our holograms stayed behind after we went to bed. in the morning we found them where we had left them. we leave them behind for night to steal the part of us we leave behind each night. it is our own custom. in our part of the morning together, we talk about the aesthetics of the whisper. we stand behind our own holograms, they are still in last night, sitting in front of two bowls of homemade ramen. just sitting: two holographic facsimiles left behind by the thief we have named night. you wink at my hologram & i stroke the graphic hair that you left behind, frozen inside of last night. it is our own custom. we are lucky the night has not thieved our holograms. we fold them like this into two squares.

a scab over one of my scars is what i imagine a crack in the earth must feel like when there is lava boiling beneath a baby taking its first steps over a fissured strip of desert or perhaps it is the baby that is the scab & its ancestors are the scars where i fit in doesn't matter anymore because a bottle cap means nothing in the ocean there are no bottles that big a scab over one of my scars feels like my skin is made of bad luck like when a baby crawls into a field of lava because some parents aren't anything but the symptoms of absentia & the baby will never have scars when its body turns into the weight of smoke that comes from a broken scab a crack of iron & fortune or a lack thereof poor baby poor baby smoke baby nothing but a rubber shit ocean collapse

i thought my voice had killed them. but you can't kill something that is black & white & comes from chemicals & lives on a piece of paper. you just can't & i especially can't because i don't know what that would mean to me if i'd just think about death like that. i thought my voice had killed them because when thirteen black birds are sitting under a black bough in a red wheelbarrow you need to take a xanax. i especially do. i thought my voice had killed them after the test results came back negative & i spontaneously & permanently forgot what they were testing for. & who are they, any of them. i thought my voice had killed them when they just stood there in a position that made their elbows dislocate. it happened over & over, the dislocation, the voice, the thought. i thought my voice had killed them because in the middle of the internet there is someone lost on a book & the internet is a wet sort of ocean. & it is sort of making the book look like a boat except that pages don't hold up as well as wood, not in water. i thought i had killed them because there are chemicals that make things like paper & the amalgamation of black & the not quite color white. it is where these colors come from that i am traveling to because that is where i have heard the legend of you is from.

collapsible lungs do exist because your chest is not hollow. bone marrow will never see the light of day if your bones are not hollowed out by the thought of a collapsible funereal. light is hollow not because you can see through it or that is a lack of matter, but because it does not fold in on itself like your bones. you can see through the collapse because it smells like the burning of color. a funereal will never lunge at your lungs because a funereal knows that inside of you is light that lives in the hollow part of your collapsible lungs. this makes the funereal pity the impermanence your body is hiding from you. & now the funereal is changing color.

M.G. Martin is the author of One For None (Ink. 2010). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, elimae, Everyday Genius and ZYZZYVA, among others. M.G. lives in Brooklyn with Tess Patalano, the lady poet and Ihu, the lady dog. Find him at mgmartin.tumblr.com and @themgmartin.