you visit me in the liminal of my consciousness; a representation of a phallacy.
You remind me nothing of my father, yet you bathe together two floating dicks in cloudy water, the rubber ducky is stained with blood
Let's play Monopoly; I am the thimble my grandmother keeps in a glass case collected to never use. I only have a single red plastic thimble which came with my first sewing kit too small for my thumb, I just curse and bleed. I do not throw the thimble away
My great grandmother died once in childbirth, as it was she was pronounced dead and awoke again with startled eyes became a somnambulant oracle; after the shrapnel fell upon the town she found the decapitated girl’s braid by the tree where she dreamt it
When I am four and my great grandmother is properly dead in a dream I do not recall she places a vase of poppies on the table I wake and ask my mother where they are
I dip the pregnancy test in the egg yolk it comes back positive. I take a new test in a Barnes & Noble bathroom with the help of my brother who does not exist
We are in the Big Brother house together: this constitutes a sex dream it is the eighth one I have had about you
I tell you I dreamt my cousin’s boyfriend was on a tour in Afghanistan; he is not even in the army. I do not tell you we made love in this dream in the woods and on a rug before the turtles began climbing the rose bushes
I pull the bullet from my neck it is a green almond – a prescription for bed rest.
Anna Zarra Aldrich is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she studies feminist and ecocritical approaches to literature and creative writing. Her writing is often preoccupied with issues of ecology, science, and space. Her work has appeared in Babel Tower Notice Board (Forthcoming February 2021), Strukturriss (forthcoming July 2021), Long River Review, aurora journal, and the anthology Fast Funny Women.