A Pure Catastrophe

Tell me about the dream where we hold hands under a tree and never cry. We wake up to the smell of gasoline every morning and doze off at dusk. We see the man pulling bodies out of the small window but never speak of it. I sleep on the couch every Friday just to catch a glimpse of your freshly bleached hair. We don’t care about the man smoking cigarettes in the backseat of his car. You ask me about the color of the moon, and I say, half. The man keeps pulling bodies out from the trunk of a blue car. We sleep on separate beds at night, and every time we dance, we look like two civil war soldiers making love on the barren land for the very first time: oblivious and naive. You wake up without ribs one day, and we laugh, hitting our heads on the bed frame. The heart is a vigilant muscle, you say. It can protect itself. I don’t understand, but I comply, for I have never known how to do otherwise. The man keeps pulling bodies out of the door. You keep talking to me in a low voice on the microphone. I keep waiting for you to come back: not as a person (warm and complete), but as love (a pure catastrophe).