ANGELA

She felt as though she could walk into another body as easily as she could walk into a room. It seemed to her that skin was less than a door and the fact that she lived in other bodies was not a mystery at all to her heart and to her mind but a fact of the universe that she accepted just as she accepted the existence of light and the effect of gravity on muscles. When she had lived with mirrors, she had known what her face looked like. Now she had forgotten and she had become a mirror for everything that she saw. If she was standing beside a street lamp, she became tall and green. The dull shine of enamel erased her features so that all anyone would notice was the one eye blinking at the top.

She felt like her skin was covered with opened eyes - that there were eyes all over her instead of pores. She could see everything. What she repeated to herself was this sentence,

"Maybe angels are the only ones who can fuck us now."

dream

When I dreamed last night, I dreamed that I loved a woman that I've known for a long time. She is very small with bones that look like china in my mind as I imagine her stripped of everything- even her flesh. But even her flesh inscrutable, inseparable from all that she is. She looks like something carved out of alien stone. She is so different from me, but in the dream I loved her perfectly. Her hair is a shining black hood. Her skin the yellow tinged color of real cream - the kind you know only lives at the top of a cold bucket or inside a cow's udder. I began by undressing her and marking each discovered part with a kiss. Her breasts were small enough to put my entire mouth around and I was pleased and surprised by the pink nipples hiding like strawberries beneath her shirt. Her hips were a fragile instrument, strung and trembling at my touch. Her belly dipped in a little at the center from the twin rims of her pelvic bones a shallow bowl leading me to a fragrant tangle of dark hair. When I parted the lips, I found moist beauty that rewarded my tongue with the dreamy sweetness of licorice. Does desire come awake in the world this way? I want her to yield to me now and I haven't seen her in more than five years. My dreams have abandoned me. My dreams are abandoned. Maybe each one is a living creature flying down to me to whisper its message at night.

...........................a face beautiful to me and burning. There are angels floating above while I sleep. They have eyes in their skin. They have eyes all over their bodies. I could kiss you two thousand times. I've kissed your name a thousand times. You are absolutely real to me and unyielding and I adore you as much as I love the way that my lungs carve breath from the air. There are sounds that come from far off places that we won't imagine...the sound of planet walls colliding with each other.

..................................................

Hallucination - a shimmer in the air tinted light purple shot through with stripes of gold. There's a patch to the left - a ruffled flower that looks like a bunch of grapes. A different flower drifts by, one that looks as though it's carved out of soap - impossibly large and white and still as a tooth resting in a box lined with dark green

wax. A spider bounces across the concrete, a long legged thing with a small round bright-red body. As it enters your shadow, it looks up at you and you see that it's eyes aren't spider's eyes. They are large and blue like the eyes of a little boy or girl waiting to be let in to a room full of water or toys. Where is the spider going? The wall that it traveled from is covered with kudzu and the vines melt into green rivers that swirl around your ankles, hardening like neglected candles, squeezing you into place. You are transfixed as you look up

to the sky and you seen a silver plane skimming the opaque blue. You see nine dots floating out from underneath it and down through clouds that blind you with their whiteness. There's a crow flying toward you and in its beak is a silver chain that you know is meant for you. As it flies around you, it wraps the chain around your neck. The crow's feathers come loose and fly through the air...circling around and riveting their shafts into your back and stabbing you so hard that your pain takes shape in front of you. Pain is a black dog sitting in front of you, throwing back its head and howling at the sky. Feathers fly around you. They get into your mouth. The dog is suddenly quiet and the pain becomes different like hunger when you've felt it for a long time. Mirrors appear on every side and you see that the crow's feathers have made wings for you, jointed and caped, welded to your reluctant shoulder blades and turning silver in the sunlight. The crow sits with the silent dog and the blue-eyed spider and you see that the crow is plucked naked - shivering in the chill that's hidden inside the hot heart of the day.

the dream of mirrors

There were mirrors along all four walls and set at right angles in the center of the room.

The angel whispered, "Go slowly," and so her reflection hit the walls and fractured over and over like colored pieces at the bottom

of a kaleidoscope. She looked everywhere for the key that would lead her out.

"Look there," said the angel. She did and saw her brother. The face wore the nose of a renaissance prince and eyes that lay veiled beneath thin lids - sallow and still. She wanted to go to a museum and look at some pictures. She wanted to cry.

