-Let me swim laps around your iris, then climb onto the bridge of your nose and dive into your other iris.
-Let me make penance by whipping myself with Twizzlers and repeating your name in a drunken stupor.
-Let me motorboat your childhood memories.
-Punch me in the stomach with a fistful of feathers. Drop them one by one wherever you go and I will follow the smell of their softness.
-I will uproot a stop sign and decapitate every person that made fun of you in elementary school using it, then go back fifteen years in a time machine and tell them how they will die. Then I will come back to the present – or the future, depending on how you look at it – by traveling in the cardboard box you wrote TIME MASHINE on when you were five. You showed it to your mother, and she said she was proud. She really was.
-I will fish for nightmares in your pupils and not throw them back, because there is no need to conserve fears. I will eat them off a slab of rock I cut from the earth with my bare hands. They will feel like pudding and taste like laughter.
-You are not a better man than my father, but make me believe it anyway.
LAYNE RANSOM has been published in 13 Myna Birds, The Broken Plate, and amphibi.us. She has things at http://layneransom.wordpress.com/. You are a nice person.
