Boulders. Boulders like sky candy, falling. Resting on my collar bones, Lock me to the ground. Like life binding this body up in vines, clenching. Tendons that can’t breathe like gas pipes that cut through earth muscle. A plea to crack open, to set the pressure back in it’s place.


Cells ached, like they were trying to tell me something. My bedroom air smelled like high VOC paint, but I didn’t know where the wafts came from. Burning natural gas makes sounds like a crying animal trapped in the floorboards. There is this feeling of wanting to hide and hold you at the same time. Of only wanting them to know me once I know myself. Once the pictures are hanging on the wall. Once I cover this face in a thick mask-vase, her earth clay more real than this charade we play. A perpetual feeling of imploding, of folding, into myself. This rock in my back, turning me inward, pulling me through.


When my wilting face can’t know sleep, I look at graphs of mineral sky spheres. The way they never stop falling through space, the way they catch glimpses of each other, always from a different angle, from a new distance. I wonder if their movements will tell me about my tide inside. If they’ll inform the forces that fill my emptiness. These planets, weaving fresh lines. A cradle I rest in. This exhale.


I wonder if this pulsing knot is her Texas quaking, mother crust, drilled and displaced. Injected with something against her will, cracked from the inside. The Ring of Fire and Loving County.  Ancient fluids move through her rocks, like veins, cracking through soil capillaries. Earth quakes, rupture bleeds, clotting, collecting, dissecting.


In August, on the hot sand, the boys dig their bodies into the ground. Their hair crowns. Flashes of blue; blinding shovel-head sand. Would these lungs withstand the earth-walls that crave to cave inward? Wet feet find water. We all disappear.


There are nights where some unknown grief keeps my body from falling limp. Where some unnamable pain creeps into this loose earth. Like fracking water deep underground, cracking me, fluidity from the inside.


Her pain rests above me like a pregnant cloud I know. I wait for her water to break. And while I waddle with this unknowable grief, I look to see where her earth trembles. Perhaps her shake scared people lining door frames. And their fear wafted north, now my 2am inhale. 346 miles from here.


When she explodes inside––blankness.


Drawing her history up from the depths. Burning it, erasing it. Selling her. Who is she? Where did she come from? How did she get there? What is she made of? Extract, distill, heat, burn. Disperse, disintegrate, suffocate. My body knows this pain. Of being penetrated against her will. Earthquake tremors like shaking discharge.


It’s these days I notice all the kitchen cabinets hang open.