One Year After My Move to California, I Jell-O Wrestle My Texan Past in a Dream

One Year After My Move to California, I Jell-O Wrestle My Texan Past in a Dream

You visit me with your pockets filled with swampwater, the sunflowers

husked and unshaved—an anniversary bouquet

of faces which rise, with you and the temperature,

to strangers. I don’t want to know

whose names now fold

into our old mailbox on Ridgewood. I could

only walk the neighborhood at night

when the heat sank to the eighties. I could almost

love the stubbled javelinas for charging us once

as we stayed too late at the alligator preserve. We must’ve

turned to a stand of live oaks in the twilight,

startled the blind herd as we breathed. In the dream

you hold a steel bowl of green Jell-O, ask if I remember

the roadhouse off I59. The one that advertised women in bikinis

who’d slide into a rink to wrestle each other smeared

in gelatin. I told you—as we drove by the bar—which ghosts

Jell-O holds in its shiver: pig skin, ground bones, bovine hide.

I’d slick myself down to a glimmer

here in the space of this dream

where the blades of the date palms serrate and slit the sky

so I might escape. So I’d glow

green in my second skin. I’d slip from the rink’s

loose ropes, from my marrow-scrubbed double in the bikini

who now shrinks to a crouch, from my past and its

ground-up dead, which I’ve simmered and stirred all year

to arrive here: in my dream that seals them as they fade

to translucence, smooth and finally cooled.