Again that trick of strapping the sunset on her back. Though even she tried to look away and into a green bottle. Found a ship and sailed off, her dolls packed up in their boxes, eyes-lidded, breathing under the bed. I heard stories; how she carried an entire city in her ear, how she swallowed a nursery rhyme and it still kicks inside her belly. Like her, the charcoal sketches I drew of her ran whenever I wept. I named them after our arguments: that inkblot of a lip is Fucked Up on the Parking Garage Roof, the shadow crumpling in on itself is Falling in Love w/ Your Mother if Only for a Moment. On the afternoon she returned I was working on one piece, shredding up a white canvas with a penknife, titled Confessing w/ a Brick and a Window. She stepped onto the porch, but before she could speak I crawled into the opera of her eye, pulling the lid over me like a curtain. A dim heat bearing down. A green, drunk halo. Hum.