You put on your thinking cap. I put on my oven mitts. We sit in the kitchen waiting for the aliens to come. You think they will fry our brains. I think they will stay for lunch. I start the roast long before the aliens arrive.
In the menagerie, our children make small miracles of paper plates. We feed them taffy through the slits of the barricade. They finger-paint a blood red sun. They tear, they chew a crescent moon. They excrete our world while you memorize all the places we have gone.
That time the train left us in parts; you lost our luggage, I lost my lunch. The chapel opened doors and we replied. With wedding streamers in our hair, we built our world in cheap motels as moths swam circles around a ceiling light.
The night lamp moon made my skin tracks. You found your way as I laid back and watched moth become shadow to her prayer. Our love was the antithesis of rhetoric. Our bodies exalted blood and bread and bred.
Now home is an inverted frontier. The ordinance of bodies here is bodies belong where they do not touch. We barnacle our daily news under cages for the cockatoos; shit frosts alphabets we’ve lost.
You put on the blood red sun. I put on the crescent moon. We sit behind the barricades waiting for our children to become. Our world eschews their gums; they chew the maps you tracked us on. The streamers knot around us as the aliens arrive.