" Go slowly'" the angel whispered as she turned away. "You'll miss it." So she locked her eyes on her brother's face and watched the mirror as it shattered. She held the soft tips of her fingers to the broken pieces and looked at a door.

teresa

She was resting on a cloud high above the spires of buildings that hadn't yet crumbled, folding like pieces of flaccid skin into the fissures that marked the concrete below. The cloud was as solid as a little boat and she felt safe. She floated through the air knowing that love was melting her from the inside out. She saw a building explode and the lights from the explosion were bright gold. Her pulse was bottled for a moment. Huge shards blossomed out from the explosion arcing up and out in a chaotic shower - glittering and glazed with every color in the rainbow. She remembered the words: "If you pass beneath a rainbow you will enter an unknown heaven." An enormous splinter carried her down and pinned her like a moth to the solid

concrete. Her heart throbbed around the glass spear. She abandoned herself to the sky above, a sky as blue as a painted lie and clear as the smile of a child.

Hallucination - I sit in the room which holds the things that I'm familiar with. There's a breeze blowing in through the window bringing with it the lemon-sharp smell of magnolias mixed with the musky-grape scent of wisteria. I remember your smell, the smell that lingered and grew in the pit of your arm, and I can see the smell in the air as I think of it. It's dull-green and plump. It looks like a spanish olive. Sadness is complete because it is a dead smell. Today I kept thinking that something was dead. I kept smelling dead things. Such a round odor. My nose begins embracing it and then closes against it. I think of your particles and I try to push death out of my heart. I don't want you gone from me. gone. I am sniffing for you through the city smelling you sometimes and hoping that you're near me. A rose floats through the air and my blood explodes, tinted with the scents of milk, hot coffee,a pretzel taken out of a bag, bread, chocolate, blood, melting plastic, hot gray metal, burning hair cut from a gray beard, gasoline, grass, xeroxed paper still warm, a polaroid picture, peppermint, basil crushed inside a warm fist, raw meat, mascara, baby powder, cat's fur, dust, lemons, garlic, wine, candles - roses.roses. These are the remnants of my love - the grave of my desire. I smell salt water. It stings the inside of my nose and makes me clean though I live 200 miles from the ocean.

the dream of wax

A candle burned at the center of the table. Hot wax ran across the rough wood and puddled at the candle's base fixing it to the table top. I couldn't stop looking at the candle and the flame grew until it became a ball of orange light as large as my head. The smell of wax was suddenly oppressive to me. I saw my sister in the globe of light. Her copper hair writhed around her face and then disappeared into the fire. Her large, dark eyes opened and closed like the mouth of a fish. I felt something trying to pull me away but I wanted to keep looking at my sister. I miss her so much! Finally, I was turned in my chair and I saw a pair of hands waving through the air, so smooth and pale, so unlined and uniform in color that they have been wearing gloves except for the long purple-black nails tipping the white fingers. The hands moved and as they moved a smell filled the air. I could smell cedar. The hands were holding a wooden rosary and the beads seemed to spin in front of my eyes. Clearly, this was a warning. My sister! But it seemed like an invitation as well. The smell was making me drunk and suddenly I could see nothing in front of me but a gray wall. When I turned back to my sister, I saw that the hand that I'd kept flat on the table was covered with warm soft wax. The flame was dead, leaving behind a ghost that twined up into the ceiling. The smell was like church when I had been young.

timothy

He had been blind for years. He didn't remember how many. Time was something that he moved through like air, changing when the air did - it happened outside the body he walked in. He walked and he waited, and as he walked he kept his himself open for the message that he knew he'd someday receive. He was walking along the edge of a building, feeling the rough brick and thinking that it must be red, because he could remember colors. Clear, vacant air suddenly met his palm, and he steered his body to follow the new wall. A mass of paper and metal pressed against his legs like a big hungry cat and the tang that bit his nose told him that he must be in a place where others dumped their garbage.

"Open your eyes." A voice, high and clear dangled in the air in front of him. "Open your eyes," the voice repeated.

His eyes weren't closed but he found himself wanting to obey. He shut his eyes tightly and then opened them again. A boy stood in front of him 12 or 13 maybe...a pale skinned thing with straight brick-colored hair that touched the tops of his bony shoulders. Its mouth curved - pointing up to green eyes, narrowed at him and cool as a pair of limes. The boy-thing was naked and hairless. Startled, he saw that it didn't have any genitals ...so how could he know if it was a boy?

"I'm here to give you something," it said. "I'm here for you."

It turned and knelt on the ground, supported on its hands and knees. He put his hands on the ass and wondered what it was that he should do. He looked down and saw that he was naked. He didn't remember when or how he had taken his clothes off. He spit on his penis and put it against the opening of the boy-thing's ass. He shoved and was surprised to find that it was like sliding into warm butter. He plunged in and out, trying to remember how it ought to feel. The lack of friction made this fucking feel more languid than it should. He started crying. It had been so long and he couldn't understand what it meant that fucking would feel this way now. His entire body was tingling as though his blood had been transfused with a new chemical. He came suddenly; he kept coming for a long time and as he came he felt as though his come was circling.. going back into his penis then coming out again in a greater quantity and then it overflowed the boy-thing, spilling over the ass cheeks and down across smooth white skin. The thing pulled itself free and turned around dripping, its lime green eyes locking his face while his penis still pumped into the air.

