fresh from the whale’s stinging mouth, a scream

In my half-dream, I vomited a whale. It lay and glistened on the rocks. In and against the water, the air was enough to brighten. I wanted to cut the carcass open, pry its bones apart, and climb inside the pink of it.

Here is the sticky Chicago heat, damp until the wind blows and lifts the water. In the same half-dream I’m standing at the edge of the sidewalk, balancing the arch of the foot on the corner of the curb and my hands are weightless and, six floors up, framed by the window, my grandmother watched you call to tell me about the crack you smoked and liked.

Heaving in the space between the call and the cry that summer, I ate a drawn breath and set my hair on fire at a bus stop. It went up until the flame died in the bright wind. The men on the street got louder when I shrank. You returned from elsewhere, considered suicide.

While I waited, I learned how to turn a plea into a repeated phrase in the cool dark and pretended the closet door could lock. The rooms outside held too much air. Wanting to be bound by something, I touched my forehead to the wall of the living room and turned the knob until I felt it click. Over the vent, the light came slow. Later, I put on lipstick to see if crying would cut patterns in its surface.

I worked retail the day of the eclipse and told myself I could stand to be alone, but when the sky went dark I got on a city bus and looked around at people wearing sunglasses until I stood in front of your house and you said hey like you had been expecting me all along. Tiny half-moons dotted the sidewalk, teased fire leaking from the edge of some great shadow. Taken in by their winking, we stole glimpses of the darkened sky and knew that it would blind us.

Here is the pillow I bit down, left damp and sad with tears and spit before I woke to find it red. I missed three calls and took the fourth, took a cab to the front yard where dirt was packed in places and the dandelions, forgotten, thrived in their various chokeholds. A neighbor moved from the window to the other side of the fence to watch me dial 911. While we waited, I called into work, overshared to the bookstore’s answering machine. The cops got out of the car, asked if there were any weapons inside, pounded the door with the outer edge of practiced fists, walked away laughing at my hysteria. Call your girlfriend sometimes; she worries are words I have, occasionally and late at night, tried and failed to forget. Later, we went down the block for coffee.

Some nights, the window opened onto a roof that ate the light and, warmed, stayed gentle after sunset. Not withstanding the dizzy loveliness of fever, the whale returned to my dreams just once. But even near the end, when I went to the yard and pulled raspberries from their small, white hearts, the water, as they left it: stained red and black with dirt and juice.