YOU LIVE IN THE PINK HOUSE
And the dishes all have flowers on them. You listen to Silver Springs again and again. It falls like a spell over everything.
There is a rabbit curled up on your pink velvet armchair. When you recline, it is on your lap. You feed it lettuce and it purrs.
In the clawfoot tub, you flex your toes. You feed the swans that stick their necks in through the hole on the screen inside the window while you bathe. Their beaks are orange and they palpate.
Your upstairs neighbor is a kind of shrub. Downstairs there are mulberries, gathered on a bush. They don't make much noise. They smoke lavender on the balcony.
In the morning it smells like pollen near the end of its life, when it gets all red and powdery and ready to be eaten.
You're sitting on the kitchen counter. Your clothes are drying in the dryer which is right next to the sink. Everything is shaking and your hands look like epiphany.
You live two feet from this lookout place where at a certain time of a day, you can actually touch the sun while it sets.
You have so many plants on your windowsill and all of them weep happily. There is a kind of feeling like anything can happen. But actually that's not right. It's like anything can not happen.
It's like the stars can all align themselves, but they won't. They'll just take little naps. The soil will not drain itself but wonder what the ground is for.
Some of the swans google how to rid themselves of swan cellulite. The swans are like celebrities: displayed and insecure.
There should be a rule against how everyone you love keeps getting older. In the pink house, there are black floors. You put a pink rug over them.
You wake up every morning with an arm around your waist. Or a gesture toward an arm. Or a kind of winded sigh that's yours, elbowing from your mouth in the shape of an arm.
And the thin fog never passes. It's just living all around you. It just takes you like an atom and it walks you to the door.
DREAM MEAL
In a dream I ate fish heads, bobbing, yellow-eyed. I lapped pureed spinach out of a bowl. I sat cross-legged in a yellow room. Yellow blinds and yellow pearls, soft around my neck. There were flies in the room. They crawled on the floor, too weak to spell their wings. I ate the fish eyes. They were all pearled, they were all steamed, they were all so fresh I spelled my lashes. They floated off, unfamished. The flies looked at me, jealous. I cupped them in my palms. They spelled into small slices of cherry pie. Afraid to eat the slices, I put them in my pocket. My pocket glowed, like a window left on in a home.
Erika Walsh is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Alabama and co-founding editor of A Velvet Giant, a genreless literary journal. Erika's creative writing has been featured in Hotel Amerika, Booth, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Peach Mag, Juked, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from Sundress Academy of the Arts and Art Farm Nebraska, as well as a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. Find more here.