--- T E R E S A   L E O

I talk in my sleep, right brain only, apparently and without logic,
out loud and context-free.  Two words:  diffusion, agitation,

then the body forks and triangulates to rhythms that start at the back
of the throat.  A Hebrew letter is trying to escape,

and I read like a sadhe or maybe a heth, a visual scat that keeps him
up to see what's next:  a collapse of empires, implosion of buildings,

earthquake, fire riot, car chase, dogs, Sarajevo under siege.
He closes in then, folds between synapse and seizure to squeeze out

the narration but not the story:  dilapidate, diminish, diffusion, ruin.
And this becomes another story that will end, eventually,

in letters and limbs, the ascenders and descenders of bodies
that snap together lyrically at night.  But it's the story after that,

the one that bolts in the not-quite-hysteric, not-quite-visceral blink
of morning that we will believe, that book of hours that wraps fingers

and tongues around hard edges, where his hand on the small of my back
is a stone tablet carved from the heft and muscle of trouble and sleep.