his hands are stilled potential--a frost-bitten chrysalis hidden in the cellar. his fingers speak of winter's hair, how brittle, how pure, how each strand winds around his heart, and chills, and warms until syncope overtakes him.

i must learn to live outside of my head, develop a method of extraction before we become comfortable with grandiloquent monologues ringing in the space between our ears, visions of interlopers quelled by a well-placed blade, wives who lose wedding bands on the beach digging for sons lost to foreign sand, the sound of rapture as it lifts the hands of faceless masses, masses blind to the starvation of their congregation, we famished sheep, even wolves pity us, leave rabbits at the edge of our pasture that our teeth will learn edges, our stomach the richness of blood.