REM Behavior Poem by julia kolchinsky dasbach

Last night, I tried to hear the way you do, pressed
my helix to the contours of your ear and waited, pressed

harder and waited, but the pulsing never came.
I fell asleep against your skull and then it came on

like a blood rush rusting through, like dream -
you wanted me

dead and used your hands, with knives, toothpicks
and hot tomato sauce (because in dreams the world

makes sense like a kaleidoscope of senses) and there
we had two children, girls I think, (Joy, I called them both)

but you blamed them, (for what? I did not know then)
so I begged, (hands outstretched as though you'd feel them)

begged, that it was all my fault, begged you spare them,
cowered, fell to our pearl-made floor: everything around

white in echo, (please, please, forgive) as the words repeated,
but you still couldn't hear -

with a butcher's knife,
claw-curve of some unnamed beast, you marked

my back, and kept on striking to the stroke
of heavy sleep-rhythm. Awake, I hear it,

like the rocking wave, like the whisper of a hammock
barely moving in an unknown distance: I hear it -

some darkness, bare and beating, a darkness
all your own, dull, hollowing your heart's

unsteady pulse: an echo fading in and out of touch.