Three Pieces -- by Alex Ranieri

I.

The Minotaur woman is in my bedroom—the Minotaur woman is forcing me to sing all of this in my sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and rolled over to find her cow-eyed observing me, anatomizing, sitting with her legs crossed in my desk chair.

The Minotaur woman won’t let me sleep—each time I drift off I feel her wet nose, her hot breath and her teeth on my earlobe. While she’s awake I can’t sleep—so I sprawl out in bed, and sing her to sleep with my eyes closed.

II.

Infinity may as well be an atom, for all it can contain me, but I fit as I choose into the stomach of a worm. I choose to be in my body, and I choose when my body is inside me. I may be a bridge, and the water which is bridged. I may be the wheat, and the dirt which breaks into hives. I may be the highway, ecstatic, addled by electricity, and I may be the landscape lying in wait, brooding, vengeful, picking my electrified scab.

III.

She is the boundary and the boundless sea—she overruns her own shore, ruins her own house. She breaks down the walls of her house—she arches herself into a taut bridge, and walks on this bridge made over the once uninterrupted sea—she walks on her own salt stomach, white in the wine-dark sea. Does she watch, also, bending over with her Argus eyes, brushing the water with black hair? She watches—with her half-closed eye of the moon she watches me also, singing alone on her shore.