Hide Me Between Doorways
I’m having trouble saying anything to you, you know? Let’s start with: night is a doorway. And every door way buckles like seawater,
pulling pillars of rust-colored after into the equation, reminding you that once you were somewhere else and now, now you’re decidedly here.
I’m having trouble in the dark. Nothing happens. Nothing is the constellation of my room. The star-map mixing above me. Tonight’s doorway is made of sharp teeth and
chewed mattresses, dust and mold filling the walls in my silent seaside city. I’m having trouble naming my fears (anagrams for you). I extend my hands
into black-tongued tide pools and find other doorways I have yet to open within the brine. What exists if I cannot speak it? Eyes lolled back in my head mid-high.
Mid-buck. Mid-body where your hand goes – yes, another doorway. A doorway is a word laid out on the rocky bluffs to dry, the salt clinging
to each letter as moisture evaporates, establishing a past-life and a present tense. My city is an ocean and my body is an anchor plunging through it.
We fear these doors even though we can’t name them (synonyms for oblivion). I collect debris and dark blues in the doorway I forge over and over.
I’m having trouble knowing when to stop. Stop diving down. Deep. Brine forming a perfect arch, an arching back, an entryway, another city corridor
where you leave me to touch myself in unarticulated absence. Your name is a doorway, spoken beneath another doorway. Dark, salty club;
spotlights like a leviathan’s bloodshot eyes. I’m having trouble closing doors, sealing my lips before my lungs fill with the sea, with endless words and silt.
Permission is a doorway. Solitude is a doorway. Leaving is a doorway taken through another doorway. Help me, you, that which I cannot name! Seize me
by the throat, plant a burning kiss on my lips, salt on my tongue. Pull me through the next doorway before it’s too late. Before the tide rises around us on its way out.
The Snow Journals
we can’t stop even in the bombed-out tunnels of winter our faces cartography for hunger and what comes next. . it builds. it builds and builds and builds into a body of white focus the wind tearing apart my veins. . how can anyone be wanted in the hours we can’t name? frost rests its lips on my exposed neck as if it can taste where I’ve been where I’m going. . I crave you the way this night craves conclusion the sun slicing a lattice through the ice and snow and warming streetlights. . where do we go next I don’t ask questions not when the air is cold in my lungs trapping all the ways I wish I could say goodbye. . name a storm. name a moment frozen in time. name me when your arms become the only pillars against a darkened bedroom where I forget my own name. . morning comes. morning sings. the day is mourning the boys who still seek shelter still seek warmth in each other’s beds. Winter I am here I speak your name I know your face I see your long stride down my city’s streets and call you home call you mine. I cannot stop becoming even in the quiet dawn.
Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and coffee devotee from New York, who spent much of his childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania, along with his many siblings and their ongoing menagerie of pets. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Passengers Journal, The Banyan Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, and Hive Avenue. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram: @dannyjbrennan