I sit on the other side of the room, wondering if it’ll move. It whispers names. I won’t listen to the coo and warble of its make-believe. And while my heart is a little less free when it moves, I adore the mobility of it. I wake to learn it has always been attached to my sleep. All those dreams about flying. All that sudden lifting off the ground. No sense fighting. Eventually the music, if that’s what it is, lulls me into making friends with it. I invite it in. It needs me to sustain itself, but I don’t know that, not until it’s too late. I only know the fairy tale which I repeat to others. I only know the myth. It is everywhere. It knew my name before I was born.
Spice
Your old wife sets a plate before you at the evening table, looks, smells, tastes as it always has, but this time look in her eyes, they will not meet yours. An apple slice mellows in the wine, there is a face in it, something in the broth in your spoon that could only have come from a faraway place. Push back the meal. Let birds appear on your lips. Take daylight from your pocket like an old timepiece to tick a way out. Tell the woman to look at you dead in the eyes.
Lenny DellaRocca has recent work in Every Day Poems, Fairy Tale Review, and Miami Rail; and forthcoming in two anthologies: Twice Upon a Time and Objects in the Rear View Mirror from Kind of Hurricane Press. His chapbook Sleep Talker is forthcoming from NightBallet Press.
