The Brittle Brine of the Ocean and the Fish Are Crying is a poem and performance piece I’ve been working on since 2023. I’m still developing it but here’s some stuff.

Inside of my dome, I sit 

criss cross applesauce

Obsessively drawing pictures 

Of sad crying fish

Every day, every night,

Always inside of my dome

Always drawing sad crying fish

Over and over and over

One after the other after the other

I put myself in here to hide from them

I put myself in here to protect what’s mine

I put myself in here to fashion my tools

My tools let me organize the squares and the lines

To make sense of everything obscured by the fog

With my tools I’m tracing a faded line to retrieve a silhouette of a figure I remember from childhood

When I get to the side of her head, I start to lose focus

My faded lines begin to dissipate, and I trip,

Falling down into a dark pit with a checkerboard maze, 

where the tigers push through flimsy fabric to reveal their shape,

the imprints of their whiskers are static and hard and their teeth slowly begin to show as the roar covers my body,

and when I wake up suddenly in a racecar bed, it’s raining.