My eyes lose focus on the grid.
Are you button, switch, or hinge?
Are you a motor or a gear?
I ask as one who is a set of rings.
Why do I long to look at something
that glitters from inconstancy?
The sea takes away
it is always taking
sweeping along what it steals
as it recedes.
I am always unavailable to myself.
I was born to my mother but also chosen—
for my strength.
I know that my will can complete
forgetting myself
for remembering her.
She has always been the lady
I have always been the house.
The weight of unfamiliar arms and chests
crumpling the angles of my jaw and shoulders.
The familiar strangeness that makes fear redundant
that makes discomfort home.
There are always shocking sinews
pearlescent and stiff.
I can grow more pure
than marrow-filled skeletons
I am shards mistaken for stones.
Wild fruit makes itself for seeds
doesn’t plump itself with juice
for any large mammal
and I know this when rodents
leave the monstrous tomatoes
and oranges half-eaten
sagging like jack-o-lanterns
in the midst of neatened lawns and mulch.
In this inland it was my turn to swallow
a dozen little knives and then
wait for the pain.
At night the survivors huddle
hot and viscous where the air guns
embed their pellets
and in the morning the night’s survivors
take flight from bowered sickrooms
still leaking but with ichor.
What does the sea mean to me?
That I can sink in something never the same.
Why, the world will ask, why
couldn’t this child just quietly outgrow
her ongoing abuse?
I become myself by drawing myself up
for your perusal.
To know someone is to be
in the middle of their riddle.
Don’t bring my letters anywhere near me
and I won’t carry yours near you.