Puppet theater for the creatures of the night

I woke from a bad dream to the earth’s fevered shaking. I felt as if I had conjured it. Afraid to slip back into sleep.

In the buried quiet, I spoke my name until it became someone else’s.

Olivia. What a sweet sound.

It must shake you like the mother when you hear it out loud. When a sound becomes a memory. A spirit with a vengeance.

It’s both too much and too little, to be the ghost in your attic. I curse you in the dark, with my room upside down.

Yet I pray for your health, for the stillness of the earth. My heart beats in a panic for the black of your lungs.

I could stay like this, live a lifetime half awake. With a sleepy gaze one of those shadows might just take your shape, come lay breathing by my side.

I asses the silhouettes. My sweet belongings, a smudge of inky midnight. In the morning light they’ll take form again, slip back into being.

Then out, then in.

It’s a precarious performance. Puppet theater for the creatures of the night. There’s a crack in the foundation. A bump under the bed. A fault line frozen in time.

A glass flirts with disaster on the edge of my dresser. The dust has stirred and settled wrong. Limp with defeat, the lampshade bows and the body buckles.

The frames cling crooked to the wall.

There is a comfort in the aftermath, the blue bruise from the fall. I speak your name until you become someone else’s. I come up waterlogged.

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