People rarely look under their floors

I stood at a blue doorway,
not dissimilar to my aunt’s wedding photos
wrinkled with spilled tea and compressed by
a swollen tangerine. If I told you she left me
gifts wrapped in newspaper under the bedroom
would you say they tasted of waking at 5 am,
being left at an intersection, or church wafers?
I found the newspaper after chewing my hands,
letting bits of myself sink through as I pried the
floorboards, bled all over, found gifts coated in dust.

Did you know people rarely look under their floors,
becoming the part of your home you’ve never seen.
Newspaper gifts are as follows:
A molded husk, a ring, yellow lipstick, a photo folded
into a crane. I unfold a portrait of my aunt looking into
me as if someone had died. She doesn’t approve of biting
nails, bleeding, digging around like an infected animal

Later, I hallucinate a blue curve, not dissimilar to an entrance,
I wait slumped outside by our fence,
caught in a spoiled tangerine evening. I think I’ll be married out here,
my veil crumpled trash bags and plastic jewels.

Water split open an avenue

I dreamt up a river two streets down. Water split open an avenue,
flooded wooden Victorians painted after get well baskets. Trees
are all wilted here. I’ll carve names in the surely dead ones, as a
eulogy. Dreamt an old woman dipped herself in the river, to cure
her arthritis. At seventy there is too much to fear, she said. Not
to me, but her spotted dog. I place a crate of pinched oranges in
the current and hope an orange floats into each yard like a sign
of reversal. This time, fruit gives itself to you, no picking! River
has split open summer and heat hangs fully. I’m nauseous with
sunscreen and foot tans but oh how summer splitters my migraine!

I always feel like a crashing bike. Like a shark attack. That arthritic
woman told me about when fish turned on her in the Mediterranean.
Motherfuckers tried to eat me! She said, this time right to my face.
What does it mean that the city gave us a river? Just once concrete
committed suicide and acknowledged the underneath.
Water has always been there.

I’ll tell myself over and over to outline river edges but I’m waking up.
I’m waking to a leak in my floor-level apartment where I forgot to close
a heavy curtain. Passersby see me in my nightgown. There’s a slow
soaking of my carpet. I salvage anything that fits into a crate.

Ocean would spill

If you hang your hand out the window the ocean would spill
bodies of fish faster than a broken milk bottle and perhaps I’d
hang their scales to dry.

To line the walls with fish skin is to accept their music
Like chimes, waltzing sounds emerge and carry throughout living
room, hallway, to doorway, to fence choked in vine and us
Up There in the house teeming with ghosts like a dinner party that
never ends.

A bedroom swallowed in fish skin,
I feel you holding a knife,
Scrape the sea off,
First, gently,
Then, in one go like a ripped flour sack,
Who knew water was not a phantom.