I know the girl feeling the kiss in the mirror

So I can sleep in peace I build a small house inside the large one. It expands, deflates, expands.  It is breathing. Inside it: a perfect copy of our old living room. I pretend we are talking about bad movies, band posters. I pretend you are saying something about the empty clotheslines between my teeth, my cassette face, a plug that keeps the world from going in. I move the chairs around the way I think you’d ask me to. I fit so well inside my body now that it is not there.

Cross your fingers

And fall into the spaces.  Your lowest sounds fill the pipes, make them tremble, turn the water a kind of sea color you can’t get rid of, can’t get used to drinking.  I am about the size of a cocktail umbrella now.  I am feeling a bit woozy.   I look at the sky and name it after you.  I name it after you because it is eating itself alive.  Pieces of it are falling everywhere, jutting out of the ground like glass.  Everywhere you walk is a kind of pre-hurt, a fear of getting cut.  Everywhere you walk you have to shield your eyes from the glare.

Before men could speak they enjoyed confounding one another with signs

Smoke is coming through the bottom of the door even through your hands are already burned.  They windmill the air now: a slight composite, analog, white against black.  I feel it.  The black in the white is feeding it.  The paper makes a shape like a mouth.  A body opens one of its circles.  Things turn as half things, opposite of themselves, paper ships inside an oven.  The family is getting ready for dinner.  One frame marks out the next, the smaller of which always the larger, a victor of spoils. The picture is already gone.

Night was nothing to him but a song

We were stopped on a road.  Everything was a hot air balloon tied to the grass, bouncing up and down.  We were afraid it would all simply go, begin going into the gone light.  We were afraid of worse things too.  I kept asking everyone if I was clear, if they could see me.  I was surprised I didn’t have to try.   Then I did.  We were playing that game where everything was lava only we never stopped.  Look at all the things we could have touched.  

Corey Zeller is the author of Man vs. Sky (YesYes Books, 2013). His work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Mid-American Review, The Colorado Review, Diagram, The Kenyon Review, Salt Hill, West Branch, The Literary Review, The Paris-American, New York Tyrant, Hobart, Caketrain, Chorus (MTV Books), among others. He currently serves as an associate editor at Mud Luscious Press and a social media wrangler for H_NGM_N BOOKS.