Pure Air (v.1).

You do not mean to betray me.
Yet, you continue
counting the calories in your margarita.
Carefully, you pull back the transparent wrap
covering your plastic tray. Its contents:
all organic, all whole-grain. Clean.

Standing before the mirror’s smeared glass,
you smack your stomach into place,
pull in your ass, try to carve an image
who bears every last secret privately.
Try to be that girl who only blinks on cue.

I unconsciously betray my memories,
when I slip, slap you hard, hoping for a bruise.
I imply, without meaning to,
the way spectres of wasted bodies
half their normal weights, still haunt
the hallways of my brain,
holding closed their paper gowns.

Once, we tried transcending body.
Trading carbon for oxygen,
we’d be pure air, — a memory
which always weighs me down.

Malignancy (v.1).

You could nickname cancer,
write letters to it in your diary,
wrap elaborately-drawn hearts around
your blended names. Nothing would change.
You could introduce it to your parents,
invite it to your prom, buy it a ring,
without changing anything,
without making it one molecule less
a tumor, its malignant weight resting
against your pulse.

Or else,
you could call me, snot-clogged sinuses
dripping, gut-ripping screams stifled
by sobs like pillows, saying
“I’m sick,” calling it
what it is.

Other People’s Words (v.1).

That semester when we shared textbooks
I learned you better than I had in over
a year of breakfasts, lunches, dinners
together, forced ends to awkward silences.
“How are you?”  All those times I asked,
you answered best in other people’s words.
Raymond Carver:  Don’t complain, don’t explain.
I don’t have to be drunk to say what I think.

Another time:  I spent my whole life
looking for anything I recognized.

A braver friend would have underlined
herself, an offering returned.  Plenty
of places I wanted but none where I was
supposed to be.  Sherman Alexie.
Or Grace Paley:  I wanted the world
to explain itself to me.

Maybe it’s always difficult,
in someone else’s language, to be brave.

Gravestone (v.1).

You make the first tattoo
seem easy.  To mark you here,
where I question beauty, constantly,
to complicate eternally a memory
that time has simplified.  To memorialize
complexity, that struggle for beauty or a scar
I recognize and don’t regret.  To forget
the distance between your name screamed
and your name sighed.   To realize
I have only one body, and you
have just one name.

Selfish (v.2).

This much must be mine,
my sister says. These eyes
must correspond with memories
I’ve known them to inform.
This heart must stoke the furnace
beneath the loves that I hold dear
and only those.

This much must be mine,
I apologize, to the child
I fathom rather than conceive.
For growth to be a victory,
every cell I feed must be my own.
I partner myself, create myself
within my womb, supposedly unused,
since, a child too, I  still refuse to share.

I, like my sister, take my body back
and never ask forgiveness.
Bless us both, who — biting our lips,
lay claim to our whole selves.
If I had more, I think I’d give it
freely. I’d let you live in me,
maybe, if I’d fought tooth and nail
for somewhere else to live.

Take Back the Light (v.1).

How many nights can hold
memorials?  How much darkness
can we reach into?  I’ve asked
the night to catch me, fruitlessly,
falling into graves already full.
I’ve pulled upward, outward, climbed
too many headstones, screamed
to the throng of mourners,

Let me be
a candle lit while I’m alive.

Praying Afteward (v.2).

Told to hold his hands
one palm pressed against
the other, in perfect parallel,
my brother instead
insists on curling them
together in a fist.

He says,
after a childhood accident
severed the nerves in his
left wrist, he requires this
to trust God holds his hand.

I understand this
need for pressure, this
requirement for some response.
Even resistance would comfort,
afterward, when every prayer
comes out a scream, even
an echo would be comforting,
but nothing gives back nothing.

Now, I wrap my hand in my hand
and grow weary with words
like prayer.

Selfish (v.1).

This much must be mine,
my sister says. These eyes
must correspond with memories
I’ve known them to inform.
This heart must stoke the furnace
beneath the loves that I hold dear
and only those.

This much must be mine,
I apologize, to the child
I fathom rather than conceive.
For growth to be a victory,
every cell I feed must be my own.
I partner myself, create myself
within my womb, supposedly unused,
since, a child too, I  still refuse to share.

I, like my sister, take my body back
and never ask forgiveness.
Bless us both, who — biting our lips,
lay claim to our whole selves.
If I had more, I think I’d give it
freely. I’d let you live in me,
maybe, if I’d fought tooth and nail
for another place to live.

Bodily (v.1).

When I started working
with kids, I worried constantly
that their quickness to ask
after my blue hair would lead
them to wonder aloud about
the scars across my arms.

No one wants to see that,
rebuked a four-year-old.
He meant my breasts,
uncommonly exposed,
in summer. Spaghetti-strap
tank-top. The bus stop
to his door enough
to gather sweat.

Am I an animal? –
to be this bodily,
flushed and sweaty,
my body hanging past
where I expect it to extend?

Am I an animal?
I’ve clawed my skin.
(Why?)   - -
If he were fourteen,
forty, if he were me, even,
I still could not explain.

Clean Arms (v.1).

I hide scars I don’t have,
ones I meant but managed
not to make. I cross clean arms,
stay awake to keep at bay
nightmares I did not intend.

Remind me later; I can call this –
(damage I fathomed but did not inflict) –
progress instead of weakness. Every risk
not taken, not a failure. Every burn
and blade avoided, affirmation:

I have managed/ I intended
to survive.

How did that become something to hide?