This is the pretend-dream,

where I am teaching you to swim,

and your body and my body

remember their names in the water.

We pull them from the lake

where they’ve been drowning,

covered in salt, covered in

sweat and horsetails.

Maybe the roof is on fire. Maybe it rains.

Maybe the fawns watch our movements

through the trees and we take the back

path in the woods to kiss their eyelids,

and then become something

better than what we are now,

something different

I forget how the rest should go,

anyhow it doesn’t matter because

here we are at the pretend-dream,

where I pretend-love you,

and we are so in-love

and we are happy,

even when your arms sprawl the table, and you

tell me how you’d like to die losing breath at the

bottom of the lake. Even when you tell me

you’ve been practicing in the bathtub,

that there’s a boy down the road,

and if there isn’t there might as well be, that

that boy’s at his own table, and he’s got a gun,

and it’s cold in his room when the lights turn out

You say he’s thinking about flying but

let us not think of that now.

What are the good parts I remember

Ah, this is the part where you’ve gotten

that promotion. Great, baby, give me kisses.

This is the part when your song

plays on the radio, simple and

terrible, and this is when we stomp craters

into the linoleum, and are empty as shadows.

You go here and I go there.

Here is your mouth and there is mine.

Hello, sunshine

I’ve missed you

We stretch out our arms like children

Hello

How beautiful.

We say our names until I forget myself,

this is how I am in debt to you

This is the belly we live under

This is where we are alive,

alive

alive

But how did we manage to make it out?

shhh. We haven’t yet. We’re still sleeping.

Here is how I imagine it, I say,

I say, here is the real dream:

I take all this love and call it an inconvenience, and the boy

wastes himself across the brick walls like a constellation

Your mouth full of water,

filled with water,

filling with water

in a coughing fit

you are drowning,

you are floating face-down in the lake

and I go home to close the windows.

Oh, I ruined it again

The real things

The real things