A long string of my usual is over a barrel and zonked, just between the eyeballs. Dawn coming up around the jasmine in bloom holds me captive in a fluffy dressing gown. Just when I want to jaw-drop, a whole sky of red patches up my dreams and sends them hacking into a safety-pinned curtain closet. The girl that sat opposite me in the afternoon kept referring to currently. I have a penchant for tearing up paper, long before the right time. I have dreamt of (and longed for) Ralph Fiennes ever since he opted out of the Oscar ceremony (last year) to helicopter over my house and land on an historic inauguration site just across the fields. If he had looked properly he would have seen my house from there, he would have seen me pacing in the late snows, stalking my own shadow and placing band-aids on all the torn skin about the place. This year he would have seen me differently. He would have seen me carrying a bucket of ashes every morning at 9 a.m. He would have seen me filling turf, coal and wood into brown paper bags and making a fuel mountain out on the back porch. He would have seen me huddle underneath two continental quilts and rise in the middle of the night, sweating under the weight. Last night I saw Ralph Fiennes star in The White Countess. His shoes had scuff marks and he was blind. I stared him out of it and his two eyes looked right through me.
Liz Gallagher is Irish and lives in the Canary Islands, Spain. She has poetry, fiction and non-fiction work published or forthcoming in Stirring, The Pedestal Magazine, Wicked Alice, Kaleidowhirl, The Hiss Quarterly, Noö, Arsenic Lobster and The Mad Hatter's Review and others. She placed first in the Inter Board Poetry Competition in December 2006.