Nick Fitzsimons

ALT The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters In the hallway, a stag is leaking night from the ellipsis I've shot through its head, the antlers twisting in the carpet like a root system. ... none of this is me until I pry the damp chest, dance my flesh through the gaps in its ribs, hoist myself in front of the mirror, its eyes jewelling mine with that infinite pause. So much of life is stepping into quiet rooms. I walk into the drug clinic while thirty years earlier my father walks out of AA into a carpark to fuck a stranger in a backseat, disappear inside a body that isn't my mother.

ALT And it feels warm here in the red bath I've made of this animal, rubbing speed into its gums "til it tastes like the edge of summer. I've spent years pouring myself into people, looking for reflections in the meat. Tonight I shed this gooey velvet, let this bleeding dress spill around my ankles, accept that I was never determined to find a way out of sickness, to press on despite the weather, step out into the ice-smacked field where pylons raise crows out of their depression, a wasp stuffs its backbone into my cheek while the bullet inside me grows larger, and I've no idea how either of us lasted this long.