Russell Justwrite 8 Stop for a

Stop for a breath on the cliffs in your dream last night, tossing bread crumbs over the edge and praying they'll find a stomach somewhere. Beneath my eyelids, there was smoke and there were sirens when they opened, the thinnest skin on my body holding in so much. You whisper in fields so I can't hear you above the wheat rustling, my hands full of bread and my ears full of wind that sounds like the ocean when I trap it in my cupped palm, bringing salty water up to my lips and feeling myself crumble into sand, dust, powder that you whisk across your cheekbones with brushes that look like clumsy ballerinas, still learning to navigate your face. I could got lost in your eyes for hours, which sounds like romance but is really drowning, my lungs filling with irises, my chest bursting when they bloom. I can still find my shadow at the back of your pupil, still as a dead squirrel on the sidewalk, mouth open like a word, stuck, and I find I don't remember how to spell. You tell me the birds hatching between my teeth are singing songs about fertility, but to me it sounds like starvation, bread crumbs snatched by the wind, salty water, wanting, gnawing at the bottom of my cliff.