Psyche suckled through a fennel straw. Dreamwake images play like girls. Tempest of time measured in breaths. Sour exposure on saccharine takes. Directive to front, I yield. Caloric, he flew. Trampled past the aviator in the shed. Corkscrew daffodils. Soak the sequitur until firm. Collapse into begotten shapes. Chronological dilation. Swollen bowel stories to share in the dark. Degradation on principle. Slough chutney. Divot mesh. Aneurysm inferred.

Brandish an ax and I will absolve it. Desecrate a church and I will abscond it. Referendum light behind the lids. Teeth like a belt buckle. Heart like a horse. Diagram the dividend between age and beauty. Shuck fabric from a fishing line. Breakfast indignities. Channeled avenues. Emulsion of a paper boy.

Of these, Naaji dreamed and didn’t dream. She wandered the vestibules of existence through copperheads and harpoons. On the back of her teeth stained headache relief. Her eyes were lined with slag. Jailbirds, keynotes, diatribes, girlies and nosers and painstakers all, quailed and paled when she entered them. She gutted their comprehension and cleaned the fat over one scrabbled knee. What they knew flossed through her two good braces and spat out the hole in her cheek, scrubbed unrecognizable. They were forever changed. Naaji kept walking.

Slum and scrum tightied her whities ‘til the laundromat closed. Made a deal with gravity and came out an angel. Only person ever pinned her lost a finger for the trouble and managed just three months before the barn burned down. Naaji spat. She plugged herself into the radiator and received. Squint, see a little man in a light bulb. Xeroxed. Highway ramp on the cleft of her lip. Spoke to the driver in Ramindjeri, asked him to tape the soaps and he laughed her fee home.

Under the light of the hostel hallway, now, this night, with us, she communes. Man on the steps knows her from seven-thousand years ago, that Fat Tuesday, and she recalls. Flax. Dung. Plasma. Bitter salt smell sags the rafters. Her toes wedge deep in the sodden sisal steps. Side-stepping the memory, she searches for the present fabric, the breathing weave. There: death and dissolution, the crepe paper flaking back to reveal hexagons of rot and decay, a toothless gum thumbed clean.

Deirdre, who knows the score.

Fettered, pickled pieces of infused flesh skimming the surface of revelation, a waterlogged graveyard weeping for its constituents. Pit in a peach where the worm should be, accelerated decomposition in a five-ton freezer, residuals. Recompensation. Eustress.

Sometimes she would line her sight with the rippling scab of the horizon, imagine herself a macrocosm of energy, sound, movement, tumbling off its edge. Other times she drew the well and paid no mind to the possibility of beyond. Enough ghost talk in dreamed whispers, fae lights in burnt corneas, to worry about the veil. Pull it over your shoulders and sleep, girl, sleep.

She tries, wedged between rash and rank.

Back in her apartment, buried in the mold and the towels, Deirdre's friend Bobby Sue takes the smallest pair of tweezers in the place and segments pinpricks from her flesh, skinning herself in half-gram nodes. Weight sheds in black-brown pencil shavings. Sunlight crosshatches against the window like it’s been filtered through a pantyhose. In every tilt of the tool, there is a becoming: breakneck bearers of tidings, all sorts. The chasm between wherewithal and fealty yawns.

Bobby Sue peels free a square of hide and scrutinizes the wound for signs of God. Satisfied with the lack, she presses on. The sunflower seed between her molars quakes in anticipation. When she finds what she’s searching for, she’ll know. Tepid separation between molt and meat: nope. Skewer portals into mattress flesh and shuck out the skin: not here either. She’ll find it. Relax.

Soon, her thigh is a picture book with the front page turned over, acrylic messengers illustrating thick, fibrous lines touching tips and swelling crimson, technicolor, a story in smear. Bobby Sue does not speak the language of self-destruction, gourmand expressionism, suffering just to suffer, but can mouth along to righteous sacrifice. If it’s worth it, take your pound, Mama always said.

Naaji knows this reality as she knows Deirdre, sees the splitting scenes between cell and image, and extends her hand. Eyes closed, Deirdre takes it like a gospel tract, and they slither up damp cloth covers, through frustration limbs, air bubble words, bugs. Seventh floor.

Door's ajar.