I wanted to write a lie, but instead came home with a fever and garish dreams.

Monsters are real in this sense: I don’t want to return to where I was

and if I could erase the memory, I would roll that year on the five factions

of my tongue and taste each cutting vapor before swallowing it. Whole.

But even then, I would still be lying if I filled the empty space

with life that didn’t happen. The word for it is lucid, the dreams

which send my eyes bucking as familiar faces splice a hazy sky.

When I wake up to emptiness on all sides, they are the ghosts

that inhabit the void. I am the echo trying to fill them. But when time

lapses into a corrugated membrane, I stand still and affiliate with statues.

Snow falls and melts on my skin, and this is my one solace, the reassurance

that I am not yet stone. I still have this fickle window of metamorphosis

gazing over me, opening and closing like a mouth to the sky, to unknown,

or my hope of heaven. I wanted to write a lie. I wanted my tongue

to be aflame, I wanted my lips to know all shades of red and golden honey.

I wanted my feet to leave deep dredges in the ground where I walked,

I wanted to be my own foundation. I wanted to erase and fabricate.

I wanted to skip over what was and leave a blip in the timeline.

But my fingers don’t move in this fashion. It is deeper than the membrane

of my body; it is like a primal sense I have created after folds and folds

of surviving. I dream and I wish, but lying is beyond me. So long

as this guttural scream inside persists, I will bow to it: my testimony.