II. To Have & To Hold
I back away from the fox with my nightmare hands. They are good at building only the make-believe. They spill water from any receptacle. They break a glass, which I step over later.
~
To avoid myself, I say every single thing that I really mean. I say I can feel my body in time. Or, No, I can feel time inside my body. Sometimes I have lost my body inside a forest I visited as a child. Something terrible must have happened there.
~
Nothing terrible ever happened there.
~
The hands between us confirm this. My hand is between nothing. It is the final wall in an empire with a ruined city on the other side.
~
There is a single burnt tree in a group of many. No one would catch her fire. No one burned with her.
~
I put my hand on the bark and pretend I am the arsonist. This makes me feel better. This makes me feel like I have done something important. Trees are not designed to inhabit our shortcomings.
~
I fall asleep on the pine-needled soil. The forest is bright with insect-sound. I wake to a mouth of teeth belonging to a creature that could probably never kill me.
~
A man is skinning the red fur in every dream I have. There is no blood, just the hair falling in pools. He does not do a good job, and when he is finished, he drapes his body over the fox’s—flayed, new stench—and somehow he fits perfectly. Somehow they become one beast.
~
Once a swan bit my hand as I offered it a slice of white bread. Once my grandmother gave me a fur jacket I never tried on. Once I woke to a forest with the red light of morning pouring into my body, backlighting every bone through the thick skin of my palm. 
engagement
I. To Have & To Hold
II. To Have & To Hold
III. To Have & To Hold