"Now you know everything," it said.

Pulsating lights shot out of the eyes - lights that swept over him leaving stickiness and a sweet foreign smell. He was exhausted. He knew that he'd been given a piece of information that he would have to carry with him always and the only way to find out what it was, and he would have to know, was to talk to strangers about what he had seen. about what he had seen. He would have to stand on the

corners of the ruined city and witness to anyone passing of what he had seen.

"So it is," said the boy-thing like a sad, plucked instrument. It reached to him, cupped its hands over his eyes and disappeared. He was blind again.

Hallucination - voice crack. When you are outside the silence of your own room sounds enter you uninvited. When you passed the row of sunflowers they began singing to you. Was this a song of the sun or were they mourning your passing? A dog spoke to you but was it the dog or the rock that was sitting nearby? As you move through the world you hear sounds inside you even when you stare at a blank wall. Even when you think of nothing. Voices whisper to you in a language that you think you know. The man on the street said:

"You are a chameleon."

When you protested, you found that he'd asked you for a dollar. You are lonely for the sound of a voice. You are lonely for a certain sound. There is a humming noise in your room and it never goes away. You hear birds, two hundred of them, taking off from the corner. When you try to sleep, the sound of breath whistling across the top of an empty bottle goes on and on stopping only for a few seconds. You hear teeth biting into a hard apple. You hear rose petals bruising against your skin as you drift in your bed. There's a voice in the world that you miss, a silver voice like an angel's wing and in

your dreams you hear a peacock's scream. You examine your tongue and your ears in a cracked mirror and turn when you hear the sound of feet coming down the stairs, hundreds of pairs of them. You hear a wooden mallet pounding through a cushion of meat. A baby screams and makes everything inside of you shift. You hear a dog's toenails clicking on a tiled marble floor. You hear a parrot squawking. You hear a dinosaur bellowing. You hear a song that you learned as a child and forgot. You hear a strand of hair as it hits the floor. You hear a vacuum of silence that sucks at you and hurts - this at the center of all that swirls around you... hypnotic, the coin shining at your feet - miles away down, a kind of relief.

the dream of leaves

When I looked up into the tree, the leaves were looking back at me because every leaf had an eye set into each side of the central vein.

sebast

He stayed chained to the lamppost for hours. His knees hurt from standing. His arms locked behind his back, felt bloodless and dead. Hours went by and he saw no one. No one arrived to help him or to talk to him or to hurt him in any way or to examine him. He slumped forward and wondered what was going to happen to him.

He didn't see them when they came up behind him. They had their hands on him suddenly, and it seemed to him that their voices, saturated with sounds that he didn't know, fluted over his skin and were exclaiming in some way at its smoothness. He was 15 years old and though he was dirty, he was hairless. They touched him all over for awhile, never spending more time on one part of him than another. Then they broke away and formed a semi-circle around him. There were seven of them. Each of them took a long metal rod out of a pocket hidden somewhere in the loose clothes that they wore. He looked at them hard,feeling as though he might never see anything else. They didn't really look like anything he'd ever seen. They were tall, each one between 6 and 7 feet, the height changing up and down by inches, changing while he watched. Tears pushed out of his eyes. A film of light masked the features of each one, like the identity screens that he'd seen on television except that these masks were light and not scrambled blocks of darkness. The rods were hollow - he could see the space inside as the stranger's lifted them to their mouths. How had he come here? The greased flesh of his arms seemed to shrink closer to his bones as he stared ahead and tried to remember coming to this place but he only remembered sleeping in an alley under a pile of newspapers. He remembered the layers of clothes that he had worn and he missed them now like he would have missed a finger or like he missed kisses. The strangers put their lips around the pipes then blew out at the same time. Vibrations hit him and cascaded through him - through his bones

and out again until his skin felt as though it was stretched out tight and vibrating too. He couldn't hear sounds from the pipes but there were sounds coming out of his body from deep within him...a pulse generating and feeding out through his quivering skin and into the still air. He felt his head shaking and his brain seemed to rattle like a walnut inside the suddenly larger skull cavity. Just as suddenly the strangers lowered the pipes and stepped forward. They lifted the pipes to their mouths again and blew out. Tiny arrows pierced his flesh over and over again, arrows blinding in their brightness -dissolving into the air, leaving behind his pain and the burning blood that ran out of the wounds in his body. As each arrow entered him, he felt pain but something else too. There was a wave of throbbing that swept from the hole of each wound and inward to his heart. His heart stopped beating for a second then started again and the empty space within his brain filled up with a different knowledge. He knew that each of his wounds sang like an open mouth. The veils around the strangers lifted away and he felt his eyes burning in the light from their faces. He said "no" over and over as he stared at them, but it was automatic and he didn't feel the words come out of his throat. The holes that covered him now released music. The notes lifted the strangers up into the air and away and finally he bled in silence and was gone too.

