15: Run

Elliott says he never loved you.
“All that for sex?” you ask.
How strange to demand your body stop loving.
At a concert, lost in the rhythm of limbs, you meet Dan. You shout that you’re moving out of state, and end up in bed, snarled in his tattoed arms.
Next morning, you’re a tangle of wires, so you go running. Feet thump the pavement like drum beats. Muscles rope under skin. A heart flaps in its ribcage. You’d forgotten the body. Even as Dan pushed inside, you believed. But as your breath turns to sand, you become a body, nothing more.

14: Tuesday

The sky is ceramic blue, and just as fragile. Jets scrape overhead. If you go outside, a coworker says, you can see smoke.
They let us leave work early. Michael and I ride the train. A kid in a baseball cap signals to a young man wearing headphones.
“What’s that?” Baseball cap asks of the jangle we all hear.
“Turkish music.”
“Something wrong with American music?”
I flinch.
“No,” the young man says, then hands the headphones over his seat.
The kid in the cap accepts and listens, nodding with the rhythm.
Michael doesn’t remember, but this happened. I swear it did.

13: The God Who Swallowed Poison to Save the World

Sundeep returned from India, made love to Kate, then showered. In his bag, she discovered a four-armed god, beautiful as a museum statue. But why carry it, like her grandmother carried holy cards? When Sundeep climbed back into bed, she curled against him. “Tell me about the gods."
He snorted. “One god’s throat turned blue. He swallowed poison to save the world.”
“Jesus,” Kate said. “Gods always die to save us.”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you think it’s true?”
“True?”
“Real like this,” she said, touching his warm skin.
“For me,” he said, “This is another world.”
And she didn’t ask again.

12: Dream

Perhaps I wade through the grass, or else I’m only watching it on film. A man joins me. When we climb into a car, I find a second man waiting. The first man stabs the second man, who yells so long and loud it must be real. I grieve, but do nothing. Maybe it is just a movie. The men are strangers, but the dream is about you telling me I could choose to be fine. As if I could reach into my sleep and take out that dream like taking a toad from a jar. Like you vanished in the dark.