2 nights in 3 poems
by vittoria spaghetti
1.
Tiny boyfriend, sweet boyfriend, baby hanging at the bottom of my bed, tonight you are pregnant, hot in the throat and wet with toilet blood, and the shell of the ovum sits broken in the sink where it bled from you, and the living baby hanging in the nettles of your stomach. We have looked through those windows wide with fear, and my boyfriend lying loves me now with all the pain he keeps waiting in his small guts for me. In another dreamy world, if all the hate of the hospital would go away and then this would be our life, instead, and the atom unsucked in the stomach stringing bright little stinging life into my boyfriend’s body in our sweet blue bed could be. But while we are deep and rigid in the dark we are in love together, wet and red we are all of us in love, hearts beating in repeating triplets, and the fleshy knot of my baby inside my baby my body encircled.
2.
I feel lucky after a nightmare: there you are kissing me. Nothing wild and scary can follow us from sleep into the blue moonless room, so long as I am lying next to you, when you pull the haunted stitch into a worm and promise everything is already alright. Lying safe in our love, we can forget every dark red thing until the morning, and hold soft heads against your heart when it’s funny in the light to look at each other and remember how much it hurt. I am lucky: in the middle of bad dreams, you called me home to bed, and I woke up already turning to hold you. After a nightmare, I loved you so much I dreamed of something different for the whole rest of the night.
3.
I woke up and he was sleeping bent around the cat. My arms broke their bonds, and scratched their two tiny heads underneath the duvet. The night was still out there low in the gutter, and a screen over the window was a sheet of dust hanging between the bedroom and the stars. Wooden cars scrolled past playing traffic lullabies. Bugs and dead dust in the wire checks slept with the rest of rocks. Air bubbled from in to out unreplenished, like the seal on a water wing. All that stuff stuck caught and hanging on the filter pane repressed within the house. The membrane was immune to fissure. Morning hours fell cold from the clock. Underneath blue windows I loved him, and wanted him clasped and thrashing here beside me again. I went back to bed, and we were all alone together.
vittoria spaghetti is a writer from the suburbs of toronto, canada.