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Translate - the concrete that turns rosy in the afternoon sun. This happens everyday and no one, not one person remarks on it. The woman on the corner, she stands on that corner right there - she speaks in a language that surely must come from another place but is it someplace inside of her or is it another country? She's translating what drifts into her ears and then sending it out again in a flow that never stops erupting from her toothless mouth. The gestures that she makes, you've never seen anywhere and yet you know they stand for something inside the air that they carve. She stands with her back against a building and the building's pink, man-made stone makes it adorable in the deepening day. It looks like the home of angels. And in the doorway stands a long-boned person, hair falling down the back, looking at you with a gaze that could come from a pair of jewels set into the shining frame of heaven's perfect face. You know that the eyes are burning inside. This is heat that you feel. It fills the air around the building with a liquid quivering that wraps around and licks you like a giant tongue. The eyes are open and hungry, watching you, tasting your gestures... the way your lips move...

the dream of lenses

He plucked the contacts out of his eyes and set them on a tiny metal tray. The butler carried the tray to a corner of the room and dropped each contact into a glass retort filled with iridescent liquid

that boiled and spat, filling the air with rainbows of steam. When the butler handed him back the tray, he picked up the lenses one at a time and reinserted them. He domed an eyelid down over each lens and he felt it as it sizzled and melted there. He waited, breathless, as these lens joined the others that were layered across the surface of each eyeball. The knowledge absorbed by each set was accumulating and there were always surprises each time he performed the procedure. Patterns moved in in front of him when he opened his eyes. All colors were there as though every animal had given birth while his head had been turned and every birth had been a color instead of a baby. He wanted to see his sister's face and he searched for her through the years of lenses that he'd melted to his corneas. He could hear her speaking to him...

"You are my brother. I feel that. What does that mean? What should I do? What you told me is that I am part of the blood that races inside of you. How can I lose you to the anger and dust and noise that we live inside of everyday, to the cold and hunger that I've lived with for so long? How can I possibly love you the way that I do without my heart shattering? I see you from a distance. You are pure to me and absolute. The curve of your nose. Your skin's dark, faintly yellow color. The polish of your bones - polished smooth by the muscles wrapped around them as tightly as a regiment or a city of lovers. You're convexed to me and I believe that I could read your heart as easily as I could read the letters on a page. I would be another creature if I were near you."

Her voice disappeared. He felt the new set of lenses melding with the others as he stared at his well-tended fire and cried.

lilah

Hand over her belly, she was always hungry and she felt something growing in there, something that was hungrier than she was. There was a spool of light that followed her wherever she went and as it spun in the air, it hummed. She knew that it was trying to speak. She wanted to hear it and understand it but she also wanted

it to go away. She knew that it had been inside her. What she remembered as she walked and held her belly close to her was a dream that she'd had and in the dream the spool, was rolling across her belly and her breasts over and over as though they were dough. When she woke up, blood covered her thighs and clotted in her pubic hair. She had for days felt a sad ache between her legs and soon after that the spool began following her around the city. It followed her like a dog and she felt it guiding her steps even though she didn't understand it. It went inside her now whenever she slept and when it did, she felt it spinning and then thrusting out and then in and then spinning again. She felt full when she dreamed but not happy. She found things in garbage cans to eat and she walked and walked each day until she was exhausted. One day she discovered that a peacock was following her too. The bird was constantly spreading its tail against the burning sky and piercing the hot still air with a

shriek that made her skin draw tight. The bird didn't look like any of the pictures that she'd seen of peacocks, its colors were wrong. Its feathers were pale citrusy yellow and the tail was painted with pink disks each surrounded with a dark corona. They moved through the city. The bird kept up with her no matter how quickly she moved. She thought that the bird's presence was freeing her in some uncomfortable way. One night she dreamed that she was watching a fraying rope, attached to a ship at one end and an anchor to the other, finally pull apart and give over to the air. Her mind floated ten feet above her head tethered to a slender string that could break at any moment. It was the peacock that brought all this about and she knew too that the peacock waited until she was sleeping and then placed himself on top of her. While she slept, she could feel a glowing hot rod enter her body. It felt like a piece of melting plastic and she could hear the peacock screaming. She struggled but she could never wake up because when she slept now it was a heavy sleep that felt like being under miles of salt water. She knew that she dreamed as she slept, but of what? Not of the peacock...maybe of food and the hungry thing that was growing inside of her that slept and dreamed too.

