“There is another world, but it is in this one”
-William Butler Yeats
there is another world inside, hidden— bubbling underneath this one
one that if the earth quakes enough and it’s plates crack and buckle, will spill out onto this world
and run rivers of hot, liquid gold down the streets
hum sweetly like mothers or grandmothers do
will feel the way water tastes at 3am
and taste the way I imagine clouds feel on the tongue
there is another world inside, hidden— inside of me and inside of you
mine is not sweet and does not hum like gold
mine is waiting to be cracked open by a lot of things I am afraid of—
i did not have my seatbelt on and I reached for it as the cop came around to the
driver’s seat window, where my father was sitting. and my dad—who does not yell—yelled at me. and I saw liquid gold dripping from his eyes, pouring onto the steering wheel. He asked me to pass him a napkin
—and sometimes when we’re riding in the car together listening to
John Mayer, like he loves to do sometimes, I hear the siren over the strum of the guitar
and I look to my father, see him wiping gold tears from his eyes, smiling at me
I see it dripping from my mother’s ears, leaking from my brother’s fingernails, oozing from my best friend’s mouth
no matter how hard we grasp at it, how many napkins we use, how high the dam is—it floods and drips and leaks and oozes