Full Moon Phantasmagoria

hills so green it hurts my eyes, rising on each side of me, twice my height, crowding the path, mounds of earth look like Viking gravesites or giant sleeping gnomes.

they’re so close, I can stretch my arms out and touch them on either side. I am a rabbit in an open-air warren.

winding path, rich brown loam against the emerald hills-that-might-be-gnomes-or-graves. my feet know the way that my head does not. I think I can fly but every time I try I fall.

hills level out to ugly suburban yards in front of ugly suburban houses and I think I liked the suffocating hills better, yards in cookie-cutter form suffocate in a more sinister way, cloying, slow-death bringing. the part of me that knows this is a dream is disappointed that my imagination led me to such disgusting uniformity.

pink flamingo in a yard except the legs are human, real human, from a what-appears-to-be-deceased-human. bloodstained, in blue jeans.

evidently the marker I’ve been waiting to come across, in all it’s disturbing glory, for I think home at last.

I approach the flamingo hybrid and shake its hand, it’s unmoving plastic pink wing and I think

its his fault I can’t fly, he stole my wings

but I look down and realise

he stole my legs, too.