Translate the pink air. I heard you saying a prayer on Tuesday and I felt safe until I, realizing that time didn't fly, understood that the words you were saying would only hang in the air for a moment and then you would have it all to do over again. There are songs I've seen that have filled me with lavender passion. It isn't like that - oh no. I have nothing that I've hidden inside a dusty drawer. It's just that when I take the wafer on my tongue I can feel the lavender enter me. I can smell it mixed with the smell of roses - like the smell of my dead mother's body. Blood flows through me slowly and I know that I could tell you my secrets in words ringed with willow, leaves, something green with a bitter flavor when chewed and swallowed. Poison is gone from my mind now and the tiny square of paper melts on my heated tongue, my pink tongue calling a farewell as it slides down my throat into a rippling golden river that tickles my skin and makes my eyes like sapphires. Flowers spring from my mouth and into the air dropping colored petals as they fly up, the petals becoming butterflies as they drift down, insects melting in the air and striping it like paint on paper. I opened my mouth to you. When I open my vein to you, I can speak the language that filters in staticed and wary, from above the clouds. I can do this. I can stand naked beneath the open sky with reddened palms raised up...feeling blood between my legs from the cuts, feeling rain hammer into the pores of my skin. My mouth is filled with water and I'm waiting for something else, a ribbon of red for my hair, for my neck...a kiss from you across my eyes.

the dream of salt water

The skin missed sadness, felt the loss of it because it was so rough now. What it clothed was a lizard and the lizard didn't mind its loneliness. What it thought about was the ocean.

"Salt water," it said aloud. The lizard dug its claws into the carpet and became a picture in a book. It was something different from where it lived and it knew this very well.

barbara

Her room, was small and completely bare except for a pile of blankets mounded in a corner, stubs of candles stuck into bottles that sat like guards stationed across the floor, and a stack of books ranged against a wall. There was one window that opened a vision to her of the city forty stories below. The other windows were missing their glass and she had boarded them over. She wondered at how she had come to be there and how long it would be before the building crumbled and fell like so many others. She remembered sleeping in a bed and clothes that smelled like soap and fresh air. She remembered hearing a voice inside the noises that surrounded all of them. She wanted to keep the voice clean so she found the room inside the skyscraper and she had locked herself in. She looked out the window for hours. Kudzu vines covered that side of the building

and she felt suspended between two distinct places, each one an alien landscape and yet as much her home as any place had ever

been. The room was cold and she didn't mind being cold, but one day, the air in the room frightened her - quivering around her like invisible skin. She sat with her back wedged into a corner. She saw thick yellow light bleed out of the air in front of her and contract into a globe that bobbed up and down moving closer as she looked at it. The globe hovered fifteen inches from where she crouched and formed tentacles that reached for her, traveled through her clothes and caressed her face making it feel like kisses. Her clothes fell off of her body and the light felt warm against her chilled skin. The light-tentacle wiggled through the spaces between her arms and moved across the ribs as though they were strings. It bit her neck and the rim of her collarbone. It brushed against her lips and across her tightened nipples. It moved down and between her legs, pushing up against her there, folding into her and blowing across her. She slid along the wall and stretched on the floor feeling the light filling the forgotten well of her skin. She floated like a water plant lost in dreaming and she knew the moment like she knew her own breath. The light twisted out of her and drifted again to the center of the room leaving her on the floor, hypnotized and transparent. She stared at the light as it swirled around an axis changing color from gold to pink to gold again, finally taking shape as an egg the size of her head. The egg settled gently to the floor and she watched as a crack jagged down from the tip and the egg swung open as though it were hinged. Inside was a heart beating against a sheath of fire. She knew that this must be her own heart translated to the floor of the

small cold room, waiting there for a new skin to clothe it. She picked up a nail lying beside her and cradled it in her hand.

