Nyctophobia

The radio is dead, he says, and With the windows down, only the rush of Air soaked with red soil, rivulets Amass in channels on the dash and Stifled footfalls collected beyond the walls Of houses with ribbed roofs ebb As we gather the folds of the road. The vineyards are dying, he says, and On the outskirts men claw at their necks And wait for the clouds to migrate west Through the ripe reek of oleander, air so thick And viscous that sound fastens to it like A fly strip; time rests Here, he says, and the Houses flood in July, when the Water finds no escape, only waits for The sun to return so that it can go home And in that

I drag myself out along the sheet Clutch a wrist and The stars in your veins Are going supernova. Crumple and fold Into me, say You're not coming back Not this you, that when we meet It won't be again, but the first time – Two people who recognize the Sound of each others names Scraping out Where lips tear open And our voices compete With suburban static for an Open frequency. I remember In the dark, they were All grit, from mouths full Of glue, and The way we endured each visceral Detail, like Listening to people fucking With the volume turned up way too high.

In the dark we bloom – Gape into Hollow point petals And on the inside Innards shredded It spills Out, one word Implodes, bursts into Blossom And here Crumpled, we are Rotten We decompose And in our ruins Something grows.

In the solemn aftermath I am a ghost collecting shrapnel – The vestiges of bullet sheathes That blistered as they fell; Through the bitter fallout I stumble, a gun-deaf mute Accumulating skeletons, Possessed and resolute. Beloved, I am ridden With deep apostrophes – Slender streams, leaking out: The thrusting roots of trees. The grip of sodden cotton Climbs along swift slopes of skin, I am perforated - And slowly emptying. Palms glisten with the sap Of splinters, so exhumed; Beloved – I cannot find the exit wound.

We are acid rain Taken root in desert's breath Expelled from storm cloud wombs To salt the shores of death We are forest fire chasers Waiting to ignite And you – you are a writer Who does not write. We are long-distance swimmers Treading amniotic fluid Compressed by warring currents Swept out and left for dead We are knife enthusiasts Ready for a fight And you – you are a writer Who cannot write. We are deep sea fisherman Using limbs as bait Bleeding out a breadcrumb trail Losing water weight We are bounty hunters In pursuit of white light And you – you are a writer Who will not write.

I cannot use the verb So instead, I'll use the thing Build bridges with playing cards Make cradles out of string When the gutters burst their banks Take refuge in a sailboat We commandeer Styrofoam Two bodies and a raincoat I cannot write a sentence In only sinus rhythm Assembling toy airplanes Telling limb from limb When the earth sweats Wearing hot liquid clothes We jump rope With a garden hose I cannot thread syllables Like beads on a string Or a length of rope Through a tire swing Instead, we take our orders From voices in the drain Let's played hide and seek With the rain This is not the sum the parts It just can

Feeble the din as dark settled in, the soften collision of moths in a tin; of sounds I could isolate: the tiniest feet and the stiff linen flap of wings to a beat and the crush of each lung against heart, against gut, and the slice of raw tin in each visceral cut - but of all of these noises the most loathsome one was the silence I suffered when noises were gone.