Eurydice in Another Life

Dinner guests. An early gloaming. O says the plum cake is burnt. I did my best. Purple-stained fingers beneath the table, tingling like frostbite. A fire roars. I am cold. He wants to sing for everyone in the den. I want to say We’re tired of your voice—how about charades? but I don’t give in to impulse. We are living together. We are living. I look out the window as I do the dishes, looking past my reflection to the oblivion of our yard. Vega’s bright presence mars the almost perfect dark. O has grown tired of tending the oak tree we planted. I have grown so tired. We need new sponges. I make a list. I used to like that. I remember once compiling the titles of all his songs, piecing them into story. I wanted them to tell our story, but it was all wrong, ringing with an unidentifiable grief, an ellipsis. After that, I was embarrassed. I took to plucking harshly at the strings of his lyre when he left it out, tinny and discordant. I liked those sounds best, wanting no more sweetness, a horse spitting out its sugar cube. At night now I dream only sounds: the thrum of bees, the trickle-hiss of a great black river, the soft percussion of a rattlesnake, the invasion of someone else’s breathing beside me. I wake and say, Turn over. Look at me. How to explain my anger when he listens.

Echo

Listen. I loved a boy who loved only his words in my mouth. He said, I dreamt that I drowned, that the sea rose to capture everything. I said, You’re everything, lapping against him, utterly submerged in the littoral cavern of his throat.