Translate - this mouth that is open, begging and beckoning, full and red. It carries a tongue inside it that makes a flickering motion

telling you to go up the steps and see where the angels live. The steps are old wood, worn down in the center, expelling dust each time a foot presses down. There are fifty-five steps and no rail to clutch. Shredded walls enclose the stairs and these are yellow displaying a faded pattern of red umbrellas floating down through blue clouds. At the top, you see a large room. The bare wooden floor is the same brown as the stairs, like a skin traveling up from the street. Dust motes crowd the air making patterns as they dance in the light that comes through the large windows. There is nothing but this at first. Then, angel's voices start filling the air. The voices chatter - then become a steady stream of sounds that have the shape of words and the rhythm of sentences. Strings of fine patterns hang in the air and then songs fill the empty room making the chilly air hot so that it quivers against the walls and sends the dust motes gusting in colors down the stairs and into the street where they enter each body and show it an unknown life, a dream that it had loved and forgotten, a visitor that takes it far away and makes it happy.

the dream of red dresses

It begins with a paper cut at the corner of your mouth.

hal

He stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk and as he looked down at his flailing feet, he saw ants crawling over the carcass of an earthworm and carrying it off in neat ant-sized chunks. Bits of the worm decorated his path as he walked along, muttering to himself and to the air that was already filled with the noise of traffic. He passed the open gates of an old park and he remembered a museum there filled with paintings and bones. A good place to sleep - warm and dry. His pants and shirt were dripping from the rain, the sun that appeared after the rain stopped had created a clear, intense pain gestating now like a fetal creature in the space between his brows. He passed through the open gates and saw through his pain darkened eyes a motion in the bushes lining the entrance to the park. He stalked the movement, head first, feeling quite suddenly sad and heavy as though he was going to see an old lover or a friend's deathbed. What he found as he turned the corner was a little girl standing in front of a hedge. She was seven or eight and

wore a black long-sleeved leotard. Someone had tied three ribbons around her chubby waist - a red one, a black one, and a lavender one. A large red rose sat at the top of her head looking as though it had been rooted there to grow. Her hair was shiny and straight - black and cut in bangs across her forehead. Her skin was brown, sleek as new paper in the sunlight. A small pink mouth and thin nostrils quivered as he approached...to do what? Ask her where her mother was? To eat her? and leave her bones to dry? He held his hands out to her not understanding his gesture. Dark lashes, rooted and violent, fringed her shining eyes - black as stones. She held a small hand up to him as he came close.

"You can kiss me," she said. Her voice was high and thin as any child's but strange to him as though she was speaking through liquid. He was frightened and sad at once but he bent at the waist and, holding her hand by the fingertips, pressed his leaf-dry lips to the cool surface. Her smell - a smell like gardenias - made him dizzy. He fell to the ground. Light swirled in front of him forming patterns, sparkling blocks of color that shifted into solid objects and then faded. He saw staircases miles long that disappeared into the clouds. He saw radiant wheels that sliced through the air. The little girl floated up in front of him and turned into a glowing creature with wings circling around one giant eye. He felt in love, hushed and blinded by the pain that entering his head like a large spike driven into the top of his skull. As each blow descended, another flash of light entered his eyes and traveled out again altering the strange new landscape that cradled him.

....................................................................

Immaculate rose in a ribbon of lavender. It sees the world through an eye stationed at the very center, shifting the shiny-balled part of it from side to side, watching you as you slide down the stairs hypnotized by the battery of your wishes. You 'desire' and you wonder what to believe of that plain and transparent word. "But it isn't !" you cry out loud three days later. That word is opaque and as ornate as a jewel that belongs in a Byzantine court surrounded by intrigue and brilliant fabric and not in the bare monk's cell of your room. When did you ever have a use for that word and why, for that matter, did it choose to visit you?

the dream of the cave

It's smooth at first. It's like moving through a giant mouth; the walls feel wet and slick like teeth. The ground is slightly damp and it sinks squirting a bit of fluid each time a foot presses down. There's a smell like peat and fleshy too... like a body is hidden here beneath a mound of dead leaves. The walls become elastic, stretching out as the hands push against them. Feet follow hands. It's utterly dark here. There's nothing to show the eyes what waits ahead.

And you fall down. You pitch face down in the soft pungent floor of this place. You get up. You are required to keep moving and you understand that contract because you've come in and you know there's only one way out. You pull up and find the wall again but the surface has given way to something rough, like sandpaper. You rub your palm hard against it and you feel it grate your nerve. You think how odd it is that you can't see anything. You wonder if you might begin to hallucinate the glitter of sandpaper or the faint traces of your breath in the cold air. You feel the walls of the cave bellowing in and out and you cling to the breathing wall convinced that there's a drop-off somewhere, a hole marked for you. Then my feet lift off soil and come down on metal and as I slide down I smell the sharp odor of heated steel. The metal is wet. My skin is wet and I slide down quickly, landing in a pile of feathers. The shafts stab me and I'm afraid that I'll drown with a feather bouquet sticking out of my mouth. I find the wall and feel skin. It's a hand reaching to help me climb out. I can feel the fingernails and the hot palm and the thick wrist that announces and arm. The arm is limp - like a rope. I climb the wall, pressing my heels into soft skin, and reaching the end of the arm at last - it seems longer than most arms that I've known - I pull myself up into a small room lined with fur. I crawl in here because the fur smells like flowers and other things that I love and then I drop suddenly into another tunnel.

