Jalina Mhyana

I__ considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I__ miming myself.

We could scan each car for terrorists and lovers she could lean into my camouflage her head resting on woven trees. When they come for her body she could run deep into my uniform into the forest of me where they could never find her.

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.

It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people__ invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I__ even fooling myself.

With each kiss in the cold house __e swallow clouds of breath _ exhaled spirit, speech bubbles_ we__ rather lick away __han fill with words. We run naked from room to room, __eeping the walls warm._ Our bodies blur through the halls __f your house, its winter circulation.

Transparent tubes divided Phil__ blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people__ bodies. The map of my love__ tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.

I can__ remember what I__e done with my lingerie. I look in the containers under my bed, as if my sexual self has been relegated to the wrong side of the mattress. I imagine my husband__ sexuality down there too, our shadow selves making love deep in our unconscious as we cuddle above the mattress as brother and sister.

I was his __ittle girl with the William Burroughs mind,_ his __ecret fairy,_ __emale Frank Zappa_ and __indow onto a magical world._ He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.

Every Sunday behind bibles, virgins,soldiers tight against me, longing,and my pelvis rubbing gods'to the big black woman voices.Soldiers tight against me, longing,all that rising, sitting, kneelingto the big black woman voices,spirits warming, tensing, folding, thenall that rising, sitting, kneelinglike some kind of dance, a mating,spirits warming, tensing, folding andgod went __hhhhh_ between my thighs _

If I must die young, bury me in a music box. I__l be the pale ballerina with dirtin her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs and open the lid when you visit.Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling the dark night__ belly until I__ dizzy, until the stars melt and spiral into a halo over my head and I__e stirred my death into the sky.

I cut our paper dinner with a pair of scissors borrowed from the front desk of the hotel. I cooked with a spice rack box of crayons _ sixteen colors. I seasoned the pumpkin pie with orange crayon, and basted the turkey's crisp skin in brown. I was remorseless with my sketchbook abattoir, playing the part of carnivore just as surely as I was play-acting the role of wife. I may as well have been a wax figure in a dollhouse eating the wax-scented food.

All of the sudden, we were a grown-up married couple! Like little figures in a doll's house, we sat there dazed, in awe, wishing a chubby little arm would pass through a window and move us around, tell us what to do. We would have given anything for a magnificent child to show us how to be husband and wife.

Back at the cottage we explored the topography of my body; twigs in my hair, calves striped red and my skirt smudged in meadowtones. The forest underlined me, accentuated me, illustrated me. I felt alive in that midnight village whose dark places left their signatures on my skin, whose bites still hummed around my wrists. I didn__ notice till then the thousand nettle stings rising like pearls; burning bracelets that my love kissed and rubbed with dock leaves; a folk remedy painting my pulse points green; honorary stalks.

Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,boulders, and caves where Kami nature spiritsminister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root, and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.

My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he__ place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them.

We played with the moon all night, painting faces on its blank cheek, shining its spotlight into sleeping people__ windows. But mostly we just ate the moon, stuck tongues to its surface and felt it dissolve, left chunks of its minty scalp on neighbors_ doorsteps.

I dreamed in night vision; whiteflowers of nocturnalgun fire _ day residue shot to hell. If I held my dreamsto a windowsill,sun would sievethrough my screams.

I can__ pray or weigh my words right; doomsday is here my friend, but you__e immune. We sufferfor you. I__ weaving crowns of sonnets, dreads;a souvenir so you__l never forget your friends.