Self-Portrait as Housewife by Austen Rosenfeld

Your dreams hold your days together. You spend your time transforming stars into kitchen implements that you could bake potatoes in. Or coming up with one good reason for crying over dirty socks or falling asleep each night with all the lights on in the house. Waking, you can’t help remembering the first, but not the only, time you took off all your clothes and stood there like a pile of unopened letters. And then the kissing would begin; tongues rummaging like hands through someone else’s desk drawer, decoding his system for living. Remembering those few extra minutes you stayed in the shower–– because you wanted to. Because it meant something to you. A woman is wading through the dark rooms of her house, each one stagnant and swarming with loneliness. She wants to say I, but can only say You. And a man hates his son’s crooked teeth so much it hurts: they ring like a fire alarm. Pieces of a shattered mirror keep falling in her eyes, she can’t help it. Come now, the dishes never put themselves away. Reapply your eyeliner, pick a fight with a saleslady. Living is forgetting, blue wings beating against the window, portraits through the centuries with every feature exaggerated. I cry out to the trucks heading South, the shifting clouds, anything that moves: I know what it’s like, take me with you.