The Dream
in my dreams, we live across the street. a street with families, where ice cream trucks visit. it looks like a bottomless postcard if you peer out your window at golden hour. the songs playing in the corner store are all in Spanish, and the only word I can pick out is 'corazon'. and in these dreams, you leave me gifts. they are on my doorstep each morning, casual as afterthought. once, a mug of tea, brewed weaker than I normally take it, and you knew, and you were sorry. then, the flowers you almost sent that one time, before you thought better of it. of me. my favorite gift is the dog. scrappy, but he waits obediently when I open the door. he smells of the sea down in Dana Point. smells of the second room where I watched you cry, the first where I could not make it stop. how you bit back words like spoiled sunsets, all the things you never told me dribbling from the sides of your mouth like rotten egg yolk. I smelled it on you. smelled it on you like the salt on the air, like the sea on this dog. I bring him, wild-eyed and windswept, inside, into my bedroom. you have not slept there in thirty-seven days. in this dream, you live across the street, slowly emptying your life of the artifacts of me until I am buried in my own home.
