Limbo

by Abhinav

Jeremy Bishop

After Richard Siken

In this dream we drag the moon out of the lake and swallow the leftovers as if they’ll save us. You tell me this isn’t reasonable — the landscape tilts but the dream goes on. The skyline curls into your clavicle and swords clang in the background. The loudspeaker yells the lottery numbers and turns out that everyone’s lost. The horses have burnt the stables down and all the bets are off. There’s smoke everywhere but it hasn’t reached us yet. So you claw into my throat an aperture the shape of your name. Our bodies a splash of light and truncated space. We know we have run out of fuel and there is nothing left to believe in. You clutch my skull and tell me to open my mouth like I mean it. And it’s a dream so we’re safe until gravity does us part. Or water. Snap out of it and stay here — could be a bathtub, could be the ocean, could be the patch of flesh where our mouths converge. We’re together so it solves space. But there’s always time and the landscape tilting. The future like a stampede roaring hungry on its haunches. The seagulls crashing into the horizon’s mouth where the wave dips and all light goes nil. Where it howls its coarse throat ballad of how nothing is ever good enough. That the swallow is all it has ever known — beneath word beneath thought, like a curve of instinct etched in the vein. Its gullet a grave of torched out illusions — gnawing and nagging for more, for more. And yet the seagulls keep slitting the wind’s furor. You take your chances, lick the dice and watch it roll. And I keep kissing your neck with the landscape bent on betraying us — then the dream melting into a wound of light.

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Abhinav is a graduate student residing in Delhi. His work has appeared in The Deadlands Magazine, The Remnant Archive, Gulmohar Quarterly, among other forums.