By Brett Glasscock
I watched a three-inch-tall mosaic man
all purples and blues, yellows and greens
eyes pure white tiles,
crawl into your mouth
and, with a miniature salute of
glass fingers drawn to glass eyebrows,
dive down your gullet and into your gut
There he stayed for three days and nights
playing a little tune,
tip tapping to the muted rhythm,
and every time you opened your mouth,
a piece of his song would leak out
and lilt your breath.
At night or under the cover of a blanket,
you could see the reflections of his variegated body
shining, poking through the skin of your stomach.
Didn’t they look like bruises made of light?
Didn’t they look like the lights on the runway when you land?
On the third night,
he spoke.
He said to me through your mouth, your lips quivering just the slightest:
don’t you worry
I’m not here to stay
I travel in search of places the sun could never touch
I come to tender a shadow of its warmth.
Brett Glasscock is an emerging queer writer living and working in Austin, Texas. His work has previously appeared in Echo and Naked Cat. To pay the bills, he works an administrative job at the University of Texas, where he has only kind of put his Bachelor's in Rhetoric/Writing to use. All pieces are co-written by his three cats. You can find him on Twitter.