Mom and Dad and Bedroom

Huddled together in our dog costumes, we stand by in the blackness and keep our heads low.

In front of our faces, a man and a woman in a bed — man’s knees pointing at woman’s pointing knees — blanketless muddy feet saturate their lower bed — crow’s feathers and curled leaves. Dreams and hideous blood clots from the rumbling of the ceiling. We stand there. We just stand there and discuss the man and woman’s rectangle bed and their rectangle ceiling.

We grew up eating rectangles.

We grew up collecting red drops in pots from the kitchen ceiling.

We grew up getting carried away in our black sheets — our ghost costumes — our stitched felt tails always wagging.

We want to bark and wake up the man and the woman and show them what good dogs we are. They continue sleeping with inverted elbows and a real dog enters the room and spreads a fever. A crucifix falls off the wall. Mud drips from the real dog’s paws. We feel a sudden hardness in our belly buttons — a heavy loneliness in our upper torsos.

We are only children.

Do you want to leave? There is a real dog in this room, I say to my sister.

We should just stand here and keep swallowing the air that enters our mouths. When we feel we have collected enough air, we should float into the ceiling, she says.

We stand there and wait for the air in the bedroom to fill us. Nitrogen flows. Temperature rises.

We stand there and wait to expand.

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P. Edward Cunningham resides in Western Pennsylvania. He is the author of an ebook of poems, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Pangur Ban Party, 2010), a contributing writer to Open Thread, and the founding editor of Radioactive Moat. His writing has appeared in journals including H_NGM_N, decomp, LIES/ISLE, Titular, and WTF PWM.