By the time I want to eat the strawberries, they are always clouded with mold, malignant little hearts. I eat them anyway. I drink the sour milk. I’m so hungry I can barely hear anyone calling my name, though I know no one is. Love is the lie I tell myself to survive. Every night now I dream of the crooked forest. I find an ordinary deer, plunge my hand into its cavity and eat until I’m sick. My spine bends back like all the trees there do, pointing in one direction, towards something luminously dark, like a star dipped in tar. Are they running toward it, or away? Inside the dream, I think, Who cares what it is? In the morning I’m desperate to know. I can still taste blood on my tongue, more beautiful than water, with its arsenic, chromium, radionuclides. It makes me want a cigarette. It makes me want to run into the moonless night, with its crystalline wind of bees, and find it. I don’t know if you understand what I mean. There’s only so much heartbreak a person can take before their language becomes untranslatable.

I remember you pressed your finger to my tongue, which shook, as if the anther of a field flower. How could I forget that taste of pollen-dust, its hint of metal, like blood if it were not cursed, not starless and half-dead like me? Only the broken open their mouths this way. You know this better than anyone. And are there even fields anymore? Are there flowers, with names like columbine and oleander and larkspur? I used to love the night-blooming ones. I used to know my own name. As a child I sang in a choir, and we swayed together like the flowers of the field. In my memory of this place, I was so tired. I rested my head on your stomach and you buried your hand in my hair. How sad I must have seemed, how sick with my own venom, swollen with a viscous fever, like milky sap bubbling in a stem. I tried to hide my moan of desire, though I hate the word desire, which has lost all meaning, as I have lost everything. My tongue whimpered in your hand. You wrang its blood into a pail. The sky above the field foamed black, like a mouth full of poison, and descended in a flood.