of a poetry high/

I was led to believe it was a dream; standing motionless

wet hair and dry clothes/ the door to my left/ no, to the right/ no,

behind me probably/ Somewhere in my house,

but somewhere I had never been/ No,

it was a nightmare,/ mist cyclone on the glass

inside my bathroom mirror; refusing to reflect,

raiding consciousness for evidence of hydromancy/

Something written in the water;

the terms for the mist to shift, spell to work/

and it worked, a little too well,

a little too fast/ The water poured from me

into the cracks in the tiles/ coursing, slithering,

finally clicking into place; chiming ingress:

a purported summoning/ A silhouette in the mirror

chasing form and line: stepped out without warning.

Eyes stretched into slits of ochre-flames/ pulling out

from the mirror vortex/ wings torn, chipped at the edges,

decorated on her frostbitten lower-lip/ Sounded like

an unkindness of ravens/ A scream plagiarized 

from knowledge of living things; and my own mouth

screaming back, an egress of self-will/

I prayed to the gods who had walked out on me/ the gods

who created us both and forgot to check back in; when

the unkindness tripped over the sink into my arms;

was a seafaring sphinx,

now, living in the shadow of my left hand/ a prisoner

of the mirror freed/ kissed me first, sang to me later

“Don’t trust me”/ Bit my neck and whispered “I trust you”/

She ate eagles with tea, passed around

chocolate covered strawberries at the dinner-table;

Gawking from the inside, past my skin and out,

Somehow my hands working in synchrony/ Give and take,

a dance learned from habits of her vices: Night-hunting

for appetizers and cheating lovers, sitting in wait for

hex-eyed step-people/ Down with every gulp

of mama’s juniper soup/ Yet, she licked her lips,

standing behind my granddad at lunch/ as if

she hadn’t cleaned blood with her tongue

from the dining-room wall that very morning/

sitting every night in the light outside my parent’s room,

eyes glowing ochre still/ Last sixty-nine days

when we stayed our execution of peace,

pacing towards a god’s menu for her bloodthirst/

Last sixty-nine days, I learnt

how to go sleepless ninety-six different ways; that

midnight lullabies are made of air trapped in bat-wings/

That fearpolis was not planetary, t’was my home

That she moistened her lips

every time I grimaced in my sleep/ and the bite on my neck

has been growing deeper/ every time I shiver 

under the spaceless weight of her body/ Until memory

receded into fugue/ No way to uncast the die;

In between her Mephistophelean hearsay: the

“she said, he said”, the “I once knew a garden gnome

who loved to play with matchsticks”, the negotiations

and hell-contracts/ she taught me not to ask

if my disposition was inherited or acquested/ No matter

how hard anyone scrubbed the glass/

The mist was there to stay,

those were the terms now.