When I am awake 
I am not awakened  

and throughout the day 
I do not hear 
or feel much
except the 
cacophonous clash of colors—
gray that surrounds me 
like thick drab curtain
and red that erupts
inside me like passionate sunsets

Throughout the day
I descend like 
I am in a
funnel

until I am curled up in the cracks of a bed
like a forgotten stuffed toy

Throughout the day
I do not hear 
or feel much 
but I know that my husband is in the attic
setting his minnows with large hands 

Each night
when the moon colors me maudlin
I feel the minnows’ crowded whispers
and imagine glass pressed against young eyes

And each night I climb to the attic with my
axe and crush the glass tank and watch as
the water spills beneath my feet and the broken 
crystals shimmer gray and the minnows
swim through infinite pools and I 
watch as their young red eyes search
freely and explore the picture of new vastity before them

The next night the tank is whole again and I can’t understand
why
so I take my axe and set the minnows
free

and slip back into my tank

a picture of a woman who is married to her imagination… whose only chance to break free from the mundane and constricted and loveless nature of her life occurs in the night, when voluptuous emotion suspends intellectual faculties and her paranoia about her passionless husband controlling and manipulating his minnows leads her to believe that she can set her husband’s minnows free… but her greatest tragedy rests in the fact that her only exposure to freedom and vastity is an indirect taste, an illusory and imaginative and vicarious experience that she nonsensically immerses herself into…