upstream raze the trailer seems larger now. there are people i don't know. children sleeping or pretending to sleep. a man erects a white fence to fend off evil spirits. then the fence is gone and a black partition stands in its place. around the corner, where the bathroom should be, there's an all-night diner. men sit at tables sipping coffee. saying nothing. one of them is an off-duty cop still in uniform. the light filters into my improvised home. i brood beside my bunk bed wondering what that noise is. that low hum i keep hearing. my stepfather gets up to have a look. he slips on a stapled stack of pages on the floor. he slides down a slanted steel slope and breaks feet-first through that dark divider. he flips over like a cartwheeling car and lands on his back. he coughs. tries to get up. falls down. stops moving. i consider rewinding the dream and picking up the pages before he can step on them. i let it ride. . . . almost everyone is gone. there's only me and some woman with an accent i can't place. she says i need to come with her. my stepfather is in the hospital. i can't find my shoes. i follow her barefoot. she tells me my mother is hysterical. she blames me for what happened. as if i put that paper on the floor and made crooked what should have been built straight. she's barely holding it together when i reach her. this is the woman who fed me with the milk her body made before she threw me away. i ask how her husband is. she says he has a bruised heart but he'll survive. her face falls apart. i hold her head while she cries. "i love you anyway, you know," she says. "thank you for raising me." it's a strange thing to say. seems to me it should have been the other way around. her raising me. but that didn't happen. did it? . . . my stepfather sits beside me in the waiting room. already up and moving around again. he turns so i can see the ring of red on the back of his shirt. he tells me the upper half of his body is bereft of blood. he could slit his wrists right now and nothing would come out. he pulls up a pant leg, rolls down a sock, and shows me the grotesque bulge above one foot. under all that swollen skin is a network of new veins to carry what he needs upstream. he taps the ugliest part of himself with two fingers and says, "this is what's keeping me alive." 241007 what's it to you? who go blather from