Standing inside my kitchen I start
pulling the damaged
drawer by the clean,
yellow sink and thinking
of people; I withdraw
the cardboard box of tinfoil
I bought yesterday; my experience
is upside down. The sharp and jagged
fangs fastened to its lower lip have mangled
my fingers so many times I can’t count the scars
and sore scabs staining my skin. I set the cardboard
casing on the counter and fold the top back and fixate
on the cold, metallic cylinder, and that familiar warmth
from it blossoms and buzzes. I drag the sheet of metal-tongue
out of the box and begin to layer it around my midsection,
chest, hands and feet; the crunching of the metal-sheet
tongue sounds like dead bubble wrap. It terrifies
me that it doesn’t cover all the parts of me; all the parts
of me unprotected hum cacophonous sobs; I need more, but I can’t bear
going to the grocery store: the cars in the parking lot and the people
in the aisles always make my skin start to shake, and the wrinkles
of the foil repetitively rattle like the tail of a rattlesnake.
Running the faucet and filling a glass full I drink
until it’s half-empty; I can taste old chlorine,
and my palms begin to froth and puke salt;
I’ll soon feel safe once I buy some more tinfoil.
As I make my way to the grocery store, gnarled,
old tree branches grasp for me like starved vampire bats eagerly
draining the blood of the purple impurities that bleed out of my panicked
breath and breathe it in; and the creases of the tinfoil are pooling with cooling sweat.
Walking upside down down the wrong side of the sidewalk, torrid with the shivering wind,
I form fences out of my fingers and peer through the slits as I press both sets of prints
to my forehead, and their horrid, dry skin smells like searing cigarettes; the night sky
and my pupils are dark dungeons with little-light windows that are too bright
for staring at; staring at a white clearness for too long can change cloudless
stars into lost, breathless waves of air that will never wash the crevices
of my lonely lungs. Eyeballing the parked cars and tall buildings
I step passed their strange windows that are too dark
and blotched to spot any sign of change inside.
A lying cat licking its fur on the curb of the street
jolts at the full, flat sound of my thin, tin armor;
it runs and dives under a hole-filled wooden fence and hides.
A skeleton-engine with a warped, amorphous shadow behind its wheel
lets out a guttural belch from the depths of its stomach, and its eyeballs
blind me in a staring-contest. My fidgeting fingers close over my eyelids
so my bare retinas can recover from the trauma caused by the blare.
Its rust-like glass rattles to the bottom of the driver’s window
frame, and hearing its wheels turning in a half-circle in the gravel
and dirt persuades me to caution my pace; the sight of the shadow
at the end of the street where I need to turn left to the store
is causing my heart to scream and beg, and the shivering bones
in my rib cage are filled with ancient, dead snow.
A form of death is snarling close to me with a faceless
and nameless driver. As I turn left into a darkness, the tires
of the roaring motor spit out pebbles from the pressure
of the cracked tread and the heavy blackness of an abyss;
the rubber spins and peels its rotten skin off the raw, ash-colored
pavement. The background sounds rage rapidly, and there’s no mirage
of hope. Its thunder-and-lightening rumble spears the neighborhood
and my good eardrum. My adrenal glands spike from the banshee-
cries growing closer, and my dizzy legs turn into timid rabbits
with widened eyes. The blackened frame of the apocalyptic
car is getting bigger by every slow second, and my tinfoil
is shedding piece by piece leaving in the desolate
street a failure to save the fragments of my sacred
sanity from something similar to a silhouette
in a nightmare; a soulless, pale creature.
Through backyards, stumbling over rusty
lawnmowers and old memories, fence
after fence, my sprinting and hurdling fade
away the guttural motor firing its venomous
sound. Entering the grocery store parking lot
I notice that there are only empty plastic
bags floating in staccato movements
with the grace of drunk ghosts.
The light illuminating the white lines
and pavement have a horror-film-feel,
and the smell of dead oranges and oatmeal
bloat the air with an ethereal, thin thickness
like dead stars in the belly of a dying universe.
The sliding doors are locked open,
and I enter the store slowly with no tinfoil
to protect me from my anxiety. The flickering
fluorescent lights snap on and off fast
like flashes from a continuous camera
and reminds me of future-memories
of being examined by scary, dead animals
with fingernails and terrible haircuts
that hang me up by my brittle ankles
and drop me from the tops of black
skyscrapers in a place of opulent cages
and candy-cyanide. Searching the aisles
there are no workers or customers to face;
and there is no tinfoil to be found. Suspended
in the sky and looking at the upside-down-floor above,
the blood rushing to my head and making it heavy
with oxygen and spider eggs that give birth
to all the things inside my fragile, alabaster
skull (except hope), I rub the glass lenses
of my coated corneas; they are blotched, and mucus
from my nostrils stream into the corners of my eyes
and blend with my tears. I reach for a tinfoil balloon
drifting on by hoping this mirage will soon stop.
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