And she lands in a pool of something wet and deep. It's thick. It is hot and it smells like copper.

catherine

Ten years ago she had gone to sleep and woken up without a penis. She didn't know how this had happened but it had and she didn't worry about it. She just started wearing women's clothes as part of her layers. She was glad that it had happened. It was like having a wish that she'd forgotten about come true. What puzzled her now was the ridge of skin that ringed the third finger of her right hand. At first, the skin was puffy and slightly red at the edges. She watched it as she sat against the wall of the ruined bank building getting up to piss or to look for food close by. Then the skin cooled and shrank circling her finger like a loose collar. She discovered that she could move the skin up and down It was exactly like the skin that had draped the penis she'd had lost years ago, but what could this mean? It was a sign of favor, she decided, blushing at the thought. She fell asleep, explosions thundering in the distance, and she dreamed that she was squeezing green liquid from a woman's breast into a paper cup. She lifted the cup to her mouth and, gagging on the smell, drank the warm, lively fluid She woke up sweating, brushed concrete dust off her clothes and fell back to sleep. She thought that she was sleeping. Her life had taught her never to be sure. She saw a man siting in front of her. His face was covered with luminous paint, his features masked in silver-white, his copper- gold hair forming an aureole around his strange head. He was naked to the waist and at first she thought that he had no nipples, but then

she saw that the places where the nipples would usually be were covered with small circular patches and these were overlaid with a hatchwork of tape and all of this was sealed with the shining paint. His body glowed, saturated with light and she felt afraid of him. Looking at him was like looking into a mirror at night or at a picture of herself propped up in a coffin after she had died. He held a green army blanket around his waist.

"Come here," he said.

She did and he grabbed her right wrist and staring at her through eyes that glared from the mask of his face, a shocking permanent blue like wet dye threatening to bleed. His voice was shaking and so soft that she had to lean over to hear what he said. He grasped the skin ring on her finger and pulled it up until it stretched almost to the finger's tip. Then he let go of it and it settled back to its home at the base.

"You've created yourself for me," he said. "You have made yourself just for me and this is my gift to you."

He twisted the skin- ring. It hurt her and she suddenly understood how pain was always translated inside her.

"You are joined to me forever," he said. "You are melted, sewn, welded, grafted, nailed, glued, tied, taped, caulked, knitted to me forever."

She was frightened and she tried to wake up but she couldn't and she felt herself falling into a deeper sleep and her heart felt like an open mouth. She knew that now he only needed to put his hand

into her and she would become a clay pot filled with water, growing softer every moment. She was terrified that this would happen and it did. He put his hand inside her and she felt suspended for hours ... pivoting on a radiant axis that sent light and pain shooting through her over and over again. When she opened her waking eyes, she saw the sun high above and her body was wet underneath the army blanket that rested on top of her in the air that had become as hot and as humid as an orchid's home.

Immaculate, you sit on the floor and feel the dust drift over you. You stare at the inside of your arm at the place where the needle slid out...a red badge drying there and hurting you in a way that you aren't used to yet. But it isn't real pain that you feel. It's something that hides inside of real pain. The syringe becomes a golden tube. A jewel. There's a perfect cylinder of love inside you that only needs to be tapped open like an egg to spill out and announce its presence. It will do this by making your eyes vanish

and causing lights to come out of the sockets in bright beams. It will form eruptions across the surface of your body that will break like blisters displaying an tiny jewel inside each well of skin. It will set your hair on fire. You are bending like a green branch until your cheek rests on the floor and you breath in dust and the old carapaces of insects. The air is filled with shimmering gold that sifts and drifts over you and moves into your pores like oil.

the dream of the apple

"You want to taste it," the voice told her. "You want to know what it would be like to hold it in your mouth." She was falling in love with the apple and she didn't know if the voice was coming from the apple or outside of it. She thought about the apple's secret heart ...if she opened it with a knife, cut the flesh through the middle with a sharp blade but she wouldn't do this. She couldn't bear to hear the apple go silent in the hard elements and noise of the world. If the apple stayed whole then its heart spoke only to her. If she ate the apple, would its voice come out of her mouth instead? Would chewing destroy its sound? The delicate green skin spoke to her too and the language wasn't one that she understood but she knew that if she carried the apple with her she might find her heart beating in a rhythm that flowed with all the things that the apple told her. She decided not to eat the apple. She would keep it with her until it turned old from the inside out, until the flesh rimming the peel softened and caused the peel to dip in; until the flesh gave off a sweet smell like gas was drifting off the changing surface; until it became shriveled and dry. She would be with the apple that long.

anna

What you want. What you really want. A small cell. The room was a cell, a cell apart from others. She thought of it as her own

separate box, but it was only this from the inside. It was one of many boxes stacked together. The brothel was a fifty story hive - the correct size for a city like this one. She knew that everything outside of her own walls was a desert.

