Dauphin

I watch a pigeon fly into a live poultry market on 3rd. Its double doors wide, a maw; the pigeon hovers through its gray excesses, wings spread fully before landing. I say I’ve had no greater experience than this pomegranate. This makes you jealous. And I want to know why, but I am sleepy. This hallway is a sleepy thing, the color of light in heat whose width we share. Bent, your bare breast, it grazes my cheek and I feel that you are somewhere like a pomegranate. It narrows further, still the color of opiate. I say I am sorry for being here. I say I am sorry because I thought this accidentally. Like thread pulled through the bones of my ear. Your nipple grazing my right cheek. I want to know why I feel this in my chest, but I am sleepy and you are only passing. Over the garage we perched in our palms and elbows on sill, and watch a Japanese gentleman injecting ketamine. What glorious hair and how he falls deep. In a beach chair. We did not know we were still children. It follows that I did not know when I became an adult. Somewhere along you walk naked to the bathroom and say so as though it was a fact. I walk behind you and slip into the runnels of your stretched skin. A sticky sweet blood from my nose. I wake up feeling warm. My grandmother’s house is warm. The light is yellow. Everything smells of a parsnip sweetened chicken soup. She hands me a brown bag. I can see in her iris my reflection, the well fed dauphin. I didn’t ask for this, I say.

Andrew E. Colarusso is the Editor-in-Chief of the Broome Street Review. Only the planets equal his rapacity/so small in the blue day of maturity.