ROSÉ & ROAD SIGNS
Tegan Beard
my dreams transcend me,
an out of body experiment in silence,
like tipping one head against the bus window
in order to look mysterious to someone you’ve never met.
needless to say, i never remember these soap bubble
faces as they float by.
last night, i caught hold of one by its tail,
a ball of dryer lint, a firestarter, and worried it open
below the light of my mother’s lamp.
my belly full of roses.
my mind snowed in.
i fragment this dust bunny, sifting
gold out of dirt, out of fog, into fog.
fog presses urgency into my hand and lets out a ribbit.
fog aches to speak but its mouth is filled with cotton.
fog so bloom-ed i can’t see the road signs you hold up. slow, love, that one says,
and then it’s all a haze.
i swear, i’m trying, don’t you know that by now,
every day i tip my head against that windowpane,
every night the fog drifts someone into my bed,
sometimes you,
my slow love, your breathing swollen in my ear ––
sometimes not.
sometimes foreign hands, foreign tongues,
dryer lint
ablaze.