Lizzy Burnam 🐞

The first night, he doesn’t sleep, 
but lies awake tormented by the almost-silence, 
the dripping pipe inside the wall 
and the pained mewling of a neighbor in detox. 
He hallucinates the sound of forks and knives clinking against dinner plates. 

In art therapy, he paints a self-portrait,
 strangled by vines, his lips the color of a Pinot grape. 
The psychiatrist asks about his family 
and who he was before his god-sized appetite drove him mad.  
The boy-girl who suffers, the burden of Zeus. 
Twice-born means once dead. 

He reads about gypsies, good-hearted falsehoods, ropes that cannot bind, 
and the roses that grow clean through the gaps of a fence. 
A nurse begins her shift, sopping wet with rain, screaming
Dionysus, king of snakes, I'll burn your wooden mask!
She pours milk on his head, walks home, and drowns herself in the bath. 

Time stops at the Fourth Step—a fearless moral inventory. 
The list is long: the boiling seas, the midnight frenzy
of women wearing fox-skin like bridal veils, 
tearing men's hair from their heads and leaving them to bleed. 
Dionysus aches to bury himself, again, under the shade of trees
and the half-sight of a wine-drunk delirium. 

The girl across the hall leaves her door open while she sleeps, 
her pale face glowing like the light of the moon. 
One night, she catches him, stopped cold in her doorway,
lightning-stuck by the gentle pace of her breath.

They exchange secrets over bread and honey in the dining hall: 
The labyrinth of scars up her arms, a maze she stumbled into, a prison she can’t escape. 
The sad story of his mother and the fruit that sealed her tomb. 
They dance to the drum-beat of thunder during rainy afternoons. 

She shows him the match-sticks hidden in a sock beneath her bed. 
They take turns crouching in the bathroom stall, 
watching the flame burn down til their fingers get hot, 
then dropping them in the toilet like coins in a wishing well. 

One day she comes to him: Dionysus, set me free. 
He invites her to drink from the fountain in his throat,
and all but his heart is eaten.