dogs tied up, wired in, jaws, licking chops, parched by the wide desert, by knowing, knowing like tired Eve who demanded a higher tier of heaven that unbeknownst to her didn't exist until she ate it. maybe this is why I'm fat, Leviathan. my fall from grace is a chainlink echo, a fanclub email, a Psalm in the palm worth two fingers in a bush. confines of the car windows and the trees outside the city, awake, the neighborhood in pieces of me, Pieces of You, like a popfolk singer on her boombox. a CD player skipped a beat, a CD player blew my mind, blew me in the car, blew you in an alley and left me to dry. left to fry, to bleed, to feel the skin on my fingers like it's someone else's, like it's yours, like we're sisters or we're competition or we could break it and we could love one another in a softer silence, and our falls, our mutual downwards could have tasted so sweet in the day, in the car, under a seat cushion like a quarter, but you quartered me and you halved me until piece by piece I traded blubber for baleen and I kept you at bay, and when I wailed it was a wailing like teeth into a brick wall, like fists in my face, and where against it all I didn't bleed, not for you, not for him. I swore I'd never drip a drop again, because no one bites my throat and takes what's theirs to leave me be, alone for a while in this dead disbelief where I'm tied to a post left to scream, eyeless and fateless and without the ring of the bell to hurry me home for a piece of rotten meat left out in the light.