I Still Don’t Talk At Holiday Parties

In a dream, I invite my father over for dinner. In a dream, I speak with my hands. I press index and middle finger on each hand together, then fling what they’re holding away

/they’re holding nothing/

and I’m saying, I’m lost

In a dream I flourish both hands out to my right and push myself away, and my father loads the word abandoned into the barrel of a gun

I hold up 3 fingers on each hand and the light blushes at my innocence

I am speaking with my hands, but I don’t know most words, so in a dream I clear the table by pressing my face down into the dirty plates. I pull the table cloth out from under the dishes, and it’s actually a quilt, and the food crashes to the floor, and I suffocate on things I didn’t want, and I leave my bed to stop the crying that started in the closet

The ceiling is yellowed and the walls are suicidal, when I put two fingers to temple and close the thumb down to shoot

I don’t know how to speak with my hands, so in a dream I stare into my father’s eyes. I hope that when I cry, he swallows the tears and teaches me a new way to deal with the things that I locked up in the attic

/the attic is empty shadows/

But even in the dream he agrees with the word gun, and I hold up an amber alert so that he knows that what I meant by the milk carton was that this is where I learned how to fix things

I press a bullet into his palm and a pill into my own

I paint the scene in red, I swallow the scene in blue