last night, I dreamt of a jungle gym in my living room, but instead of being children, we were adults trying to fit back into the smaller parts of ourselves. somewhere in the back of the kitchen, I caught you wiping pumpkin pie off your chin, crust crumbling onto your collar. you caught me licking all the icing off your little brother’s chocolate cake. we were nonsensical and ferocious, the way we abandoned taste, like the bright-skinned lobsters running in circles in the corner. your forearm was a gust of wind around my neck’s fettered sails, and I thought about loving you as if it were a fact I could recall for certain, or as if I were not a pile of coiled cords beckoning a gentle unraveling. I awoke thinking, even in sleep, under the cool caress of my subconscious, my flesh is still a slave to cravings that snap off my back and echo in rooms full and bursting.
Chirayu Trivedi