late october, i don my sleep clothes like i’ll die in them.
i touch leaves as their crinkly death christens them dull.
that’s all really. nighttime. the dog sleeps and i don’t.
i’m missing the party, maybe on purpose,
shower twice in one day which isn’t so crazy 
and neither am i. isn’t that disappointing?
               i have this game with the water. turn it hotter
               and hotter with my back facing the spray ‘til it gets
               too much. who’s dying of thirst? remind me.
               whose dying. my mouth is a graveyard, my tongue
               a headstone i don’t remember carving past the dash,
               the world full of a burning want my belly doesn’t light.
               i realize all the tiny pebbles on the wood floor
               are dead ladybugs overturned. finger bones rattle.
               i keep waiting for this to pass, for my breath to unhitch
               from its stuck post, let all its horses free. silly me,
               ankle deep at the poker table, dozing right off. 
               frozen solid now, frozen solid but shh,
               hush as it thaws and i forgive you.
               what happened to me in there?
               did i disappear?
               is it over?
               is it over now?
               can we rest?

A Cabrera's poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in The New Guard, Brain,Child Magazine, Colere, Acentos Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Best Travelers' Tales 2021 Anthology, Mer, Deronda, and other journals. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and adapted for stage by the Bay Area Word for Word Theater Company. She writes, teaches, dances and ride bikes in San Francisco, but not always in that order.

painter (they/he) is a musician, writer, visual artist, and multidimensional being having a human experience. As someone who is generally baffled by the nature of existence, they see their work as an exploration of that lack of clarity. Though originally from so-called Maine, on the unceded territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy, you can more recently find them playing violin amongst artists of all types in the so-called-Denver/Boulder area, on the unceded territory of the Arapahoe, the Ute, and the Cheyenne peoples, most regularly accompanying bands Eli and the Hypotheticals, Clay K and the Vertebrates, and Black Market Translation.