My sleeves are an open tin.
I mean it like it is — like it sounds.
You wouldn’t even recognize me:
opera-length,
quellazaire held like a spear
held like a periscope.
No matter how hard one tries to expel nomenclature, the minor keys linger in all-night gas stations.
Elsewhere I was a daughter, I was a mother, I was either/or.
The doctor asks, were you blue as death
or infancy? Metal on flame
and bearing it or mad, embracing it,
I say. Without praise.
you are a brush of calligraphy
sweeping designs across my belly
ink splattering circles and symbols
like a string of black lipped oyster pearls
strewn between my thighs
She holds it out for me to touch, and as if I’m unsure that the death is fully removed from that chain, I touch it briefly, ready to wash my hands. The metal is cold like a body.
Thickened calluses. One finger crippled to quarter moon,
and the index, childhood impaled, bearing jagged scars.
Did you think your hand
could rearrange the world
with no consequence?
That I’m just some damn doll,
some pupa, sold
on not eating?
How must she have felt, their second child thrashing
inside of her—did she already agree with him
that her happiness lay in sleep? In dreaming
of lying in some other room, of a less fickle moon?
