DYLLAN MORAN

Tyler, you’re alive again. It’s summer and there’s no sheets on your bed. No AC. All your roommates are gone where the doors are open, and I’m naked with my back against the cool wall, and I’m covered in blood. It’s the time of year when these currents are edging backwards. You fall in, and it makes you young again. When we’re so nostalgic like this, I could kill us both. It’s not like in the movies: offscreen, the beast transforms into a human again. But here in your bed, your bones must actually become small. We both hear the snapping, and suddenly you’re so much shorter, and there’s bits of your organs and blood & blood everywhere. “Be careful baby. Don’t touch me there. Oh God it all hurts so badly.” And there’s no way to clean all of this/your shit up, because there’s nothing to hold, just more pieces always flowing out. When the summer light is deep orange and feathered on the edges of the blinds, you’re dead, Tyler. And your roommates aren’t coming home. “I want to hold you in this,” but then there’s no place in my body where I could keep you safe. I learn to live without you. I polish your bones. Four years later, I’m reading Wuthering Heights again. I take you into the ground and lay you on my chest. I close my eyes, and Tyler -- you’re alive again.

I won’t leave your house until this disease in me has fully replicated. 

Where shreds of words / to produce more words in antecedent pairs.

In I left New York / because I wanted to go home.

And no possessions or abductions that wanted my / any body. 

No scraps of DNA / against the mucosal membranes. 

Your hands, in your house, and you’re not wearing a shirt when your roommate comes home.

I learned your last name today, and we watched old videos of you on Youtube

when you were a camp counselor still living in Missouri.

In America / I love you. In America / an I love you. In America / and I love you.

Colby. Colby. Colby.

The rhythm of your name, a rite of this coming spring.

I saw a black crow
& its crow bones
tangled in a ball /
the fat, smashed
together on the
street. “Oh quickly
how these things
change” on the
way to the subway.

This is the last day
I will see you, Brooklyn /
in one hundred years.

Before my bike.

Before back west
& the prairie dogs
in the fields

where the grass seed

& the red earth.

Where to kill
the bugs &
poison on the hills.

I’m held underwater
in memory of the great
western interior sea.

Shark teeth in my back.

Untangled from the
plastic and set into something
entirely disposable.

A glossy flower
fastened to my ear
under all this decay.

a!

no hell, disgusting first planted on a dark plane of afternoon / the far flowers burn / ashes over current, root for frosted opens on a fingernail / squatting by him to summer “these ghosts” -- a revelry -- then deep powers over endpoint; a patient knows so only by hesitation -- difficult for this, for seeds, for skinned by the bedroom / draped in the dead lamb / that the veneer: to recall, never-and-end in your disillusion.

A field of splinters left to dry in my hands /
in North Carolina / when the wood’s soft and the fogs
over the hills / and sex and high in your friend’s bed
and much too full of words for tweezers / or for your mother
or for your dead dog / or my name, when tomorrow
my tongue split and someone else in this room /
             and I won’t see you there again.

I dreamed about you the other day.

It was the time on the border / of Wyoming
and my cousin, and I can’t breathe b/c of
the fire. We were normal. Maybe we were a
little bit happier b/c in the dream we knew
that this would all come and end. 

I can’t leave you there anymore.

These waking dreams keeping company in such concord.

Dyllan Moran currently lives in Brooklyn and works as a middle school reading intervention teacher. His work has previously appeared in Cleaver, Tiny Spoon, Gasher, and Entropy (among others). He can be contacted at moran.dyllan@gmail.com, or you connect with him @dyllanmoran on Instagram. When he's not writing or teaching, you can find him in the dark (the traffic, stopped) in love with everyone and everything.