Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields." Poem by kristina marie darling

Without knowing it, we'd started playing the game again. Memory or dream, memory or dream? he asked, not realizing at all how afraid I was.

Half asleep, he would spend hours changing the rules, the way a glacier cleaves to reveal a lake below. The sheet of ice beneath the sheet of ice. Even then, I could barely speak. To mouth words like precipice and shoreline seemed a luxury, not the kind of violence it would later become.





Of course the landscape had clear boundaries, once: the farthest cliffs sketched twice in stone, circled by our small figures in the winter months. Inside his mouth it was always this dark

Most nights, I couldn't tell if he was joking,
not even when he said my name
not even when I asked him to say it—