silenced raze i still dream of that house. the basement bedroom that bought me no privacy at all. the sliding glass door that led to a deck we seldom sat on. the china cabinet beside the dining room table. the cream-coloured carpet. the old gold rotary phone. the waterbed that used to rock me to sleep. the shelves lined with hand-labelled vhs tapes. everything is almost always just the way i remember it. when i didn't live there anymore but still visited every other weekend, i would stay up late watching satellite tv. there must have been five hundred channels to choose from. maybe more. i knew where to find the racy stuff that lived off the grid. most of the time i would end up watching a movie that didn't feature any unsimulated sex. "enter the dragon". or "escape from alcatraz". or "first blood". or maybe "girl, interrupted". sometimes my stepfather would show up when he couldn't shove off, and he'd sit with me for a while. that's what i'm doing in more than a few of these dreams: staring at the tv screen after everyone else has turned in for the night. i work the volume control on the remote, afraid i'll wake the monsters upstairs. it doesn't matter what i do. the sound is never stilled. the other night i asked the woman who carried me in her womb for the better part of a year what i was doing wrong. she wouldn't say. 240422 what's it to you? who go blather from