The ache, a pinpoint of gnashed rotting, dilates until it is larger than itself; it creaks inside the body beside the pollen and the pollution until it is what the body’s known for. 

At some point, everyone discovers they continue existing without their home. 

It’s dreadful– it’s absurd– no one believes me when I describe the crow in a cage at the top of the plastic castle off a Houston interstate, dirty and lethargic against a sky stripped of color. It could have been a dream, yes, but I remember the crow as I remember my terror of tunnels on foreign land, of the other children as they pushed me down those dark slides. 

“My love,” my father says, August 2024, “There’s more to do because there’s more to know.” And I sway like a newly sprouted plant. 

There is a ridge of tendon which weaves between my muscles, fixed to painful safety in its tautness, in its refusal to pop or soothe. 

We watched trees break in half on TV as we sat on starchy motel beds. No one spoke.

A church bell rings the day in. I’ve been awake for hours. A brassy hollow injects my anxiety to dissipation, to solemn acceptance of the previous night’s end. 

“Darkness means there’s something we aren’t seeing,” he says. 

The ferns beside the river are flattened with wind, still holding at the crest of their battering. And the force continues. The tendon tightens. The water ripples roughly and reflects gray. By nightfall, it will be high, and all will be wet. 

A sorrow larger than myself stung my sinuses as I stole glances at the imprisoned crow and slinked away from the tunnel’s entrance. My parents watched from inside. The sky was like de-pixelated TV static, and it rang through their bodies across miles. 

Maggots crawl up my sticky corridors of sleep until I meet them, wriggling free towards daybreak, bright white and grime-dusted in the sun. They are fat with death and celebrating. I scramble to record my dreams about them as they settle into their hiding holes from light. 

I’m swaying like a plant in morning breeze. 

The ache hurts best far from where it was born. Beneath layers of flesh, it holds itself, terrified, until it cannot anymore. The expansion is nothing like flying.