Not once do I fear anything other than the possibilities of my own body
breaking. In our moonless bed, I make you my teenage fantasy, crying

on your hard chest as you mumble I’m here, I’m here, though you were
just downstairs in my childhood bedroom, smashing a bookcase

through the wall. Unlike a little girl’s board books with sweet talking
animals who find their missing buttons, the book in my dream was long

as an arm. Each page cursed our bodies: my teeth rotted and craned
out of my gums, you became furiously not you. Tell me it’s not real,

I say and pet our snoring cat to prove what is: surviving something
and having no way to share it except for I was, you were, and then,

an astonishing inability to use my words. You place a brown bear
and a flannel elephant at the corners of our bed—like I did when

I was little, you say—and even though I’m thirty and I know
if you give a mouse a cookie, it will still be a mouse, I feel safer

with them at my feet. Nothing is ridiculous at 3 a.m. If they fall off,
that means they’re fighting for you. I fall asleep before they do.