See,
there's a snail inside my head
and i know it because of the slime dripping
out of my nose, pouring from my eyes
like someone left the drinking fountain on
ooze rolling off my tongue
plopping into my lap, sticky like
fly paper with all those bodies hanging
off it, ooze trailing down to the desk
and laced between my fingers-
webbing thick as sleep, heavy
as a quilt in the wintertime, the way everything
slows down
and the snails let themselves in
to tuck along the mantle, on the bedframe,
wriggling into your mouth at night
and you'll know because you wake up with the slime
smeared onto your pillow-
i already told you, it's in my head
setting the dinner table between my ears
for a family of five
waiting for spring to come.
I did five-hundred and seventy six stitches of crochet
today. there's a plushie staring at me now and its face
is made of dinosaur corpses and they won't stop looking at me
and wondering what their children turned into.
the dinosaurs outside scream every morning
and their heads bob around when they strut over the lawn;
my head doesn't bob but my hands flap and settle at my chest
and i guess there's some dinosaur in me too
like how people say we're made of stars
but better. tell a kid they're an iguanodon's cousin
and they'll spend all day shoving leaves in their mouth;
stars are so far away but lizards are the sort of thing
that stick in your head until you can feel the scales
and something inside you twisting, waiting for the chance
to shuck aside words and milk and fur,
to be something
that remembers what mark it left on life
the sort of animality only imagination can offer up
All the yarn left over
is sprawled across the floor like intestines,
stained with the colors you see when you hold skittles too long
in the summer and they bleed out in your hands
killing a rainbow, it doesn't just lick off,
you'll be mottled with it for days
until the skin sheds off somewhere;
there's probably skittles in the carpet somewhere now
encapsulated in the skin my body didn't want anymore
still the color of chubby plastic dinosaurs
like the ones i had as a kid
you know the sort, the ones that were more the idea
of dinosaurs than anything that ever lived
they've got feathers now, more bird than lizard
and now i know i grew up on the fantasy of animals
but it's flesh and blood i take into my hands-
I spent two years with a box of snails in my room
that i chucked leftover basil and carrots into sometimes
and it was always gone by morning; the box was made
from the stuff you find in the desert after a lightning strike
and that stuff stains too, not like skittles
but like the mud you can haul out of the riverbed
in your fists, the sort that's more water than dirt
and it drips like it. sometimes there's things wriggling
around in your fingers, tadpoles if you're lucky,
leeches if you're not
but i always liked the snails. people say
they're not supposed to be there in the river,
we're better off if they're broken open
on the riverside, the way people talk about monsters
and people that they wish were someone else
and i see the snails with their homes cracked open
on their backs and their pulpy little bodies struggling
to go somewhere dark and quiet
maybe they know what's coming and want a minute of peace
before packing up to go
They've carried their homes on their backs so long
that they're stained too, like the mud but
more visceral, flecks of spinach and pus mixed in
something inside me wants to pick up my house
and jam it into my back so the corners skewer into me
and my skin burrows into the walls until
there are no more lines
but then i think of the riverside with all the bodies
of those who couldn't live without a house on their backs
and i think
maybe
i'll crochet a snail tonight
and keep it in a box to give away when i go
back to the stardust my body's loaned from.