Untitled - ScholarWorks Home - California State University, Northridge

your bed is floating on waves. The insides of your body rise and fall.
Sometimes they nose you, telling you which way to go - 400 pounds of muscle,
skin slick like oiled vinyl, sliding under your stomach, lifting you and carrying you
farther into the water. This bachelor herd of bottle noses- they've learned how to play
with tourists. They approach apprehensively at first but become bold and bullying
after awhile. They seem to know that they have faces that humans can understand.
They feel unreal, impenetrable and yet, you are warned to keep your fingernails
trimmed because their skin is so fragile. Soon you will have no fingernails anyway.
They are falling away- separating from the skin because of the chemicals in the tanks.
One day you will become as smooth as a baby again- like the inside of an eye-lid.
Things are buried in the ground around the house - frying pans,
anvils, gardening tools. One night when you return late, you find a resident
digging the ground around your entrance. You've seen him before, this resident.
He walks the neighborhood constantly, and you see him in the grocery store,
the pharmacy, the post office. He is very tall and keeps a forward gaze, which
does not seem to take in anything beneath his eye level. Sometimes you've
wondered if he's following you, but most of the time you find yourself darting
out of his way. He is dark-eyed with angular features and long eyelashes. He
would be handsome if it were not for this gaze.
As you enter your room he looks up from his digging to tell you that
none of this exists. "It is all. We are all. Electro-magnetic force fields," he
says.
Throughout the night you will wake up and see his silhouette through
the Venetian blinds. You will hear the slice of his shovel through the ground.
The next morning you will walk over piles of upturned dirt as worms thread
themselves throughout the black earth.
You spend most of your time alone. You've learned what foods you
can keep in the sink of your room without them spoiling and you've learned
what can go in the communal fridge without getting stolen. You are the probably
the only one who steals food anyway -you like the custard cups one resident
brings home. Your window faces the back alley, and there are a few residents
who have friends with cars. Since guests aren't allowed in the house, it's
where some of them like to hang, smoke, mess around.
A lot of them make excuses for why they are here. They are junkies,
travelers, people on the dole, a woman who has left her husband and needs a
place to stay while he realizes what he's lost. They are a visiting professor and
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