She kept a small fire burning on a platform built with tile at the center of the room. Mostly, she stared at this and rocked back and forth or walked toward a wall, turned and walked to another counting each step as she went until she became tired. Food appeared each day on a plastic tray resting inside a drawer that popped out of the gray metal door and then, emptied of its contents, nestled seamlessly back into place. The tray always held a flower displayed in a little plastic vase. She collected the flowers in a corner where they dried up and mixed their withered petals together, forming a riotous and darkening rainbow that would explode if a breeze ever entered the room. But there weren't any windows. She ate the small piece of bread on the tray - a bagel, or a slice of sourdough or a croissant and she drank the bottle of water. She always left the rest. There was a bed in one corner of the room that was dressed in graying sheets printed with a fading pattern of pink ballet slippers. She lay on the bed many hours willing herself not to sleep although she was tired all the time. She was tired in the deep heart of her bones. She had visitors while she lay there. The customers entered with a key which they rented from the brothel owners. When they left, they locked the door behind them. She waited for them wishing through her fevered cells that they would never arrive. They were small and leathery with pinched eyes and quick rasping breath. They smelled like paper money that had been handled over and over again. She surfaced from her fevers now and then to find her skin marked with fading bruises and small scratches. She carried dim memories of customers promising her things...a room with a window, clothes, a trip outdoors, but she slipped quickly back down into her own heated dreams. Then there was a time when no one came at all and the tray with the flower and the food stopped coming too. During that time she lay on the bed sweating and empty and marked the days by singing. She was happy and sometimes she felt that parts of her body was floating near the ceiling. One day, the tray arrived again. She crawled to the tray, plucked the red rose from the vase and pulling her body to the corner of the room, she put the rose gently down on the crackling cups of old color that rustled beneath her fingers. When she twisted back around, she saw an angel standing in the center of the room. Light pooled at its feet and she knew that it must be an angel, but then she knew in the next moment that it must be a demon. What was it? It was looking at her and smiling. She knew that it had the face of a dead girl because it looked like the girl she had loved before she had come to this place. The skin on the face was glowing in the dim light and it seemed too pale to wrap anything living. The hair was dark and melted out into the shadows. The dead girl wore a dress made of peacock feathers - gigantic ones that shimmered painfully. She got up and went to the dead girl and touched her waist. She kissed the dead girl. The dead girl took her hand and made her lie down, pushing her shoulders back and holding her against the thin mattress. She felt as though she were drowning...being drowned by her own beloved...by the remote face that she stared up into.

And then, she was outside in a place where she had never been, wearing clothes again and hungry because there wasn't any bread that she didn't have to beg for. She held the memory of her cells inside her and when she spoke to the crowds passing by it was this memory that she spoke from. Her forehead was cool. She slept when she could.

Immaculate - I face you inside my heart like an unforgiven sin but I require you like air. You are an anchor to my days. My love spurts and glows and flies above my head at night making it impossible to sleep. I feel my love's violence and I want to smash it to purple fragments but then I remember the lavender ribbon that I wore around my head when I was sixteen and terrified of time. The room that I sit in to love you is as bare as a bone - white and elusive to me at its corners. Its one narrow window frames the sun each morning. I know that you're here. I feel clean and empty. When I look at my hand, I see a gold halo around it and I believe that if I lived with mirrors I would see that my face had changed too. Everyday at sunset a yellow daisy - no a purple orchid - no a branch of willow appears on my bed... a gift from you. My heart opens out to you and closes around you and then opens again. This room vibrates

with your presence. I absorb you here and this is why I never leave. If I did go out, would I see your face again someday? I want to see your face again.

.....................................................................

...I've kissed your name three thousand times.

dream

A muddy river turned golden in the sunset. The sky changed color from blue to orange and the air smelled like cloves, opened fruit and crushed flowers.

angela

She put her hands against the hole in the sky and pushed. The blue stained her hands and then the rest of her skin as she went up into the sky and disappeared looking, to an unanchored pair of eyes, as though she were diving into a huge vat of paint, leaving behind her a surface as smooth as paper.